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.

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.

We’re fast approaching the end of Season One, a huge milestone for Riot and one that hopefully means we’ll see a deluge of new content for Season Two. We might get some news about some long-anticipated changes as early as next week. If Rinoa’s Twitter stream is to be believed, the company is taking a cruise on Wednesday of next week. That’s the day after patch day, folks.

Personally, I’m not getting my hopes up. I’m…pessimistically curious? I think the problem with a major content release in May is that there are so many other games that Riot will be competing with later in the year, potentially Dota 2. Unless there are some major feature releases planned at that time, Riot would be stuck hoping player enthusiasm can tide people over through the changing MOBA landscape. I don’t think that’s a realistic assumption.

That said, Dota 2 doesn’t look to be changing much about the game, other than adding an official support/development structure, so it could be the case that LoL carries on just fine. The game seems to continue to grow, even if Riot has squandered some of the good faith of the veteran player base. At any rate, keep your eyes open for big changes next week.