IH's - Banning and Drafting

[Dietdrpepper]

I would like to purpose that the way the IH community is moving on bans and draft is in a poor direction. I would like to discuss bans first and then move on to the new insistance on drafting. The normal ban system for NA IH's is a standard 3G system. I purpose that the way this 3G system is implemented however is unbalanced. The current system goes:

 

Team 1 Ban #1

Team 2 Ban #2

Team 1 Ban #1

Team 2 Ban #2

Team 1 Ban #1

Team 2 Ban #2

 

Many times this process doesnt really matter as bans are made more to elimante certain players from playing certain heros. The imbalance of this system shows itself when you have players of more or less equal skill who play the same hero well. It also becomes a much bigger issue in draft. Team 1 is always at a disadvantage above as team 2 always gets to ban after team 1. Team 2 is able to "reactively" ban while team 1 is only able to proactively ban. A reactive position is not always better but for things that involve strategy the concept of the person with the most information is at an advantage almost always rings true.

 

I am not saying that any one system is perfectly balanced because I don't feel that is even possible. I do feel we should strive towards being as balanced as possible though. That said I would suggest that this system be changed to the following:

 

Team 1 Ban #1

Team 2 Ban #2

Team 2 Ban #1

Team 1 Ban #2

Team 1 Ban #3

Team 2 Ban #3

 

This system still slightly favors team 2 in that they do get to have the last ban but at least they have to give up some information to team 1 during the banning process. Another way would be to have a system where bans are made at the same time or concealed and all bans are shown at once by an observer. This would be the best way imo but would require more effort and therefore would more than likely fail.

 

On to drafting. The current NA IH community seems to be moving toward making draft the default. I for one do not care for draft as much as I do the regular 3G. That being said there are some aspects of draft I like and it is possible that the more I draft the better I will like it. I do know that I do not like the current draft system though as I feel it is imbalanced much like the current 3G process I described above.

 

First is the concept of bans + draft. By using both bans and the draft system you are essentially creating a total of 6 Global Bans and 5 Team Bans. This process takes out (for each team) a total of 11 characters. Currently there are a total of 9 Tanks, 12 AA, and 18 Casters in the game bringing the total amount of characters up to 39. That being said, Starscream is currently broken and has been since his implementation. Therefore he is auto'd. This process (Draft, Bans, Auto SS) removes ~29% of the characters from the game. Now one may say that 29% is an acceptable value but lets look at other MOBAs such as DOTA 2. They use a similar draft system as described above, however instead of 38 playable characters they have 98 which is more than double that of AOS therefore allowing more gameplay and creative team compositions.

 

I would also note the relatively low amount of tanks currently in the game. Currently there are 9 tanks in the game, one of which is auto'd bringing that total down to 8. Of those 8 tanks there are only 4 tanks (drake, micro, balrog, & tychus) which I would label "premium" tanks and 2 which I would label premium pseudo tanks (erekul & vorpal). The others (brine & lz) pale in comparison to those listed previously. I don't feel anyone would say they would rather have an LZ over a Drake. Putting all this aside however, the current system tends to ban tanks which makes sense due to them being the limiting resource and the fact that they play such a huge role in the game. Therefore let us say that team 2 decides to ban 3 tanks. That means the number of available tanks is at most 5 now. Moving on to draft. Team 1 must pick a tank first to be competitive. Team 2 then is able to counter pick to team 1's tank. Leaving team one left with probably LZ or brine both of which I and many others feel are weaker tanks.

 

in addition to this "tank" issue. We also have the same issue as above where team 2 is undoubtably at a disadvantage. Sure they can pick first and can therefore get the "best" pick or ensure that one of their players gets to play their main. This advantage is short-lived though when team 2 is able to consistantly counter your picks. Look at the following description of the current draft system and see how T2 always has more information than T1.

 

Team 1 Draft #1

Team 2 Draft #1

Team 2 Draft #2

Team 1 Draft #2

Team 1 Draft #3

Team 2 Draft #3

Team 2 Draft #4

Team 1 Draft #4

Team 1 Draft #5

Team 2 Draft #5

 

I would suggest that the team who bans first should draft second. Another option would be to do the draft process however allow the picking of the same character. I am sure this would be unpopular though since it seems to defeat the purpose of the drafting system.

 

There are many who state that drafts produce better, more balanced games. This has not been my experience. It seems to me that one team gets counter drafted and therefore ends up at a disadvantage for most of the game. A lot of times one can tell directly after the draft who is probably going to win. This seems to defeat one of the purposes I have proponents of the draft system lament on when using the 3G only system - One team can get unlucky and have their team composition countered. This can be solved however by having a more balanced team comp opposed to one which is countered easily. In draft this is much less likely since counter comping is the name of the game.

 

If the IH community wants to move toward a draft system, I would suggest that due to the relatively small pool of heroes available within AOS we cut global bans completely. This would force tougher decisions and make counter comping more difficult. One team cannot obtain all of the premium tanks by using the ban system in conjunction with the draft system.

[EterNity]

I don't know why team ban was gone in first place.

 

All I knew were me coming back to AoS one day and no one is doing team ban anymore.

[CheekyKunt]

Agree with the team ban:

 

Team 1 Ban #1

Team 2 Ban #2

Team 2 Ban #1

Team 1 Ban #2

Team 1 Ban #3

Team 2 Ban #3

 

I think we talked about this in 2 or 3 games, but no one listened.

 

I'm not sure about drafting... It seems whoever has last pick has an advantage.

[Dietdrpepper]

I agree Crazy. I know that there really isnt an efficient way to make the system perfectly balanced but I just feel the way it is now is pretty far off and can be improved upon. What would be nice is if the game itself had options for bans and drafting allowing us to possibly have a hidden ban or draft system. That would make things much more balanced in my opinion.

[Dietdrpepper]

@ Eternity

 

I think the reason NA did away with team bans was the fact that the team bans ended up just being another global ban. I think that was due to the nature of roulette.jackson though and how no team wanted to global him but was required to team him since playing without one but vs one was a losing position. This has all been changed though since the jackson nerf (now he hardly sees play at all) and I feel the team ban system could come back.

[Destroyer]

It would be nice if a draft pick option would be added into the game, but instead the game gets a new UI, oh well.

[Spooky]

I agree with your suggestion about global bans. It would give more balanced way to make bans. However I can't agree with your other statements:

- with option without any global bans (only draft) - u would get very similar compositions every game. There are some 'game changing' heroes which are very often banned, like MK, Tosh, Rory or Micro. In effect u couldn't ever get specific hero to game, because he is useless against some popular heroes. However with ban system u can build composition over some specific hero and ban his natural counters and so on.

- tanks - they are not 'required' if u have good initiation which was proved during last tournament (team of jackson, vergil, rancor, grunty and one more non-tanky hero, raynor probably, won).

- number of heroes - I think number of heroes is fine, at least only few of them are almost never used in inhouses, where in case of Dota 2 at least half of them are almost never used, while 80% are never banned (based on what I've seen on casts from tournament games)

- team balance - well, it usually depends on drafter skill. Sometimes Team 1 has better composition, sometimes Team 2. So it is independent from your position during the draft which means lack of balance isn't a draft system flow itself but it's rather only a bad drafter issue. Simple example I've faced many times - lets say there are some heroes considered very strong and game changing (T1). Team with second pick has their last ban. There are still 2 or 3 T1 heroes available. But they decided to ban 1 of them instead to ban sth else and pick 1 or 2 in their first pick (@Francuz)

[Hogwarts]

You see pepper this is much more productive then your alex jones batshap crazy rage infused rants on mumble

 

some times i cant tell you and him apart

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xog5FoODC4s

 

 

 

on topic, last night we tried something different and neat whale input the names of the heroes into a web site that takes a group of names and splits them up into smaller random groups, and each team has a hero pool of 10 i think they can choose from its completely random, and there are no bans you just have to pick from your pool made for some fun games