Discussion New Champ Select Replaces Team Builder

[Katherine]

 

When new champ select goes live in your region, it will replace the Team Builder queue.

 

Since introducing the experimental Team Builder queue back in 2013, we’ve been analyzing and rethinking the best way to get into a game of League. The lessons we learned from the Team Builder queue directly impacted the development of  new champ select.

 

 

We’d originally planned to adopt Team Builder across all queues, but as our first attempt at improving the experience of starting a League match, a few issues held us back. While Team Builder successfully empowered individual players to choose the champ they wanted in the role they wanted each time, it wasn’t as good at helping teams assemble a specific strategy or composition. Building a Yasuo-based knock-up comp or a classic Orianna-oriented wombo combo was damn hard when non-premade players pre-selected their champs. Long queue times made turning down champions that didn’t fit while waiting for your team’s missing piece feel even worse.

 

 

With new champ select, we’ve solved the issues we found with Team Builder. Teams get on the same page and start working together through pick intent and distributed bans right from the start. You’re guaranteed to get one of the two positions you prefer, and you can use pick intent to let your team know who you’re looking to play before bans and picks take place.

 

 

We ultimately decided to disable the Team Builder queue because we believe new champ select is a better answer to many of the problems we were trying to solve with Team Builder, and in the future we’ll introduce a version of blind pick inspired by the new design for players who are looking for the new champ select experience without bans or drafting.

 

 

New champ select goes live in NA & TR for testing in Normal Draft and Ranked on January 13, 2016. If everything goes well, we’ll continue to roll out new champ select in other territories over the following days. Thanks to everyone who gave us feedback along the way to this launch, from the original Team Builder beta to the recent PBE testing. We’re excited to take this next step into League’s future, and we can’t wait to join you in new champ select.

 

 

 Team Builder role icons: Distribution and future plans