Gaming
esports
LoL's Proposed Team Builder May Help eSports
A matchmaking upgrade promises to let players preselect a role, champion, position and more.
LoL World Championship at the Staples Center
© Marv Watson
As anyone who has ever been handed a “mid or I’ll feed” ultimatum can attest, those pickup games can become a hotbed of poor sportsmanship, resentment, and team dysfunction. That’s why it’s a good sign that Riot Games has unveiled plans to introduce a “Team Builder,” an exciting new feature for competitive play promises to enables you to preselect a role, champion, position and more when matchmaking.
The goal is to build a balanced team where everyone’s in agreement on where they’re going and what they’re playing, and in doing so help lay the foundation for good teamwork,” explained Jeffrey “Lyte” Lin, Riot’s in-house neuroscientist and social systems design lead.
It’s a potentially huge development, since one of the major obstacles players encounter in ranked play is that it’s very difficult to get a balanced team composition out of five strangers who may or may not share the same specialties.
“An ideal champ select is one where all five players get their preferred role and feel like they’re all on the same page for the upcoming match,” Lin says.
“The current matchmaking does a good job of matching up players of similar overall skill levels, but doesn’t have any way to know what a player’s intentions for a given game are. Sometimes things work out perfectly and everyone gets the champion and role they wanted without a hitch. But if multiple players are looking to play the same role or lane, a consensus has to be built in a relatively short period of time. That’s time that could be used to get to know each other, agree on a strategy and build confidence that it’s going to be a fun match.”
Improving this matchmaking process could have big implications for competitive play because it lowers the obstacles to training in a particular role. In a game like League of Legends, where there’s a clear connection between ranked play on the servers and League eSports, that could also increase the talent pool.
Lin also hinted that the Team Builder could be even more specific enough to let people match based on individual champion selections.
With Team Builder we’ll also be rolling out a smarter matchmaking system that can dynamically account for your experience with a given role, position or champion.
"First time playing Ahri? Learning how to be a solid Marksman? Venturing into the jungle for the first time? Team Builder’s matchmaking will take all of these factors into account,” he wrote.
Lin also promised that the Team Builder won’t force players to adhere to the standard metagame and lets them specify not just the character they want to run and the position, but also the overall gameplan they want to practice. Less clear is whether Team Builder will eventually replace the current ranked matchmaking. Sensibly, Team Builder is something Riot will develop separately from ranked before considering where it should ultimately fit in terms of matchmaking and ranked play.
Taken as a whole, Riot’s ambitions for Team Builder and smart-matchmaking have the potential to transform how players train and practice for high-level League play, which can only spell good things for the game as a whole.
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