14 DAY TRIAL // It seems that everybody wants to be in charge these days, as League of Legends' newly-introduced Team Builder mode points out. The ether has been invaded by would-be captains looking for people to order around, and Riot was quick to come up with a provisional solution to the issue.
Riot introduced Team Builder mode last week, in an attempt to improve matchmaking queue times and to smooth out the team comp election process. And since observing that everyone wants to lead the assault, it has implemented and experimental feature to see if it can reduce the overall number of captains.
Players will now have to invite at least one friend into their groups via Team Builder in order to become captains, and Riot expects that the new rule will "greatly improve" the captain to solo-player ratio, consequently also reducing overall queue times for everyone.
"Right now, we're seeing way too many Captains--there are already too many trying to find other players to run a non-meta team comp," the devs share.
The details of the tentative solution have been offered via the League of Legends forums by the game's lead designer of social systems, Jeffrey Lin.
"Although about 95% of players are having queue times of 5-10 minutes or less (even doing unorthodox or creative comps!), this means that 5% of players are having unacceptable queue times," he explained.
Lin also outlined that the worst affected summoners have been those with either very high or very low MMR, the best and the worst of League of Legends, as well as those who play during off-peak hours.
If an improvement isn't registered or other issues pop up, the change will be reverted just as easily, Lin reported.
"If it doesn't work it's a simple switch off and we'll try something else. We want to see how this affects queue times and match quality. If this is positive across the board, then we'll keep this flow. If we see some huge red flags, we'll go back to the drawing board," Lin said.
Their solutions seem to have been right on the nose lately, as internal figures show that the toxicity of the playing medium has been greatly reduced by the streamlined Team Builder matchmaking tool.
The stats speak for themselves, and it seems that teams using the Team Builder feature have registered a 4 percent increase in positive communication, as well as a drop of 23 percent in negative comments in case of victory, and an impressive 36 percent drop in negative comments in the case of lost games.