Riot Introduces "Team Builder" Concept!

Riot developers have been busy creating their latest and greatest in the way of new and improved queues, which features the following: Team Builder!

Essentially, you can select a role and queue up with 4 other random teammates that selected the other roles. Interesting no?

Here's the official post by RiotLyte:

Hello Summoners!

Lyte here, and in this post I’m excited to talk with you about Team Builder, a new feature coming to PBE in the near future where you can queue up for a specific role, champion and position and get connected with four teammates that also preselected their preferred role. The goal is to build a balanced team where everyone’s in agreement on where they’re going and what they’re playing, and in doing so help lay the foundation for good teamwork.

How often have you logged on to League of Legends and thought, “I just want to play Renekton today.” Or maybe you want to try a new strategy but can’t find four friends to premade with. We’re always asking how we can make the League of Legends experience better, and one thing that comes up a lot is how players want to feel like they’re in control of their pre-game experience.

Good teamwork doesn’t just start when the minions spawn or at the first big teamfight. It starts in champion select. Champion select sets the tone of the game and greatly impacts whether you feel like you’re going to have a fun match. So we asked ourselves: what’s the ideal champion select? And how can we improve this process so it happens more often?

An ideal champ select is one where all five players get their preferred role and feel like they’re all on the same page for the upcoming match. The current matchmaking does a good job of matching up players of similar overall skill levels, but doesn’t have any way to know what a player’s intentions for a given game are. Sometimes things work out perfectly and everyone gets the champion and role they wanted without a hitch. But if multiple players are looking to play the same role or lane, a consensus has to be built in a relatively short period of time. That’s time that could be used to get to know each other, agree on a strategy and build confidence that it’s going to be a fun match.

Team Builder is intended to bring players together that complement each other’s expectations and intentions from the moment they enter the lobby. When everyone’s aligned on who will be going where and playing what, the only thing left to figure out is how to dominate the opposition.

Once we had a model for how Team Builder would bring players together, we started looking at matchmaking and how we could evolve it to help further enable good games. One of the most important things for a team’s enjoyment is making sure that they’re matched against similarly skilled players.

With Team Builder we’ll also be rolling out a smarter matchmaking system that can dynamically account for your experience with a given role, position or champion. First time playing Ahri? Learning how to be a solid Marksman? Venturing into the jungle for the first time? Team Builder’s matchmaking will take all of these factors into account. .

Our goal for Team Builder is to bring players together and build better teams. Because good teams win more games, make bigger plays, and most importantly, have more fun.

To us, that’s exciting, and we’re looking forward to your feedback. See you in Team Builder,

Lyte

F.A.Q.

Frequently Asked Questions:

1) Won't this enforce the meta?

a) Here's an example of a crazy meta that was tried earlier in the day. Team Builder is all about introducing a new, cooperative Champion Select where players can agree to a strategy and team vision before entering a match. Players in Team Builder will be able to outline a strategy they are interested in playing, and the system will find teammates that share that vision. Feel like playing a double jungler strategy or want to send 5 players down the mid-lane? No problem. It might take longer to find 4 other players willing to try a crazy strategy but when you do, you'll know the entire team is bought in and you're going to have fun.

2) Will Team Builder replace other queues?
a) Team Builder is a complete re-design of Champion Select that was inspired by a lot of research on social dynamics and cooperation. Because we're going to iterate on it quite often with player feedback, we opted to create it as an independent queue first and not touch any of the existing queues. Depending on what we learn, we may adapt some or all of Team Builder into the existing queues.

3) Will I have long queue times if I want to play a popular role?
a) In our research, we were surprised that role preferences were pretty diverse. When we surveyed players and asked what their preferred role was, about 15% of players preferred playing Support, 14% of players preferred playing Jungle, and 5% of players were willing to fill any role.

We'll be keeping a very close eye on role popularity in Team Builder, but for now, it looks like there are players that are very happy to play the perceived least popular roles if there is a system like Team Builder in place to help create teams.

4) How can I play as a leader in Team Builder?
a) There are two flows in Team Builder. You can opt to be a leader of a group and define strategies for your team--this is usually the recommended path if you have a few premade friends and want to find a few strangers to fill out your team according to your desired composition.

You can also opt to be a solo player, choose a champion, role and position and ask the system to look for teams who are looking for your spec.

Excited? Comment below!