It’s one of the shortest lines in this week’s patch notes, but one of the sweetest. I actually reread this three times late last night when I was browsing the notes – “You can now request a trade with other players at the end of Draft Mode.” Say hello to the best feature since Season One launched. this is a big deal, especially for premade teams. You no longer have to have your Morgana/Amumu/Vlad player create the game.

This could also help a lot of solo queue players, depending on the community reaction. In DotA, swap was huge, and players were pretty cool about trading if they didn’t want to play a given champion but had the coveted first pick. Other players don’t like having first pick, and might use trade to barter a later pick slot with other players.

I’m more excited about this than I am about anything else in this game right now.

A friend and I wanted to play a couple quick games tonight to try to bump our solo 5v5 ELO beyond the levels of absurdity in which we currently wallow. I really wish this post was about our success.

We started out fine, with an easy win because of some feeding on the part of our opponents. For our next game, though, the feeders were on our side. I had first picked Nidalee for a bit of variety. She’s not a strong first pick, but I am a strong player so I figured I’d be okay. The other team picked Shen and Annie, two very strong picks with high CC, a point I was sure to make to my team in no uncertain terms. We would need CC.

Our next two picks were Yi and Karthus. I was right on the verge of losing my mind, but I just tried to even more emphatically express a need for hard CC. Our opponents chose Ashe and Morgana, which is a sealed fate, but I guess we still had two picks. Our teammate picks Katarina and my friend, seeing the comp, says screw it and picks Nasus. They last pick Janna. You can see the results above.

I really thought there would be a serious ELO discrepancy based on the picks. These guys were obviously clueless, right? Well, right, but that doesn’t mean a thing when it comes to ELO. Despite my position at the top of the ELO list, my teammates were right in line with the enemy and fairly close to me. They just don’t know that zero hard CC versus a mix of the best CC in game is almost guaranteed to lose (barring some SERIOUS problems on the other team).

This post isn’t only about Shaco, but about the ban process in general. While by and large I think bans are good and that draft mode is a big improvement for the game, I do wonder what Riot will do about champions that are getting banned in most every game.

Your experience may differ from mine, but nearly every game has Heimer/Shaco/Shen banned and then either Soraka, Xin Zhao, or Taric. For now this has encouraged much more variety in champion selection, but even now I see a few champions popping up more than I think is reasonable. Ashe, for one, is in just about every game – I mean like 90 percent. So what can Riot do to make sure the ban system continues to encourage variety, both in bans and the champions played?

One solution is obviously nerfs, and I think Heimerdinger is a great candidate. He is still too strong a lane presence for most characters to be successful against, and in solo queue that’s a big problem. Players are largely focused on picking a team with synergy, and not necessarily a team that can play against the opponents.

Another solution would be buffing the marginalized toons. I haven’t seen Kog’Maw once in draft mode other than a game in which I picked him. I haven’t seen Kennen. I don’t see Karthus or, much as it pains me to say it, Eve. Give those characters the tools to be successful in a draft setting and maybe we’ll get more variety.

I also wonder if Riot would ever consider global bans – toons that change from week to week that are unplayable, just as some champs are free each week. Part of being a good player, in my mind, is knowing a wide variety of toons. It seems pretty important to the competitive environment, then, that the best players know how to play more than a handful of champions. In most cases I think that’s already true, but it would encourage a breadth of knowledge that could help every player improve.

I know I’ve flip-flopped a bit on TT in the past – excited to frustrated and back again – but my final verdict was that it’s a fun map, but only until you get sick of seeing the same few characters. Well let me say, with the release of draft mode and the ranked 3v3 queue, TT is back to being fun.

I was particularly curious about the 3v3 draft games because it’s where I’ll likely spend most of my time in the ranked team queues. I never have five people consistently playing with one another, but three is much more manageable, and with draft mode it’s a lot more fun. I like that I can remove Shen/Jax/Shaco from the equation and see where people end up. Granted, there are still quite a few toons that people consider top tier for TT available, but I’ve been pleasantly surprised by the variety I’ve seen. Hopefully that will continue as my ELO continues to rise.

I also just noticed today that you can’t ban toons that the other players can’t pick. If they haven’t unlocked everyone, you’ll only have the toons they’ve unlocked to ban (plus the week’s free rotation). It’s nice that you can’t then waste a ban on something your opponent would never have anyway.

Where are you guys spending your time? Solo, 5v5, or 3v3?

Plain and simple. DotA had this feature, whereby you could choose a hero that your teammate might want. It’s a great feature because often the guy with first pick rights on your team doesn’t want to play a highly desired character. Swap allows him to pick a more contested character, making much better use of the early draft position than would otherwise be possible.

There is one big drawback here – the champion unlock system. Because most players don’t have access to every champion, the draft system can be a bit ugly. When I was playing a lot with players from SoloMid I would often end up with a less than desirable comp or a toon that I wasn’t great with, if only because we wanted to have the strongest comp and I was the only player on my team with a given toon unlocked.

This all goes back to a post I made some time ago regarding champion balance as the primary matchmaking problem. Balance problems encourage players to use a limited subset of heroes, meaning they don’t get to know the rest of the available champions. Ranked play might even exacerbate this problem, simply because players will get the idea of a strongest comp, post it in the forums, and the mob will follow.

Still, swap would be better than no swap. Every team, even those in solo queue, should have a chance to make the most of their highest draft positions.