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Came in thinking it was gonna be "HURRR RIOT BANNED ME, FIX TRIBUNAL HURRR"

Was pleasantly surprised.

I don't really like the thought of 10 banned champs, especially when grouped up in the middle. I can see a situation where someone picks a strong but easily counter-able mid at the first "play pick" phase then instantly banning all or most counters at the next "banpick".
Morgana comes first to mind? Then you'd just insta-ban kha'zix, talon, ect. Just something off the top of my head, I don't play ranked and I'm not to familiar with who counters who, just hoped that example would show my intent.

I do like the idea of staggered ban picks, it would definitely make watching streams more interesting. I would put a ban pick for each team BEFORE each play pick though. Would look something like this.

X_O__X_OO_X_OO

X_OO_X_OO_X_O

The O's are that sides teams choice of play picks, while the X's are the choice of ban's. Putting a ban pick between each play pick would open up options for counter-baning while keeping the option of counter picking.
Using my example above. After picking Morgana you could ban Talon, but you would still have to option to pick Kha'zix. (Assuming of course my example holds any merit, but you get the idea)

The 2 bans at the beginning would be for the "really op" champs (solo queue) or for taking out champs you KNOW the enemy team is good with (what pro's use the ban picks for, or so I've seen)
The most I would change is add 2 more bans at the beginning, with a total of 8 bans.

As for who should ban? I dunno, I'm leading towards letting First pick ban pick throughout, or letting the higher pick in previous play pick choose fallowing ban pick. Which would give First pick 2-3 bans(depending on the extra ban at the beginning) and 2nd pick or 3rd pick (depending on team) 1 ban pick

As I said earlier I don't play ranked. But I would love to see something like this implemented. From a spectator point of view, it would make even watching the picks entertaining.

Thanks for your input!

I see what you mean with the Morgana example. However, along the lines of what I said before, I don't really see this as a problem with the banning system as much as I see it as a problem with the game. It's very frustrating to me that a person can pick a typical AP mid and everyone knows that they will almost definitely lose to champions such as Talon/Fizz/Kassadin as long as the other player has equal skill. I think that the game should have less direct counters to champions. I hate the fact that when you're playing draft pick, it's almost a common practice for some people to see the opponent pick and immediately bring up Google to go on championselect.net.

However, if I were to respond to what you said without having to change the actual game, I'll suggest this:

What if, rather than having 2 bans at the start, a picking phase, and then 3 more bans for each team, you had 3 bans at the start, a picking phase, and then 2 more bans for each team?

This way, it may be easier to tell that the other team is banning counters to Morgana before they actually have a chance to pick her. Then the other team can simply ban Morgana.

Also, one more thing: You may be right that in the original idea, you could hypothetically ban out a large number of the champions that counter someone like Morgana. However, would you think it's okay to do this since the other team has equal opportunity to do the exact same thing for their mid? For example,

Team A intends to pick Morgana as their mid. They begin banning champions that are considered counterpicks for Morgana. They only get to ban 2 champions in the first phase, so they can only prevent 2 Morgana counters from being played. In the picking phase, Team A first picks Morgana and 2 other champions. Team B immediately takes one of the remaining counters for Morgana.

OR Team B notices the first 2 bans that Team A makes, and bans Morgana.

OR Team B intends to pick a mid who is countered by Morgana, so they have equal opportunity to ban such a mid in the first banning phase.


I don't think I worded this very well, but what I mean is that each team has the opportunity to have at least one champion on their team with few counters remaining.


Here is the problem, and part of the reason that I wrote this post looking at the competitive side of LoL. (stupidly) unlike DotA, League of Legends forces you to unlock champions, either with money or with slowly earned IP. Because of this, banning 10 champions and picking another 10 champions can seriously screw people over if they don't own a lot of champions, where in DotA, all of the champions are free and every player actually stands on the same ground as the next. There are no runes, masteries, IP, or any nonsense in the game. That is the only reason that this system may not be easily implemented into Normals.

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I'm not saying this is bad, because it would be great, and it is really needed.

But DotA has some balls overpowered team comps that sometimes NEED to be banned. DotA would be nigh unplayable if people were always allowed to play with a godly comp. For example Dark Seer, Luna, Enigma, Earthshaker and Shadow Fiend.

For those who don't play DotA.
Dark Seer is able to pull all enemies in an area into one spot, he can also make clones of enemies.
Luna's ultimate is essentially a super starcall
Enigma is able to stun all enemies in an area
Earthshaker has a long range AoE stun and an ability that allows him to deal more damage the more enemies are around him
Shadow Fiend is able to channel an ability that deals a ****ton of damage in an AoE.

League doesn't really suffer this problem... Just with the buffing of AD casters, the nerfing of AP items and the destruction of armor, it's basically just Ezreal and AD bruisers who always need banning.

The only champ comp I can think of which even synchronizes properly is Twisted Fate and Shen.

Fair enough. That makes sense. Although I don't like that about League of Legends, I do see what you're saying.

But, just because team compositions aren't quite as overpowered as they can be in DotA, does that mean that there shouldn't be a second banning phase? In other words, would it create a problem? And also, do you think it could still help in some other way? And if not, can you think of a way to make it better?

If nothing else, do you agree that the number of bans still needs to increase? With the amount of champions in the game now, and as someone said above, Riot is (paraphrase) "really cutting down on champions this year" when I think 12-14 is still ridiculous -- shouldn't you be able to take out 10, or at least 8 champions out of over 100?

Edit: Also, do you think this could possibly encourage more thought towards team compositions? There are definitely a few things that could give reasonable ban ideas. For example, Rengar + Orianna is a pretty good combination. It may not be as broken as some things that can be done in DotA, but I'm thinking of something like Rengar + Orianna + Amumu, or something similar. Rengar jumps in with the ball on him, Orianna ults, meanwhile Amumu pulls his way in and then ults. Then add something like a Zyra or Nami ultimate, and at this point if everything works out, the damage dealers should probably have had a field day.

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One more bump before bed.