Are more bans required?

Season four is around the corner, the promotion tournament has been completed, and Christmas is behind us, so what's next for League of Legends? Some have speculated that increasing the number of bans before we officially go into season four in January may be needed or, in some opinions, required. The guys over at Reign of Gaming have grouped these arguments, but unlike them, I do not believe we need to add more bans, and here's why.

Before we get to deep into things, I will be covering some of the highlights in Battle of the Atlantic, so if you don't want spoilers, don't read!

"Keep the overpowered out, but the strong in."

So one of the arguments for increasing the bans to eight is that there are currently too many champions that need banning, otherwise they'll wreak havoc on your team. It is generally argued that those who have more of the overpowered picks, such as Dr. Mundo, Shyvana, or Riven at the time of writing will win the game due to being innately stronger.

If you have been watching the recent games for LCS promotion then you'll realize that for these games, it is generally the case but not always. This leads to the conclusion of the above opinion. Ban what's overpowered, play whats strong. Play something that is overpowered against something that's strong and you'll win. But, in my opinion, that is not the case. Correlation of the two do not equal direct causations. To explain, in 2011 fossil fuel emissions decreased, and piracy went up. Using the logic that correlation implies causation, we can conclude that pirates are saving the world, which isn't the case.

After the pick and ban phase in a regulated game of League of Legends, there will generally be more than one champion available that will be considered overpowered, which means that both teams will be able to pick up a champion that is overpowered if they so desire. To say that they had to, or otherwise they'd lose, would be a lie due to the results obtained in the promotion standings.

The solo queue phantom problem

If you go into a ranked game in League, then generally the overpowered will be banned straight out, and flavor of the month picks will be taken up. If an overpowered champion is let through, then the opposing team for that champion is more often than not considered to have a hard time. I disagree with this statement, every champion has a weakness and in most cases the said champion will be picked up early on in the picking and banning phase. If we were to take an example, like Amumu, who has started to come to the front with a 55% win ratio in Bronze, down to sub 53% in diamond, we can see once people realize how to play against one, their success decreases dramatically. In bronze for instance, you likely see less aggressive counter jungling which would be detrimental to Amumu in the early game. In diamond, however, he gets tossed around like a ragdoll due to people knowing his capabilities, and how to exploit them to make him weak.

Again, we can use another example of Dr. Mundo, who is an extremely good late game tank. However, he can be kited thus diminishing his use, as his only gap closer is his ultimate. Basically, the overpowered are only overpowered if you don't play correctly against them. Having many champions becoming strong now that the meta is shifting may cause some unrest. There'll be many champions that people will not know how to deal with, and as such seem overpowered, but once people understand they are in fact just strong it should get easier. When players in solo queue adapt to playing against them, just like the pro players, they will no longer seem as overpowered as they did before. The difference is that the pros adapt faster.

"A team will be able to simply ban out an opposing member."

This is a very interesting point. If the bans were increased, could someone like Hai, who is on Cloud 9, experience even more struggles with his limited champion pool knowing that he has been focused in the past? Simply put yes, and I wont criticize that learning more champions is bad, everyone should be doing it. It is not alright for professional players to just be content with their champions. They should be constantly learning. But if the number of bans does increase, it can make a team target a style of play more heavily.

If we were to look at the star of CLG, Doublelift. He has been in the past the centre of the team. The team strategy every game would simply be to protect him, and he would carry them to victory with one of his late game champions. Increasing the bans means a team will be able to get rid of all the late game marksmen characters, and effectively make that strategy useless. While I am not intentionally defending CLG, they have in the past build their team around this strategy. A team can simply put CLG behind by making sure they don't have a high source of damage in the late game, thus making Doublelift's job much harder, or in some cases practically impossible. While you should be able to ban out champions, you should not be able to ban out strategys such as "Protect the carry", "Split push", and so forth.

"Unpopular champions would see more gameplay."

In some cases this can be a valid point, if a player has a rather unusual champion pool, they may pick out one to play that is not often seen in the "pro scene". If Riot wanted to do this, there are other, better, ways of doing it than this. To start with, the reason why a champion would be an unusual pick in this sense would be because it is innately weaker to the champions that are on top at the moment, and would put that team at a disadvantage. As mentioned earlier, 'play the strong', but don't play the weak due to an extra champion or two in your pool being banned.

And even then, does anything need to be done to encourage unusual picks? Gambit showed us that it didn't in the Battle of the Atlantic. Ranging from Warwick top, Amumu support, or simply Annie with a Frozen Mallet, if you're looking to break the meta or show the crowd something funny, then you can do it already.

"More bans, more skill!"

Arguing that forcing players to play other champions, and thus play them more, would make them more skilled, is a statement that I consider false. Having to play for example nine different champions regularly, would mean that you aren't as skilled as someone who only plays four of those. That is if we assume the two people are equal in everything else such as time, learning, memory, etc. More bans will only 'spread out the skill' onto a larger pool. As such, I think it would be a poor move to force this as a sole motivation.

Conclusion

I think that for season four at the very least, and possibly future seasons, we don't need more than six bans. Increasing it would cause too many small issues that would be unsettling for a large amount of the League player base, and it also retracts from the picking and banning phase of the game, as you won't be able to 'outplay' your opponent through your various picks and bans. Going forward, it is definitely something to keep an eye on, but for the meantime, it allows us to have another part of the game while in my opinion, attract a better game overall.