First, we agree with the community that holding champion select hostage isn’t an acceptable thing for players to do. Being able to choose your position isn’t a guarantee that you’ll get your primary selection every time — we need all players to take their turn playing other positions either via secondary choice or autofill so the system can get people into a game in a reasonable amount of time.  This obviously works best when people lean into the role they’re assigned and try to do the best they can.

We don’t have immediate plans to address champ select trolls, but we are closely monitoring autofill behavior and dodge rates and will adjust our priorities if needed. One of the common requests we hear about is vote-kick, vote-to-leave, or similar systems. We’re unlikely to do this because they are too easy to game, promote conflict within champion select, and could punish players who don’t want to pick the FOTM/OP/counter to the enemy lane (we’ve all seen a negative player say something like, “Camille gg” in champ select and would rather not allow mentalities like that to have undue influence on the champions players choose).

Instead, we’re more likely to make a system that lets you give us feedback after you dodge on why you didn’t want to play that game. It may be that a particular person was acting poorly, maybe you just didn’t like the team comp and wanted a do-over, or maybe you wanted to go make a sandwich! Feedback like this could help us spot dodge trends, which could then lead to new features or solutions around those trends. Player Behavior has a few high-priority things on its plate at the moment, but this is definitely something we want to circle back on.

In the meantime, you’re still able to report players who are assigned a role but refuse to play it in-game, since the expectation is that players will at least try their best.

We committed to bi-annual IP sales when Chromas re-launched last year, and we’re planning to stick to it (we’ll have two this year). With the re-launch in the back half of the year, there was only time for one IP sale in 2016. But the plan for two in 2017 is still in effect, and we’ll have updates on the first run relatively soon. Exact dates aren’t locked, but we’re aiming for the first IP sale of 2017 to occur in spring.

This one is a bit more complex than it seems at first glance. It might look like just an asset swap for the art (take one thing out, drop another thing in), but there’s actually some underlying level scripts, foundation work, etc. that was forked from regular ARAM. This means that Butcher’s Bridge is a unique beast from the code’s point-of-view, even if it looks the same from a player point-of-view.

Bringing it to parity with today’s ARAM (allowing it to be switched on) would require a non-trivial amount of work, and while we’d love to do that, we have to weigh it against the other stuff we’re currently working on, like new game modes and Practice Tool. This isn’t to say Butcher’s Bridge will never return, just that we’re currently more focused on other development priorities.