Vainglory Forums

Does anyone else get kinda pi**ed when people insta lock in at the beginning of the hero selection? I like to play casual alot, just for fun, but it takes that part out of it when some selfish prick can either play as 1 character or thinks they can do a better job instead of picking and waiting to see what others wanna do and then come up with a team from there. Sorry for the rant, but i seriously cant be the only one... it happens almost every game.

Here's the thing about insta-locking...

The reality is many players use casual to practice and just screw around. Personally I couldn't care less about winning or losing when I play casual, in fact that's why I play casual. To relax and have fun.

As I said casual is often used for practicing new builds, or new characters. When I new character is released I insta-lock the hell out of that character because I'm trying to learn the character and create builds for the guide I will inevitably write for that character. In these types of situations I'm looking to practice a specific character, not worry about composition. In fact I even use such challenges to see if I can make the character I'm practicing fit in a different role.

In theory it should work the way you say. Everyone soft picks their roles and characters and then they work towards a good comp. that's the fantasy. The reality is if you soft pick a character there have been many times for me personally, where not only did someone pick the role I requested, but they insta-locked the character I had soft picked. So there is a bit of "if you don't pick it quickly someone will steal it from you".

Hell, admittedly I've accidentally been that jerk. There was one time where my teammates had soft picked into a CP jungle, and a Roam, so I needed to go WP lane - probably my weakest role (I can cp lane all day, not good with many WP laners), so I was so focused on figuring out who I could WP lane with, so I picked Kestrel and locked in. I didn't notice that the jungler had soft picked Kestrel as the CP jungle. Oops.

I wish VG would make character select like Smite, where if a character is soft picked no one else can select it. That really allows soft picking to build a team without worrying about your character being stolen.

Finally, I'll say that a lot of players, even some of the better players, don't have a full understanding of which characters synergize well with other characters. That's truly an art all in itself. So waiting for players to soft pick so you can build synergy isn't likely going to happen in solo queue very often. They are going to pick who they are best with.