Riot's upcoming League of Legends Ranked Team Builder should cut wait times

A new method for team building in ranked games is coming to League of Legends, and it sounds like a big improvement.

The new Ranked Teambuilder has been explained in an ASKFM post by lead designer Jeffrey Lin. Although choosing your preferred position prior to the start of the game has been difficult in the past, Lin has outlined a much more intuitive process that will be implemented soon.

This new 'Champ Select' process will involve eight steps:

1. Players can invite friends into a Lobby.
2. Each player is required to select at least 2 Positions (such as Top/Mid, or Mid/Jungle). On average, Ranked players only play 2.2 positions, so we wanted to start simple with a Pick-2 design, but have some backups like rank-sorting all 5 positions if there are queue time issues. We also have designs to incentivize mastering all positions in the future.
3. There's a new position called "Fill."
4. We're currently asking Duo Queues to cover at least 3 unique positions, to further improve queue times. Duo Queues will still have a higher chance of getting the exact 2 positions they want, but it is not 100% guaranteed.
5. Once you've chosen your positions, we match you into a full team and you enter Champion Select.
6. We've made some changes to how drafting works; however, we'll be talking more about this in a future design blog.
7. During Champ Select, you can still negotiate with your teammates to lane swap or trade champs if you want a more favorable match-up just like Champ Select today.
8. Once drafting is done, your team enters the game.

This should greatly reduce queue times for players who usually have to wait for their preferred position to open up.

Thanks, Kotaku.