Last week Riot Games introduced the League of Legends Team Builder which was to be launched on the PBE server. This evening the system has been pushed live for players to test out.
The Team Builder is what Riot hopes to be a more eeffective way of matchmaking teams and it’s to be trialed at specified time frames over the next few days. Jeffrey “RiotLyte” Lin posted:
“Team Builder’s coming to PBE today! From 1 – 5pm PST over the next three days (Oct. 25th – 27th), select PBE testers will be able to try out this new feature and give us invaluable feedback on its design and functionality.
“I’m excited to get your hands on Team Builder for the first time, but we’re trying something very different with this PBE Release. Team Builder is a complete re-design of Champion Select, which means it’s complicated and there are a lot of changes. One of our goals is to collaborate with players on this feature, and collect feedback throughout the development process.”
The post continues with an explanation of how it will affect players and explains what they want to achieve during this testing period. In principle the changes make a lot of sense and with any luck it will improve game balancing for players.
What does this mean for players?
- As players, you’ll be able to help us test the feature extremely early in the process, and work directly with developers to evolve the feature over time.
- PBE is a smaller server, so queue times will be longer, and gameplay experiences will not represent a Live server. Matches might be very unbalanced as players of all skill levels will appear in the same match, but our focus is on testing the feature and collecting your feedback.
- Many features will be Work-In-Progress (WIP) or not working in Team Builder, for example:
- Currently turned off or incomplete:
- Skin Selection
- Role Selection
- Currently, we’re only testing Position Selection and the “Any Role” option
- Friend Invites from Friends List
- Match Found Ceremony
- Dynamic Matchmaking Adjustments
- Estimated Wait Times
- Anti-Abuse System
- Currently turned off or incomplete:
How often will there be PBE tests for Team Builder?
- We don’t have a fixed timeline, and it will depend on the feedback we collect in the tests. We’d like to host a PBE test with players once every few weeks.
How do I get involved and help make Team Builder awesome?
- VonBurgermeister has a thread here that has instructions for what types of testing we’re focused on for Team Builder this round.
- RiotDoctahWayne has a thread here that will be collecting information on bugs you’ve found in Team Builder.
- Post general comments and game design questions in this thread!
To participate in future beta testing for League of Legends, apply for beta access here.
