As you’ve surely noticed if you’ve logged in over the past couple days, ranked queues have been temporarily disabled and will remain that way until Riot brings the servers down at the end of the weekend.

To compensate, Riot put Normal Draft mode in the queue. Almost immediately, posts were up on the forums requesting that the feature become a mainstay. I certainly hope it does. I’ve wanted it pretty much since I started playing. Blind Pick leaves a lot to be desired, and the current Ranked queue options don’t really handle every situation. I would love to be able to play Draft Mode with people who aren’t level 30, with groups of 3-4, or with people way outside my ranked ELO.

Normal Draft also prepares people for the ranked experience. Players on their way up the summoner level ladder can learn what the ranked experience is like and have a chance to counter-pick opponents.

According to Morello, whether or not Normal Draft sticks around is an issue of resources, not community interest. After trolling one of the support threads (honestly, why are you still doing this, Riot?), he said the following:

I wish I could give you more info, but I don’t have any myself. If we end up turning it back off, the reasoning would only be something technical. We wouldn’t turn it off if we could sustain it technically, wouldn’t make sense.

So there is some hope for Normal Draft, even it seems remote.

For my Champ of the Week features I always try to play a mix of normal and ranked games because I think it’s important to see how each champion plays in the different environments. In my experience, ranked games tend to be a bit more focused – teams attempt to pick solid team comps, fill each of the roles, and at least someone on the team will try to ward and control dragon. Normal games are a bit less organized – I see very little warding, team comp is kind of all over the place, and map control isn’t as important as getting kills. On the whole, I think normal games tend to be much more fast paced and much more fun, but that’s been changing and I think the tournaments are to blame.

Lately my normal games have been against focused players with tournament comps. I just got out of a game against a Rammus/Anivia/Xin Zhao/Lee Sin/Soraka. Was it a perfect comp? No, but it was way out of my team’s league, and the fact that they also had Clairvoyance made it even worse. The game went long, mostly because I think it was full of decent players, but it was insanely boring. Let’s face it, the cautious play seen in high-ELO matches just isn’t that fun in practice. Kill counts are painfully low and most of the game is a dance about who will initiate a fight. That’s not what got me into League of Legends in the first. I fell in love with LoL because it was active and engaging and rewarded aggressive gameplay.

I’m not complaining that the game is getting more challenging. In fact, I would love it if that were the case. I would love to have closer matches. I would love to see less surrender votes. Instead, I’m seeing slow tedious games that make me reconsider playing more than a game in each sitting. The excitement is rapidly disappearing from the game as more players turn to the tournament meta.

The only cause I can see for the shift in gameplay is the accessibility of tournament streams. I think it’s wonderful that League’s competitive game is getting a lot of attention, but it’s making the lower ELOs a boring mess to play. As this dominant metagame trickles further down the ELO chart it becomes increasingly important for Riot to make major adjustments to the game. Support has to get nerfed. Tanky DPS has to go away. Riot needs to address all of the attrition reduction mechanics in the game, not just the new ones.

What do you think? Are you seeing the same comps every game? Does the game feel less exciting to you or is it just me?

I’ve been playing a lot of Ranked Solo games recently, if only because I miss draft mode. Actually, that is the only reason. I don’t like ranked. I don’t like the attitude of the players. I don’t like that my own expectations of my teammates rise dramatically when I play ranked and so I don’t like how often I’m disappointed.

I’ve dropped 150 points or so over the past week and a half, largely because my teammates have made some very foolish choices. As an example, I had a team captain today who set up a Rammus pick with the bans. It was a nice move, and we could have had what many consider the strongest pick in the game on our team. Instead, our captain chose Ezreal because no one wanted to switch for Rammus, giving the other team the pick he had baited for us. Trust me, I would have taken Rammus had I known, but he just switched and locked without saying anything after no one offered to trade. Amazing.

That little story aside, I wonder what the value of Ranked Solo will be when normal draft comes out (it is coming out, I promise – Marc Merrill confirmed normal draft to me over Twitter last week). Personally, I would mind if Riot did away with it. Ranked and Solo just don’t work together in my mind. They are competing principles. I understand that it was necessary when Season One launched; players needed a place to see the new game modes, even if they were just playing solo. When the same options are available in normal, why keep it around?

More likely than not, it will stay around. Players will always want that quantifiable measure of success, as arbitrary as it sometimes seems to be (seriously, how did some of these people get past 1200). Personally, I won’t be going anywhere near ranked, unless I suddenly have a regular play schedule with four other people and we can run ranked 5s.

It took almost 500 games but I finally managed to push my way through and break the 1600 ELO barrier. I’m now officially among the top 1000 players in the ranked Solo 5v5 queue and, I’ll be honest, I had hoped it would be different, though I’m not really sure why.

I think the thing I expected most from high-tier play was more coordination/communication and less finger pointing. It has actually been quite the opposite. In most games I’ve played since 1550+, where I’ve been for a while now, players rarely talk, sometimes to the point that you can’t get a response about comps, picks, and builds in champion select. Believe it or not, it’s really important for the team to know if you’re playing AP Twisted Fate. It’s also disconcerting when a player takes smite on an atypical jungle toon if your team already has a strong jungler. For whatever reason though, whether it’s the arrogance that comes from having proof of success or something else, high-tier players rarely want to talk about this stuff.

Another strange phenomenon at high ELOs are the players who think they can prove that the underplayed champions are actually strong, but that they just require skill. This isn’t just a few people, either. A ton of players do this. In particular, I can think of a guy I see on occasion who picks Gangplank regardless of his team’s composition. I’ve tried reasoning with him, saying things like, “Hey, how about someone else. We already have three melee,” or, “Gangplank isn’t a very strong mid these days,” to which the response has always been some form of “fuck off.” I can understand his frustration. Sometimes it’s fun to play guys like Gangplank, and in some comps, Gangplank fits very nicely. But when you’re locking a niche character the moment the champion selection screen lights up with complete disregard for your team composition, you’re making it infinitely less likely that your teammates have a chance of winning. The fact that I’ve seen him (the player, not Gangplank) in several games, not one for which Gangplank has made sense, and that he’s not only had a bad attitude but then blamed everyone possible for our inevitable loss dissolves any sympathy I might have for the guy.

He’s not the only one, either. A lot of high-level players share this sort of delusion about their level of skill with a given champion. The reality is, some champions just aren’t fit for high-level competitive play. You might see some marginal success with them, but it will almost always be anecdotal, an exception to the rule.

There is one problem with high-tier ranked that I knew would happen. As your ELO improves, there are fewer and fewer people at your rank to be paired with. A couple things start to happen. On the rare occasion that there are ten people of a wide ELO spread from 1600 and up online and looking for game at the same time, you get paired with and against people anywhere from 1600 to 1900. That’s not so bad, because a lot of those players seemed to be very similarly skilled. What happens more often, though, is that you become the balancing factor for someone’s duo queue. Shortly after hitting 1600 I played a ranked game in which I got Corki for another player with my first pick. He ignored my requests and picked me Rammus, even though we had a jungler (lane Rammus is a nightmare). I got stuck bottom with Kayle, who I begged for the first five minutes to “PLEASE STOP PUSHING THE LANE.” I got no response, and the player spammed Righteous Fury until we were slammed up against the enemy turret with Shen and Malphite in front of us and their jungler working up increasingly violent and creative ways to orchestrate our demise. I got out of the game only to find that he was nearly 200 ELO my junior. Either he or someone on the other team was in a wide disparity duo queue and I was there to hopefully balance things out.

At this point, I find myself enjoying normal games at least as much as, if not more than ranked. There’s more champion diversity and players are generally more friendly. I’ll still likely play ranked, but I think that will become increasingly rare. The experience just hasn’t been very fun lately, even since improving my ELO.

It’s a decent read, which I’ll let you do on the official forums, but more interesting to me were the responses from the community. There were plenty of “your dodge-worthy champions shouldn’t be dodged because of X (it always makes me laugh when someone uses the word “strong” near the word “Teemo”)” but players were also willing to give all kinds of advice for someone striving to reach 1600. The most interesting to me was, “Just play a TON of games, and have a win % > 50. Saw a dude today at 1620 who had a measly winning percent of 52 percent, but had 600 games under his belt.” It made me wonder, how often are top players winning games?

The answer – not much more often than 50 percent. In fact, the top ten players have a collective 57.7 percent win rate. There are exceptions, of course, but for the most part, solo queue win rates are pretty close to 50 percent in most cases. That’s actually reassuring, because it means my own 56 percent win ratio is on par for me to continue climbing the ladder. Granted, I’m probably going to stall out at some point, but I can see that I’m at least winning as often as people who have stalled at the very top.

I’ve been trying to spend a good bit of time in solo queue over the course of the weekend to see how things feel. There are still a lot of the same problems – bad players have been carried, good players are in brackets well below their skill level, there is so much animosity among teammates that it’s nearly impossible to organize people. My problem is that I want to see the stats that ranked matches provide, but playing the queue as a solo is painful.

I really think Riot should open up the solo queue to allow 3-man premades. There is really no reason not to. Among the queues, solo seems to be taken the least seriously. Even with three people, the chance for your other two players to be atrocious is high enough that it really shouldn’t be much different from the two man system.

I know there are normal games, but the fact that normal stats aren’t being tracked gives players too much flexibility to leave games without consequence. I still want to enjoy a competitive game with my friends on Summoner’s Rift and, unfortunately, the current system doesn’t allow for that.

This. Is. Huge. This is at least a step toward addressing the individual performance in a team setting and the penalties/benefits some players reap as a result. As a for instance, I had a game today in which I played Shaco. I got a slow start, mostly because I was on the phone and not focused on my jungling, so I didn’t gank much early. I did try for one big gank on our 1v2 lane and sent them back to base, so it wasn’t a horrible early game. Well, not to me anyway.

My teammates, on the other hand, would not stop berating me for being a terrible Shaco and a waste of a team slot and on and on. Our Olaf kept insisting I was going to be useless late game because I hadn’t ganked. As it turned out, I went 11-2-15 with two tower kills before the other team surrendered. Regardless of what my team thought was going on, I was largely the reason behind the victory, or at least the very heavy piece of leaden straw that broke the camel’s back. Our Olaf slightly below 1.00 in his K/D ratio and our Mordekaiser was 1-9. For the other team, that can be an extremely frustrating loss. They likely could have beat our team with a different player. My understanding, then, is that their ELO will not be as negatively effected because we had a strong carry. Likewise, my own ELO should receive a slight bonus for carrying.

On the flipside, if Kaiser had somehow lost us the game (which he almost did), we likely wouldn’t be as penalized because we had a heavy feeder on our team. No word on when these changes will come out, but I’m really excited about them.

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.

I queued up with Everett and we jumped into a game. At the loading screen it looked a little ugly. We had a Gangplank, which I never trust anymore, and our teammates were struggling to keep up from level one. The enemy Fiddlesticks was completely dominating the game, up to 17 stacks on his Mejai’s at one point – it was bad.

We got lucky, though. Around level 12 their Taric started to chain-DC, giving us a chance to farm up and come back to win. I felt bad for the other guys, but we really did have a better late game team.

Number seven was my first loss, made all the more frustrating by unbearable lag. From what I’ve heard it’s only the ranked queue, but the lag is such that at times I would see two second delay from the time I clicked to the time I casted. The other team had it too, but they were much tankier than we were and could last through the lag spikes much better.

I wouldn’t care nearly as much about the lag if it weren’t in ranked play. Ranked matches are meant to provide a forum for players to show off their best skills and have a ranking that reflects those efforts. When you introduce massive server side lag, you pretty much negate the chances of that happening.

My first impression – my god are people tryharding. Bans in my game were a little silly, but the first three picks were Shaco, TF, and Sivir. It’s actually nice to see some well-rounded comps for once, but I have a feeling I’m playing against some pretty low-ELO folks. The other team ended up a mish-mash of toons – TF/Sivir/Kayle/Warwick/Mundo, while my own team looked a bit better at Shaco/Ryze/Xin/Heimer/Kaiser. Not a lot of stunning but there wasn’t much need.

I really like the pick interface. It’s a bit confusing all at once, but the tips were helpful and once I got my brain around all the graphical prettiness it was a smooth system. In game, though, I was experiencing fairly heavy server lag. With a ping of just over 100 I had a full second of delay, in some cases more. I’m guessing this is due to severe server overload but it still sucks. Hopefully things will improve as the night wears on.

UPDATE:This is looking like a sure victory. I’m 8-1 presently and they have a level 7 Warwick while I’m level 13.