Earlier on this month , Riot Games introduced its Team Builder feature to League of Legends . The feature was dished out across the game’s servers on a bi-daily schedule, where each server had its own share of the Team Builder feature for 48 hours. I first got my taste of Team Builder when it came to EUW, and I was both elated and annoyed that such a feature was implemented and that it hadn’t been implemented before.
Team Builder encouraged experimentation with different champion and role compositions, and made the overall experience of League for both myself and my teammates a hell of a lot more enjoyable. Want two Fighters going Bot? No problem! Want three Supports? Can do! Want all five teammates to be Junglers? Go for it! The feature made diverting from the meta much less of headache and more fun .
If you’ve played League of Legends before, no doubt you’ve encountered that one player who instalocks, who is inflexible, arrogant, uncooperative, a lone wolf and–quite frankly–a toxic blaggard. It’s because of these players that you’re more likely to lose a match, but they can also–though it’s grudging to admit–be the players who can win you the match, despite their egotistical disregard for the rest of the teams. Because more kills means you’re better than anyone else, right?
Having one of these players on your side of the fence makes playing League of Legends more of a headache than it’s worth for those who simply want fun, and it gives the game a bad name and reputation. The introduction of Team Builder nullified this kind of player.
Team Builder gave way for players who wanted to experiment and have fun a means to do so, especially if they were only playing by themselves in a stack for four other strangers. If you went in by yourself, you didn’t have to worry about fighting over what role / position you wanted and giving yourself an unnecessary and unhealthy dose of contempt for humanity; you just picked a champion, your role, your position and presto! When entering the queue with your desired selections, all you had to do was wait for the game to put you in a lobby where there was a slot for you. Or, alternatively, you could create your own lobby and select who goes where and what role they should be by youself. Both routes negated a lot of unnecessary conflict, and thus got rid of a lot of butthurt during the pre-game.
You might say it also negated a lot of early communication, but Team Builder communicated very clearly and more effectively who was going where and what they were going to do by the GUI alone. For additional communication, there was the little chatbox you could use. As a result, the GUI let everyone know who was doing what and knew where everyone was going to be, and everyone picked what champion, location and role they wanted to be. No instalocking, no bickering, no arguing, no rage-quitting because you didn’t get what you wanted; just simple, cohesive cooperation.
League of Legends needs Team Builder. Team Builder was a means of effortlessly putting a team together without the headache of having to put up with negotiating with others over who goes where and the expectation broken and misspelled sentences, and the immediate assumption that everyone in League is an uneducated Alpha Male 12-year-old with little comprehension of grammar and coherent thought. Team Builder offered decisive feedback to the team in terms of its composition, and all around made queueing in League of Legends a more streamlined experience.
Team Builder, in my personal opinion, is much more superior than the queuing system that League of Legends has right now. I feel the game, and its playerbase, will gain immense benefit from the feature’s permanent installation should it come around. It’ll allow for more friendly and constructive communication, and it’ll allow for experimentation and the execution of different tactics and strategies without the headache of trying to promote democracy in a lobby filled with anarchy. Sure enough players will probably conform to League’s meta anyway, but at least the procedure will be much less of a hassle.