New League champions might be disabled in ranked play after release

Players are rushing to play new champions in competitive with no experience on their release and it’s causing problems to other players—and Riot is listening.

Riot is looking for a way to disable new champions in ranked play after their release, in order to limit the amount of people rushing into the competitive environment to test out their unpolished skills, the company said in a recent journal post.

There’s an alternative option Riot are looking at where you would need to play at least one game of the champion out of ranked play before they can pick them in ranked. This would give players at least some time to play the champion in another environment, to get an idea of how to play them before rushing into ranked.

League devs sympathize with this basic problem a lot of players face in ranked after new champion releases. Players have taken it upon themselves to try and fix the problem by banning these champions themselves in the draft phase.

This has negative effects, however, as the player is choosing to use one of their precious bans on a new champion, when they could be using it on a stronger one, like Rumble, who the enemy team could easily pick up instead.