14 DAY TRIAL // The development team behind the multiplayer online battle arena hit League of Legends is preparing a new queuing system that will allow players to opt for more specific roles in online matches.
The new system, dubbed Team Builder, will allow players to select a certain role, champion, and position before attempting to join a team. The system will allow matchmaking with complementary teammates and will ensure that player preferences don’t overlap and result in unpleasant interactions in the game lobby regarding who does what.
Riot Games plans to first hold a beta test of the Team Builder feature on live servers, with each region first going through a 48-hour test of the matchmaking system, starting with RU and EUNE, during the week of March 3 to March 7.
The beta tests will not occur all at the same time, and the test times will be slightly offset from one another, as the development team has specified in the official announcement on the League of Legends website.
The Team Builder system will be introduced alongside the already existing queuing modes for unranked games taking place on Summoner's Rift, but the team will be taking the feedback from the beta tests into consideration for future developments regarding the entire matchmaking system.
As the system is new and entirely experimental, the team has not yet figured out how drafting and champion bans fit into it, and for now it will not be available for competitive games.
The Team Builder matchmaking system will enable players to queue either as solo players or as captains, which will allow them to select a particular champion, role, and position or to have more flexibility when building their team, respectively.
The team warned that solo players who AFK or who reject "more than a reasonable number of groups" may face some penalties, in the form of increased cooldown before they can join another group or even losing their privileges to use the Team Builder queuing system altogether.
The same penalties will apply to Captains who kick an extreme number of players out of their teams, the system adding an incremental cooldown before starting to look for potential teammates, and eventually preventing such players from using the system for a certain period of time.