For those of you who haven’t played any draft mode today, you’re missing out. The game now offers team captains three bans a piece for a total of six bans per game.

This is something players have been wondering about for a long time, myself included. As the list of champions grows and grows, more bans are only natural. Of course that comes with a few issues. First, time. The ban system was already painfully long at times. It just got 60 seconds longer. That may not seem like much but when 3-4 people dodge in a queue (as happened to me this evening), those extra minutes really start to add up.

Bans might not stop at six, either. Riot continues to add champions to League of Legends, which makes multiple ban options all the more important. The client currently has graphical space for 5 bans per side, a total of 10 per game. I’m hoping we never get to that point.

In the mean time, I’m really digging the six-ban system. Despite its length, it gives us a way to deal with a much larger set of OP champions, and I will never see that as a bad thing.

If you’ve queued up for a draft game in Dominion, you may have noticed that the game doesn’t dump team captains straight into the lobby. For instance, I queued up for a game this afternoon and went back into my match history to check some stats. The queue popped but I was still reading some stats so I clicked “Finish what I was doing.” When I was finally dropped into the lobby, I was the team captain, and with first ban I only had three seconds left to ban. In my confusion, I totally missed it.

In 5v5 and 3v3 draft modes you don’t see this happen because the client forces the captain to join the game immediately (and maybe everyone else – I’ll have to test it later). I made a post about the issue in the Dominion forums, to which Morello responded with the following:

Good catch – will raise visibility on this issue. Thanks!

If you see similar issues, I would highly recommend posting them to the Dominion forums. They’re much less cluttered than General Discussion and will probably see a flurry of Rioter activity today.

Today’s maintenance was supposed to remove Normal Draft mode from the list of available queue types, along with re-enabling ranked game modes. I was pleasantly surprised when I logged in and found that Normal Draft was still enabled.

Later in the day, Tamat followed the surprise inclusion with this post:

We’ve heard your feedback, and as a part of our ongoing commitment to making League of Legends an even more fun and awesome experience for players of all preferences, we are officially introducing Draft Mode into Normal Games! Now you can play like the pros without any impact on your ranked rating!

I have to say, this is probably the best feature launch we’ve yet seen in League of Legends. Why? Because we didn’t expect it. It wasn’t overhyped (unless you count the rumors/occasional red posts saying it may have sort of might be almost is kinda getting worked on). Hell, we were even told we wouldn’t be keeping the feature.

And yet, here it is, and it’s pretty awesome. Good on you, Riot. Good on you.

It’s been a while since I’ve played ranked for as long as I did to get my 1520 status in Solo Queue. Long enough that I had forgotten how much I love draft mode and loathe blind pick. With draft mode, I feel confident that I can pick an appropriate champion for any situation. I own every champion. I’ve played every champion for at least a few games. But certain comps just aren’t as good as others, and when I go up against one blind, I remember just how badly I want normal draft.

This week has been a particularly painful reminder because Master Yi is my champion of the week. I really enjoy Master Yi, and I think he has a lot of strengths, but he doesn’t compare to Nocturne, especially when Nocturne is paired up with Orianna, Mordekaiser, Vayne, and Taric. That’s actually a comp I faced today. The ragtag squad my team put together just wasn’t going to cut it, right out of the gate.

Do you think much about normal draft or are you content with blind pick?

Riot recently announced that summoners will soon be able to play co-op games against computer controlled champions for IP. It sounds like a cool system, at least for getting back into the mix if you’ve been away for a while or want to test a new champion. More interesting to me, though, is the screenshot that’s in the current client for the service.

As you can see above, the picture shows what appears to be an updated client with some new features. For starters, there is a ‘Game Mode’ field. This could mean very good things for players who, like myself, enjoy a little variety. I would love to see all-random deathmatch implemented, and it would be interested to have an All Random All Mid option as well. The bad news is that the field is blank other than ‘Classic.’ Granted, Riot probably doesn’t want to leak anything, but that could also be an indication of just how far off these new game modes might be.

It’s hard to see much else. The new format is much more conducive to multiple maps in a list format, instead of the current grid button system the client uses to select game types. Any guesses as to how far away this client is? I’ll say six months.