Perhaps the most important change ever to be made to competitive League of Legends, the ten ban system has had plenty of reactions from the community. Be it by a Twitter tide of opinions, or by reading one of the articles already written on the topic, you most likely are already familiar with this very likely to be implemented idea.

Of course, the reaction by the community is to be expected. Ten bans is, only rivaled by the destruction of the lane swap, perhaps the biggest change ever to be made to competitive League of Legends. To understand why this is, we must first take a look into how the current pick and ban phase shapes the competitive scene.

The current draft

Very rarely, if ever, do we get to see a team direct all their bans into a single player on the opposing team. Two main principles are responsible for this. In any given meta, teams identify and form their own opinion on what the strongest and more relevant champions. Because of the huge difference usually existing between the strongest champions and the viable ones, it is not very common that banning someone out is worth conceding the opposing team the strongest pick or two very strong picks.

It is apparent that the difference in strength between any champion in the game is shorter in the middle tiers and wider on the top and bottom tiers. If you could rank every champion's value from 0 to 100 in any given meta, the difference between the 1st and the 10th would be much bigger than the difference between the 60th and the 70th.

This means that, once the strongest champions of the meta are banned, banning champions because of their tier becomes less and less efficient. Two extra bans allow for more strategies to develop. While now we mostly see strong meta champions banned, we will see groups of 2-4 bans dedicated exclusively to target one player or strategy in the future. As it stands, you very rarely have the tools for these kinds of plans. 

The second principle is heavily tied to the first one. Players have finite practice time, and they distribute this time in the way they think will make them the most successful. It is why no one is practicing only two champions all the time, only to get into a real match, get banned out, and proceed to get destroyed. While this might look obvious, it is instrumental to understand the impact of the extra bans showing in our horizon. 

On paper its very simple but, once you are in a team environment, plenty of intangibles have to be understood in order to assign your practice time to each champion. Because of the huge knowledge of the game needed to do a theoretical approach to this time assignation, most players and coaches simply do not. Practice time assignation is, more often than not, an intuition based skill.

What does the future hold?

Remember that the original point of having a ban phase is to allow competition to exist and be diverse, even if some champions are completely broken. Most teams have one or two champions you absolutely do not want to give them, and having only one ban is not even close to enough to target a player down or make some playstyle unviable. 

Realistically, we are switching from a 1-2 ban phase to a 3-4 ban one. In this manner, the best coaches will now have much more room to exploit their weaker counterparts. No one should expect teams with poor draft to be completely dominated for the whole season, but rather peaks of dominance from the strongest drafters. When presented with a new drafting idea, weaker teams will struggle at first, but adapt to it over time, for as long as no new breakthrough strategy comes up. 

Indeed, the extra bans will not immediately break the game, but rather will unfold their true strength as the season advances. Because of how many more strategies and options are opened with this change, even the best coaches in the scene will need a lot of time to fully understand the possibilities and draft accordingly. As the best develop and investigate new pick and ban strategies, teams with weak understanding of draft phase will suffer severely, and for a long period of time.

We must point out that the danger for someone to get consistently banned out is fairly low. As stated, if some player is ever in the position to get focus banned, he simply has to split the practice time evenly between more champions. This, combined with his teammates being able to get more practice time per champion, because they have no bans directed at them, makes the strategy not worth at all on the long run. In this case, Twitter's fear was completely unjustified.

The real dilemma lies in intuitively deciding how much practice you need in each champion. In the new system, players' old intuition will not be worth much. In both systems, if you spread your practice too much, you might just get ignored in the ban phase and lose influence overall. The difference is that now some champions might not be effective because of how much the optional bans have increased in number.

Imagine your whole team has practiced a poke composition. If key elements get banned out, effectively, it's as if every pick you practiced for that composition had been banned. While you can make a point that the reward for the practice is getting the other champions targeted, being able to ban “bundles” of champions is something we can not currently do, because of the strengths of top pics. Champions will now be more dependent on the needed synergies to be relevant on the ban phase. 

It's good to fish in troubled waters

This new tool will definitely be used by the very best coaches to abuse bad game knowledge on their opponents over and over. As the draft becomes more complicated, the amount of people that can expose you in the optimal way shrinks. Because of this, you will not get immediately punished for bad or greedy choices during scrims, and you will have less practice against these scenarios. This will, unavoidably, make your practice assigning mistakes harder to correct. Once you do fix a mistake however, if the base problem of bad game knowledge persists, new ways will show up in which to abuse the bad allocation of practice time. 

We can see in this manner how the new system will show peaks of dominance thorough a long period of time. As weak coaching staff faces superior drafters, their weaknesses will get exposed, and the other teams will get a chance to expose them as well by copying the idea of the strong drafters. The team will then work on fixing this flaw, and make the strategy obsolete against them, or find themselves at the bottom of the league. Still, because of how much more complex the new draft will be, more and more ways to abuse opponents will keep coming out as time passes. If by any chance a weak team finds itself exposed again by a new draft trick, another peak of dominance will arise.

Because of this, analysts and coaches will be more important than ever before. Having very strong analysts in your team will allow you to get much more player growth out of their time. Practice efficiency is no joke. How much a team can get out of their practice is, of course, the single biggest factor determining the success of a team. Being able to transition the intuition of practice allocation in champion into a methodical distribution of time will be a huge challenge for every team. Undeniably, those with better theoretical grasp over League of Legends will definitely come out consistently ahead.

The sacrifices made

This change will no doubt reward those teams with better coaching staff. Nevertheless, the system comes with downsides no one can avoid. We don't get to see the best players in the world on their best champions that often as it stands, and this addition of bans will make it even harder to do so. Obviously, more bans means that you have to pay a smaller price for taking someone's signature champion out of the realm of possibilities. In the new system, there is no room for refinement.

There is, however, a solution to this problem. Bringing back blind pick for the last game of a tied series. Not only does it make a series more simetric (giving the same amount of first and last picks to both teams), but this would skyrocket the value of mastering a single champion. Blind pick builds hype, equalizes advantages and, most importantly, can bring to the viewers the most amazing performance players can give, while maintaining a heavy strategical component to the draft.

I'd personally love to see 10 bans, and so should everyone that enjoys the strategic component of this game. Both the coaches and the general public finally get enough tools to separate the competent from the excelent, and room for analysts to be celebrated. Still, this does not mean there is no room for improvement. We should, as a community, not only encourage excelence in our players, but also give them means to deliver what we all want to see, the best of the best.

Images courtesy of Riot Games & Business Insider