Lately, I’ve been playing a lot of Summoner’s Rift games, because I’ve been swayed by the appeal of champion mastery, and the desire to get my favorite champions to a maximum level of “mastery.” Ultimately, my desire to “master” Jinx, because she’s one of my favorite champions, and my preferred role in the game is to be an AD carry.
I’ve avoided blind pick and draft modes, because there’s no surefire way to guarantee that I’ll get to play Jinx when I want to play Jinx, so I’ve been playing a lot of Team Builder, so that I can lock in Jinx, and it’ll pair me/fill me into a team that can accommodate. Playing Team Builder is pretty much the worst mode on the planet.
I’ve lost way more games than I’ve won while in Team Builder. And the nature of champion mastery is basically along the lines of “win and get like 10,000 experience points towards the champion, lose and you get like 42.” Regardless of how you do as an individual, the amount of points you get rests primarily on whether you win the game or not; like earlier on the day, I had a game, where I went 9/4/11 with Jinx, was easily the most useful player on the team, but on account of my team’s inability to win, I got 35 mastery points. The opposing AD carry who I killed six times, and a vastly less glowing KDA score, probably got like 4,235 mastery points, because they were carried to victory by an Ekko player who was vastly superior to my team’s inevitable Ekko player.
And that’s just part of the problem with Team Builder; it’s advertised as a mode that people should utilize to be able to try new champions, new roles and new ideas out, but the issue is that there are some people that use it as such, but then there are lots of other people like myself that want to be able to play the exact champion and role they want to play, and therefore, there’s a lot of room for difference in abilities between players on one team versus the players on the other team.
I may queue up with a maximum level Ekko player on my team, but someone who primarily plays top lane has decided to start doing some support play, and brings the rest of the team down with their inexperience; meanwhile, on the other team, is a pre-made five-person team where everyone is playing their preferred champions and roles, and they’re also colossal douchebags for when they begin running away with the game they inevitably win.
It’s not really a breeding ground for fairly equal competition, and that just leads to the mode sucking.
The bottom line is that Riot is trying their hardest to create equal competitive gaming, but it almost seems like an impossible task, because there are so many people that just want to win every game without competition that they’ll exploit whatever they can in order to make victories happen easier. In no way is Team Builder an efficient mode in order for me to reach my own personal goals, and frankly I see no more reason to even keep playing it.
