10 Bans Live in League of Legends Normal Queue

Are you ready, League of Legends fans, to ban Yasuo every game for the rest of time? I know I sure am! The day where this dream will become a reality is quickly coming, as today that long-promised 10 ban system has made it's way to the normal game queues. Soon, according to Riot, the feature will be implemented in every queue, including ranked queues, meaning that you'll never against have to see the champions that you hate the most again.

The 10 ban system which we're getting for normal play is far different from the one that professional players use. Instead of teams choosing to ban champions in the familiar back and forth manner than they have used for years, each player will instead choose a single champion they wish to ban at the beginning of champion select. Once the ban clock has run out, all ten selected champions will be simultaneously revealed and then removed from play.

With a new system comes new questions, however, and Riot has done the best it can to answer many of these before they can become frustrations. Along with their announcement of the new system, they also posted an FAQ, which can be found here. We've taken the liberty of presenting some of what we thought were the most topical questions below.

What if I don't want to ban something?

We're adding an option to select "No Ban" if you want to live dangerously. We also wanted to add a failsafe in case two or more teammates rush to ban the same thing in the last few seconds – you'll default to "no ban" instead of incurring dodge penalties.

What happens if two or more players try to ban the same champ on my team?

As soon as one player locks a ban, the champ is no longer selectable for that team. If this happens in the last few seconds of the ban phase and two teammates try to lock at the same time, the second player's lock will default to "no ban" as a last resort to avoid dodge penalties.

What happens if two players ban the same thing on opposing teams?

There is a chance of duplicated bans across teams. Giving visibility into the enemy bans before time runs out causes the strongest strategy to be waiting until the closing moments to bait-and-switch bans with your opponent, which sounds unfun. This also reduces the chance of certain meta champions being banned across every game. Y'all know who we mean.

Doesn't this mean some champions will be banned every game?

Hopefully no; this was part of the design decision into allowing duplicate bans overall. In a snake format, the later players banning have more of an implied responsibility to take out the meta bans for the patch. There are outliers to the meta ban situation - particularly in high level games - where less-played champions like Shaco have multiple dedicated one-tricks that are still at risk of being banned out, but trying to balance this system for these outliers is near-impossible. We will be keeping an eye on the champs most likely to be permabanned across all tiers, and will make changes if necessary. Maybe we'll just make everyone else OP to compensate.