Should ranked games have free champions?
Here’s something that came up today, mostly because I was seeing a lot of Mordekaiser players. Then I realized he’s free this week (I only looked because of the miserable quality of some of the Kaiser players). The question pretty much asks itself. Why do we have free champions in ranked matches?
The question I always like to ask regarding ranked matches is, “will this enhance or encourage more competitive play out of more players?” I have to say, I think the answer here is no. Most champions only come up on the free rotation once every few weeks, some even longer than that. Should ranked matches really be full of champions that a player might use for a few days at a time, once every few weeks? It seems to me that if you’re going to use an ELO system that doesn’t account for individual player performance, I would think a primary goal would be minimizing the attrition from bad players and maximizing a good player’s ability to carry a team. Having teammates who don’t know the champions is a huge problem in that system.
Granted, there are exceptions to this rule, but I think the only thing holding it back from being a great idea is the current 14-champion requirement to enter ranked play. Reduce it to ten, which will be an increase for some players, hopefully forcing them to play more games at the level cap rather than less before jumping in to ranked play.
Posted in: Champions, league of legends
Tags: elo, free champions, free rotation, matchmaking, mm, ranked games, ranked play, season one
I don’t think you can do 10 with 4 bans, right?
I agree with you that free champs shouldn’t be allowed BUT hard to say from a PR angle how that would go over. If you’re not inclined to buy any RP, it can take a while to get 14 champs, even just buying all the cheap ones, especially considering you have to spent IP on runes.
I think this is a very valid suggestion, and I hope Riot considers it seriously.
By defintion, ranked games should mostly consist of the people who take their performance seriously, which means they have taken time ot farm enough IP to get and to learn the champions they play best (or are prepared to spend RP to get the new ones, to the extent they are OP).
The IP requirement argument doesn’t stack up either, you only really *need* two types of marks (ArPen and MagicPen) for the three key roles of physical damage carry, caster and tank. Quints (HP and CDR), blues (CDR and MagRes/Lvl) and yellows (HP/Lvl, Dodge, ManaReg/5) are easilly shareable between each role and do the job quite nicely.
I like the idea of no free champs in ranked.
However needing only 10 to enter ranked play you have clearly not tought through. Say i enter a 5v5 mtch with 10 champs unlocked. 4 out of my 10 are banned leaving me with 6. I am piking last, the 9 ppl who pick before me take all my heroes, waht the hell happens then?
Yeah, I was thinking 3v3 when I wrote it for whatever reason. You are right, it has to be enough to account for bans.
@KaKTy3: Re: ip & runes: I’ve got in around 500 games played, and just barely finished all the runes you mention (missing hp/level seals). Some of this is due to not knowing what to buy at first (I bought several flat hp regen seals, which are quite expensive, but hp/5/lvl seems better to me in almost every case), also I bought full sets of tier 2s as well, not knowing any better. Waste of IP there. They need to remove T2 runes IMHO.
There are plenty of players at the 200 game mark who are better than me, but maybe not able to afford enough runes for two full pages. Yeah, you can go in with say, overlapping marks (as I frequently do), but you may not be able to contribute as well to a true team environment where you have to react to what is drafted.