Team Wild West.

Among the features League of Legends is missing, the ability to queue with multiple teams has to be up near the top. I’m not a particularly social player in that I don’t find myself queuing with full teams in ranked. I usually go for the 2-3 friends in normal kind of thing. For a lot of players, though, a full premade is the way to go, but with friends at different skill levels the ELO system just doesn’t work.

Enter the new Team system. In Season Two, players will be able to join teams and maintain a separate ELO rating for each team in which they participate. It’s a great system, something used by many RTS franchises. Obviously it has its pitfalls – a high ELO team can just make a new team at any time and stomp through the lower ELOs – but this is definitely a nice step forward for Riot and League of Legends.

I’m wondering if this will also include some new stat tracking features. It would be frustrating if we could participate in teams without any real way to see each team’s individual match history. Hopefully we’ll not only be able to see our own histories but also have the ability to look up teams and see their histories as well. It would be nice to see the types of comps other teams are playing, provided the metagame makes a little shift.

This is a great feature announcement. Good on you, Riot.

Also, I found the awesome header image at the FYLoL Tumblr.