[ Update #2 ] Introducing Team Builder

Updated 2: More posts have been added!

Update: YOU WANT DISCUSSION? WE GOT DISCUSSION! Check the post for a whole slew of new red posts!

Good news everyone - Lyte has announced TEAM BUILDER - an upcoming feature that allows summoners to " queue up for a specific role, champion and position and get connected with four teammates that also preselected their preferred role.".

Continue reading for more information!

Here's Lyte with the full scoop:

"Hello Summoners! 

Lyte here, and in this post I’m excited to talk with you about Team Builder, a new feature coming to PBE in the near future where you can queue up for a specific role, champion and position and get connected with four teammates that also preselected their preferred role. The goal is to build a balanced team where everyone’s in agreement on where they’re going and what they’re playing, and in doing so help lay the foundation for good teamwork.

How often have you logged on to League of Legends and thought, “I just want to play Renekton today.” Or maybe you want to try a new strategy but can’t find four friends to premade with. We’re always asking how we can make the League of Legends experience better, and one thing that comes up a lot is how players want to feel like they’re in control of their pre-game experience. 

Good teamwork doesn’t just start when the minions spawn or at the first big teamfight. It starts in champion select. Champion select sets the tone of the game and greatly impacts whether you feel like you’re going to have a fun match. So we asked ourselves: what’s the ideal champion select? And how can we improve this process so it happens more often?

An ideal champ select is one where all five players get their preferred role and feel like they’re all on the same page for the upcoming match. The current matchmaking does a good job of matching up players of similar overall skill levels, but doesn’t have any way to know what a player’s intentions for a given game are. Sometimes things work out perfectly and everyone gets the champion and role they wanted without a hitch. But if multiple players are looking to play the same role or lane, a consensus has to be built in a relatively short period of time. That’s time that could be used to get to know each other, agree on a strategy and build confidence that it’s going to be a fun match.

Team Builder is intended to bring players together that complement each other’s expectations and intentions from the moment they enter the lobby. When everyone’s aligned on who will be going where and playing what, the only thing left to figure out is how to dominate the opposition.

Once we had a model for how Team Builder would bring players together, we started looking at matchmaking and how we could evolve it to help further enable good games. One of the most important things for a team’s enjoyment is making sure that they’re matched against similarly skilled players.

With Team Builder we’ll also be rolling out a smarter matchmaking system that can dynamically account for your experience with a given role, position or champion. First time playing Ahri? Learning how to be a solid Marksman? Venturing into the jungle for the first time? Team Builder’s matchmaking will take all of these factors into account.  

Our goal for Team Builder is to bring players together and build better teams. Because good teams win more games, make bigger plays, and most importantly, have more fun.  

To us, that’s exciting, and we’re looking forward to your feedback. See you in Team Builder, 

Lyte"

He continued:

"I just want to take a moment to thank some of the Rioters who worked on this feature: 

Robbypoo, RiotComplex, statuskwoh, RiotWorldPeace, RiotTantrum, davin, btab, MissMechaZero, RiotLobster, stopthief, Exekias, Amazoe, Scezumin, VonBurgermeister, Ryedan, RiotNeuroCat, RiotJayway, Taurendur, whever, Drevarius, RoamingNumeral, RiotSeb.

If you see them around the forums or a future event, make sure to give them a fist-bump!

--

Update!

Frequently Asked Questions:

1) Won't this enforce the meta?
a) Here's an example of a crazy meta that was tried earlier in the day. Team Builder is all about introducing a new, cooperative Champion Select where players can agree to a strategy and team vision before entering a match. Players in Team Builder will be able to outline a strategy they are interested in playing, and the system will find teammates that share that vision. Feel like playing a double jungler strategy or want to send 5 players down the mid-lane? No problem. It might take longer to find 4 other players willing to try a crazy strategy but when you do, you'll know the entire team is bought in and you're going to have fun.

2) Will Team Builder replace other queues?

a) Team Builder is a complete re-design of Champion Select that was inspired by a lot of research on social dynamics and cooperation. Because we're going to iterate on it quite often with player feedback, we opted to create it as an independent queue first and not touch any of the existing queues. Depending on what we learn, we may adapt some or all of Team Builder into the existing queues.

3) Will I have long queue times if I want to play a popular role?

a) In our research, we were surprised that role preferences were pretty diverse. When we surveyed players and asked what their preferred role was, about 15% of players preferred playing Support, 14% of players preferred playing Jungle, and 5% of players were willing to fill any role. 

We'll be keeping a very close eye on role popularity in Team Builder, but for now, it looks like there are players that are very happy to play the perceived least popular roles if there is a system like Team Builder in place to help create teams.

4) How can I play as a leader in Team Builder?

a) There are two flows in Team Builder. You can opt to be a leader of a group and define strategies for your team--this is usually the recommended path if you have a few premade friends and want to find a few strangers to fill out your team according to your desired composition. 

You can also opt to be a solo player, choose a champion, role and position and ask the system to look for teams who are looking for your spec."

davin also joined in to respond to comments on this "reinforcing the meta":

"It actually does not enforce it--leaders of a team will be able to set whatever parameters they want. Double jungle? Five man mid? Make it happen!

But, because team collaboration is the name of the game, your teammates will need to be bought in by queuing for that position and accepting the plan beforehand. It's built into the system to allow for flexible meta expression."

davin continued on with more details how Team Builder affects "meta":

"Just to make sure people see: You can actually set up whatever comp you want. You can definitely do 2 mid or 2 jungle. The system is meant to make it easy for players to decide to play the way they want to play. Because there's no crazy time pressure, you're not going to hop into a game until everyone is fine with the plan. If the captain sets up a Support Top, Marksman Top setup, for example, they're deciding to wait a little longer to get solo players who will be happy to play the strategy they desire.

In that way, the tool is also more responsive to shifts in the "standard" meta. Should be neat to see how players collaborate with it "

A player was worried that Team Builder would further enforce the current meta, but Riot Lyte responded:

"Team Builder is all about introducing a new, cooperative Champion Select where players can agree to a strategy and team vision before entering a match. Players in Team Builder will be able to outline a strategy they are interested in playing, and the system will find teammates that share that vision. Feel like playing a double jungler strategy or want to send 5 players down the mid-lane? No problem. It might take longer to find 4 other players willing to try a crazy strategy but when you do, you'll know the entire team is bought in and you're going to have fun."

Lyte also had details to share about the Team Builder release:

"Initially, Team Builder will be a separate queue and you will still be able to queue up as you do now for other game modes such as Normal Blind Pick."

"Initially, Team Builder will be an entirely separate queue. We're looking forward to feedback from players and will use that feedback to determine whether this type of Champion Select is a good fit for modes like Ranked Mode but for now, we're focused on improving the Champion Select experience as an independent queue."

davin explained a bit more on champions and what role they fulfill:

 "Champions aren't locked to their primary roles, when you select how you're queuing up, you specify what role/position you want to play with the champion. I'm a support player myself, and will be excited to try out more Naut support with this--Naut is one of my favorite champs :)"

Lyte had further details on being group lead:

"Team Builder is pretty flexible but we had to be careful not to add too many specific options in the system that may increase queue times. What this means is that in Team Builder, you'll be able to outline the high-level strategy you are interested in playing--this means that you'll be able to select the roles and positions for your team, but not select the specific Champions you want on a team.

As a leader of a group in Team Builder, you'll then be presented with players that want to play one of the roles/positions on your team, and you'll get to see the Champion they want to play and get to accept/decline them from your group."

He then talked further on how it'll be as a solo player queuing for Team Builder:

"As a solo player in Team Builder, you have quite a lot of flexibility as well. Let's say you want to play Nautilus Support in the Top Lane. If you get placed into a group, this means that the leader of that group has already agreed they are interested in a Nautilus Support in the Top Lane. But, let's say you chat with the team in the lobby and don't like the setup the leader is trying to play--as a solo player you can simply ask the system to find a new group. It's as simple as that."

More questions came up about Team Builder enforcing meta, so davin explained:

"This is something we discussed pretty extensively while building the rules of the system. We didn't want to enforce the meta, but we also didn't set out to try to break it. Instead, we wanted to put the tools in players' hands.

Some of the research we did to see if this feature would have legs showed that players were actually pretty happy to play outside of the "standard" meta, as long as the composition made sense from a "what can this champion do" (not a lot of players were excited about solo-lane Sona, but Swain top was pretty accepted). There's some players who will be pretty strict, but perceptions on that are actually pretty widely varied.

In short, it's something we'll be watching, and it's definitely something we've considered quite a bit. Given the broad range of beliefs regarding what a viable composition is, I think there will actually be a decent amount of variance."

A player worried that this system will get you kicked if one doesn't play a favored champ, to which davin responded:

"We all have our own experiences with folks who are super insistent about what champions are allowed for what roles. But there's also folks who are pretty easy-going, as long as the champion makes sense for the role. One of the first things we did when planning this feature was to run some research to figure out whether players would generally be happy with a composition that "made sense" but wasn't "strict omega tier 1 champ in every slot". The levels of acceptance there were pretty encouraging (go Ziggs go!)."

davin also mentioned some safety measures taken for players:

"Until you accept someone, you don't see their name. There's also some further safeguards against abusive team leaders :)"

A player asked what if a player chooses a champion early but changes it in champ select:

"You actually never end up in Champion Select. The team's screen replaces it--once you're all good, you just queue up and end up in a match."

Another player worried that this feature would increase queue times, to which Lyte responded:

"In our research, we were surprised that role preferences were pretty diverse. When we surveyed players and asked what their preferred role was, about 15% of players preferred playing Support, 14% of players preferred playing Jungle, and 5% of players were willing to fill any role.
We'll be keeping a very close eye on role popularity in Team Builder, but for now, it looks like there are players that are very happy to play the perceived least popular roles if there is a system like Team Builder in place to help create teams."

When asked if Team Builder would apply to Draft mode, davin responded:

"It's a whole separate queue. We'll see what happens from there!"

Lyte talked about how to become a Team Leader:

"Right now, it's as simple as selecting Team Builder and selecting that you want to be a leader. We're considering whether leaders need to invite at least 1 friend to be a leader, but this will depend on feedback and data on the ratio of players who want to be a leader versus be a solo player."

When asked if the meta will match against two teams queued for Team Builder, Lyte responded:

"You'll be going up against whatever strategy the opposing team queued up with."

When asked if there are two separate queues for Team Leaders and Solo Queu-ers, Lyte responded:

"Yes, there are two flows in Team Builder. You can opt to be a leader of a group and define strategies for your team--this is usually the recommended path if you have a few premade friends and want to find a few strangers to fill out your team according to your desired composition.

You can also opt to be a solo player, choose a champion, role and position and ask the system to look for teams who are looking for your spec."

 Lyte had more details to share on queue times for Team Builder:

"When you select a champion, role and position, you are presented with an estimated wait time so you can gauge how many teams are currently looking for that spec; however, we also saw in the research that players are quite open to diverse and creative strategies. For example, Caitlyn as a Marksman-Mid is a strategy that would be very well-accepted even though it isn't standard."

davin explained the selection process a bit more:

"If you're not setting up a team and you're just queueing up yourself, you pick: Champion, Role, Position. So you might pick:

Nautilus / Jungle / Tank
or
Annie / Top / Mage

You're not limited to picking what a champion is "designed for", but the interface will let you know what a champion's primary roles are. You'll get an estimated wait time as well--to let you know if some combination will take longer to get."

Lyte also added:

"Yes, team leaders can leave roles as "Any Role," which allows maximum flexibility if the team doesn't really care about the role but know they want a person at a specific position."

davin confirmed that you can choose unique champion and role combinations:

"Yep, you totally can. You could even queue Janna/Mid/Marksman and pretend it's Season 1, though you'll have to wait to find a team that's on-board with that."

davin had more to say on how the queue and champion selection works:

"Nope, much more streamlined than that. Since it is its own queue, there's no bans or anything like that. Once everyone is 'ready' and the leader launches the game, you just end up in queue and then on a loading screen."

A player asked how duo queuing would work, and Lyte responded:

"Of course! In the current setup, one of you will have to be the team leader and invite the friend. Both of you can then spec a bottom combination, then fill out the rest of your team composition with whatever you want. The system will then start finding some teammates for you two!"

Another player worried that an unpopular champion pick would result in multiple kicks from Team Builder groups, to which Lyte explained:

"In this case, if you chose Zilean and get accepted into a group, it means the leader has already OK'd a Zilean. If you form a team and place yourself as Zilean, you may get a few solo players who enter the lobby, see Zilean and then leave, but this is not as common as players think.

davin ran quite a few studies on non-standard team compositions with unpopular champions, and it turns out that players are very willing to play with non-popular champions."

A player asked if the same Champion can be on both teams:

"Yeah, the easiest way to imagine the queue is that it's a normal game with a more collaborative, non-time-limited champion select process. This is how we might have done champion select from the start if we could use a time machine. Though Ranked obviously has different needs."

Another player asked if they can choose and unspecified role for Team Builder:

"Right now, solo players have to select champion, role and position. Team leaders can create slots with "Any Role," but they must select a position. We're going to see how this setup works, and we're always open to iterating."

Lyte had more details to share about being Team Leader and Solo Queuing:

"Yes, as a Team Builder leader you will be able to accept or decline suggested players to your team. Solo players will also be able to ask the system to find them a new group. Team Builder is all about encouraging communication and cooperation and letting players take as much time as they want to find a team they will have fun with."

A player asked if a Team Leader can put a "no preference" option while creating a game:

"Not at the start, but if it ends up being a common desire after the system launches, it'd be something we could add."

Another player asked what the future of Team Builder will be in Season 4, to which Lyte responded:

"We really just have to see. As we head towards PBE and Live, a lot of the systems within Team Builder may change according to player feedback. We're really focused on just redesigning Champion Select to encourage as much cooperation and sportsmanlike play as possible, which is why we're creating an independent queue for the time being. Depending on what we learn and if it's the right fit, an adaptation to Ranked Modes might look completely different."

Another player worried that they would be kicked for playing Champions in unconventional roles and not according to the meta, and Lyte said:

"In that case, you would likely be setting up your own team and inviting your friend, then setting up slots for the others. If solo folks think your setup is weird, they'll leave (they can't kick you) and get put into another team."

davin then reiterated what the purpose of Team Builder was for:

"Yeah, that is basically 100% the point! Making it easier for teams to be happy going into the match--which is done by players having the option to truly opt-in to the experience they're about to have."

Lyte then reminded a player what the process was when choosing an unconventional Champion for a specific role:

" If you spec Jungle Quinn, then the system will find you teams that are OK with (and accept) a Jungle Quinn before you appear in their lobby. Players will not notice when their spec is declined by a team."

A player asked if there was going to be a feature that automatically kicks players that abuse Team Builder, and if there was a chat in the lobby:

"Seems like a good use of that button ;) And yes, you can chat!"

Regarding being Team Leader and Matchmaking, Lyte explained:

"Right now, being a leader of a group in Team Builder is as easy as selecting Team Builder then selecting that you'd like to be a leader. We're toying with additional requirements such as requiring leaders to invite at least 1 friend--research suggests that this may encourage players to play together with friends which we know is an awesome experience.

Regarding matchmaking, the system currently assesses the team's skill level then finds an appropriate opposing team--it doesn't try to pair similar metas against each other. We're able to match according to lane position skill ratings, but whether we do that or not is still up for debate."

When asked about Team Leaders choosing the "Any Role" option for team members, Lyte responded:

"We're going to start with the "Any Role" option for team leaders to use, which means that a team leader can spec out a team composition and use "Any Role" for every team member and just choose their positions. 

For positions, we're going to collect data first and see whether "Any Position" would be valuable to add."

When asked about Champion Select during Team Builder, Lyte responded:

"In Team Builder there's no more traditional Champion Select. Once all members have joined the lobby and readied up, the team leader sends the team straight into matchmaking and the loading screen."

A player asked Lyte if a Summoner can change their selected Champion during Team Buidler:

"For now, there's no option for players to switch their Champions once they are in the team building process. We're aware of the value of adding this, but there's also some concerns like how you would handle players who use a desired spec to get fast queues, then switch their specs in the lobby and end up being kicked--it's not an ideal experience for anyone in that situation."

When asked about anti-abuse features, Lyte explained:

"There are a few anti-abuse systems in place that will prevent team leaders from declining players forever until they get the exact Champion they want. For example, if a team leader decides to decline a 10 players in a row in a short time period, the system may decide to give the team leader a 30 second cool-down before suggesting another player to them."

A player asked if Summoner Names would be visible during Team Builder:

"Player 1 and Player 2 was just for testing purposes.

However, when players are suggested to team leaders, Summoner Names will be hidden to avoid some abuse with third party tools and stat look-ups. Once a player is accepted into a team, their name will be revealed but there's a few anti-abuse systems in place to deal with team leaders who then use third party tools to look-up the name and kick the player at this point."

When asked about estimated queue times, Lyte responded:

"You get an estimated queue time before you queue up; however, the initial estimates when the system launches may be a bit off. As the system collects data, the estimates will become more accurate."

When asked about "Find Another Group" and "Kick" features, Lyte responded:

"Yes, there's a "Find Another Group" button for players and a "Kick" button for leaders. As we move towards PBE, we'll be sharing more details with exactly how the system works."

Another player worried that this would not be a good feature to introduce to Ranked, and Lyte explained:

"Given the number of players here that have already voiced they love playing Zilean, Quinn, and other unpopular champions, it should be no surprise that in our research many unpopular champions were well-accepted in Team Builder teams.

If I were a team leader in Team Builder, I'd be the first one to click OK to Zilean-Mage-Mid or Quinn-Jungle. From research from davin's lab, it turns out that there are many players like me "

When asked about implementing an option to have team members vote to allow a player in the team, Lyte responded:

"This is a possibility and something we discussed; however, it's not something we're going to do for the initial experiments!"

A player asked if a Team Leader would be able to invite a full premade team:

"About your one question, team leaders can invite up to a full premade team, but by that point it's just easier to go into a Normal Blind Pick game I imagine."

When asked how Team Builder would affect Ranked, Lyte responded:

"To be honest, we'll just have to see. We've used a lot of research on cooperation and team dynamics to drive game design decisions on Team Builder, but now we really want players to try it out and give us feedback as we work on the feature. As we iterate on Team Builder and learn about what the best Champion Select experience is, we'll then figure out how we want to use these lessons in other modes."

Lyte explained some of the anti-abuse features Team Builder has:

"There's a few anti-abuse systems in place that will punish a team leader that acts that way. For example, if a leader frequently accepts a player then kicks the player, they may end up being restricted from playing Team Builder for a period of time.

We can do stuff like this because accepting a player then kicking them is very different than just declining the player from the get-go--these patterns of behaviors are very easy to detect."

When asked if Team Builder would take into account a player's MMR, davin replied:

"Skill level is still taken into account. And it actually helps adjust in some other ways (based on what the system knows about your experience with roles/champs)."

A player worried about when he could strategize with his team, to which Lyte responded:

"You can discuss ganking routes with the team in the lobby."

When asked about the likelihood of being placed in a same queue of a friend that is looking for the friends' specific roles, Lyte responded:

"It's unlikely. The system doesn't necessarily look at the entire composition and search for solo players looking for the exact composition a team leader wants which means that the leader will just get a bunch of players who want to play junglers in general and not specifically a 5-jungler strategy; secondly, the system doesn't reveal Summoner Names until after you've accepted them into your group. The leader will most likely have to accept a bunch of junglers and get strangers and be forced to kick players which will start triggering the anti-abuse systems."

A player asked if there would be a ready-check:

"There is definitely a ready-check before the game starts "

Another player asked when they would be able to choose their skins during Team Builder:

"Skins are chosen in the Team Building lobby, the one you see in the screenshot. Just click your Champion icon and skin away!"

When asked if there would be punishments for kicking players from Team Builder too often, Lyte responded:

"It depends why you are kicking. For example, if you are kicking because you accept a player that happens to not gel with the team in the lobby chat, that's generally alright. 

If you accept 10 players in a row, reveal their Summoner Names, look-up their stats using third-party tools and kick all 10 of them... the anti-abuse system will detect this as a pattern of behavior."

If a player doesn't like the team they were matched with, Lyte explained:

"If you join a team that you don't like, or the strategy just doesn't mesh with you, you definitely have the option to ask the system to find you a new group. There's only repercussions for extreme abuse cases, such as a player chain joining and leaving groups repeatedly."

A player asked if they would be queued against similar metas, to which Lyte explained:

"Your team will be faced with a completely random composition. As a scientist, just imagine all the data when you get to see a matrix of creative, unorthodox compositions and how they perform against all other compositions...
I'm excited.
:)  "

When asked how long they worked on this, davin responded:

"IMHO a lot of thought and care has been put into this from everybody involved. Speaking specifically as Team Builder's UX designer, we worked really hard to make the entire workflow as empowering, intuitive, and hopefully fun as possible.

Can't wait for everybody to take Team Builder for a drive :)"

A player asked for more information on how being Team Leader works, to which Lyte explained:

"We'll release more information as we go to PBE, but basically as a team leader, you get to setup your own team composition.

For example, as a team leader, I was able to setup the following today:

Fighter - Top
Support - Top
Marksman - Mid
Mage - Bot
Mage - Bot

Once I've determined my team composition, I lock in, and the system begins finding players for me that are interested in playing one of those specs on my team."

On the differing expectations of roles different Summoner's may have, Lyte said:

"We agree, the system isn't designed to communicate all intentions and absolve players of any communication. Once a Support gets accepted into the lobby, teams should chat! They should figure out what they want to do, and whether they want to do 0 CS Support, or whether it's a kill lane. If players disagree on something, they can very easily ask the system to find them a new player or a new team."

Zileas chimed in, reminding players that there is no timer during Team Builder:

"Also, there's not active time pressure to queue once you have your teammates, so it's easier to work out those kinks before everyone is on the loading screen."

As for how this may tie in with honor badges, Lyte noted:

"I like the idea of showing Honor badges... in fact, we have a few ideas with what we want to do with Honor and Team Builder. But for now, let's focus on getting the Champion Select re-design out to players ;)"

===================================================================
Edit: Here are the new posts added on 10/16! Enjoy!

( Still formating >.> gg early publish )

Lyte also added:

"Roles are not attached to the champion, and you can choose Mage-Gragas for example. It's also very trivial for us to add a "Roam" role, if such a role were to emerge as a popular option."

As far as when you can communicate with your team within Team Builder, VonBurgermeister noted:

"As soon as someone is in the lobby, you can start chatting. Basically you can talk strategy from beginning to end." 

As for anti-abuse systems, Lyte mentioned:

"There are a few anti-abuse systems in place that will combat players or team leaders who intentionally kick players non-stop.

I'm not sure if you play mainly Ranked Modes, but one of the things we saw in Ranked was that a lot of cognitive biases are at play. For example, there's been research on companies that show that the average employee believes they are above average--statistically impossible, but a very robust cognitive bias that exists in all humans. In Ranked Mode, this cognitive bias exists too--as a player, we have no data on anyone else but ourselves, so we tend to believe we're the best player in the lobby. Statistically, we can't always be the best player in every lobby because everyone is typically close in skill-level, but we feel strongly that we're always the best. Because of these cognitive biases, players in these modes tend to want to play the perceived "carry" roles, which is why there are less people opting to play Support. Because Team Builder is currently an independent, non-Ranked queue, we're more confident that more players will opt-in to playing Support. 

Cognitive biases like these are one of the reasons why competitive modes are tricky--we have to design a solution that not only makes sense from a game design sense, but also from a psychological sense. "

On picking your champion to fit a team comp while using the new system, Lyte said:

"In the playerbase, there's a large % of players who are willing and happy to select their Champion first before seeing the rest of the team composition. However, we also know there's a % of players who want to see the team first, discuss strategy, then choose a complementary champion--this is especially true for Marksman or Support players. 

However, when designing Team Builder we had to balance the flexibility we were offering players with the time it's going to take to build a team and get into a match. In an ideal world where decisions are all made at lightspeed, we could offer players every single decision point we could think of; however, we start approaching scary long times just to build a team together because you're thinking about 100 decisions every single lobby. Not only do more decisions lead to longer team building times, we also begin to deal with the psychological effect of too many choices possibly overwhelming players who just want some flexibility but ultimately just want to have fun. 

We're still trying to find the right balance of flexibility and cost of time, which is why we've decided to initially offer features like allowing team leaders to select "Any Role" as a role option. We'll collect data and see how the flow of the experience is and decide if we need to add more flexibility features as we test on PBE."

When asked what you can change after queuing for Team builder and how it will interact with game modes using bans, Lyte noted:

"You can change your masteries and runes at any point in the lobby, and can definitely chat with your teammates about what pages you'd like to use.

A lot of players have asked whether Team Builder will have bans, and it will not. Team Builder is a new re-design of Champion Select, and is focused on the core experience. We've considered how a Team Builder "draft mode" might look like, but that's not the focus of the initial experiments.

I agree that there's a lot of potential value in allowing players to multi-select Champions or Roles, and allow team leaders to choose which one they are interested in; however, there's a lot of complexity to these designs--especially from the tech side. For example, if 2 players are suggested to a party, and both of them have Miss Fortune as a proposed champion, then we now have to consider additional collision cases. From a Game Design side, if you allow multi-select Champion designs you now force team leaders to choose the preferred champion among a mix of 3 (or however many you propose). If you propose only 1 Champion, say a B Class Champion, many players will say "OK, that's fine, let's play!" If you propose 3 Champions, a B Class with 2 A Class Champions, you now actually hurt champion diversity because you force team leaders to make a value judgment here and many will opt to select the A Class Champions even if they were OK playing with the B Class. 

These are all solvable problems, but we wanted to focus on getting the core experience to players first. Then collect feedback, and iterate as we go"

Lyte also spoke to playing less popular / desirable champions in Team Builder:

"We believe perceived less popular Champions will get increased play and better experiences in Team Builder. In the current environment, you're choosing a Heimerdinger and forcing that intention upon other players--sometimes players are cool with that, and sometimes players are not. That's hit and miss, and not an ideal experience for any of the players in the lobby. 

In Team Builder, if you choose Heimerdinger and get accepted into a group, you're already in a group that has seen your intentions to play Heimerdinger and said "Hey, we're cool with that." In addition, the research shows that players are very willing to play with a diverse pool of champions. davin's group did a lot of research on non-standard team compositions and champions and over and over again, players were happy to play with them."

On team builder having champion swapping / trading, Lyte mentioned:

"If we wanted to allow Champion swapping, having the team leader or group vote for it isn't a bad idea; however, we didn't want to take on too many features too fast. We want to iterate on the core experience with player feedback, and build the system together with players."

When asked about the possibility of new features fo Team Builder, Lyte reminded:

"The Team Builder you see now, or the one on PBE, won't necessarily be the final version with all the features. We're working on the core experience, and fully intend to add features to Team Builder over time."

He continued:

"I'm pretty excited about the feature myself--as a player and as a scientist.

There's been several long discussions about whether Team Builder might become the dominant queue, whether we should leave it as an independent queue and all sorts of similar issues. For us, the most important thing for launch is that Team Builder can be a healthy queue, and that Normal Blind Pick and Ranked Mode can be healthy queues that co-exist with Team Builder. Depending on the data, there are several directions we could go from there, but it's really too early to predict.

Regarding role definition changes, we definitely worked closely with Morello's team on those. The reason we worked on those was not just because we had been researching Team Builder, but because research showed that lower level players really had no clue what terms like AD Carry or AP Carry meant and it didn't really give players a proper expectation of a champion's potential playstyle. "

When asked if a "re queue" option is going to be availabe, Lyte noted:

"We really, really want to add some features to Team Builder that make it easier to make friends and queue with them again; but, for now, you have to just add them to your friends list post-game and queue up with them in a new Team Builder game."