The League of Legends news site Surrender at 20 also has a comprehensive breakdown of the new feature.

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Essentially, the way that Riot changed things is they finally gave you the option to select two preferred positions before you even queue up to be matched with other players. You can also pick “fill” if you’re willing to play any position on a team.

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This makes it so the entire team is already assembled, position-wise, before the champion select even truly begins. There’s also a cool little CNN-style diagram of the map to show where everyone’s going:

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Then, and only then, you and your few teammates can select the champions you all want to play:

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This is not the same thing as locking in. Rather, it displays your preferences prior to the picking and banning process.

After that, you go into the ban phase. The bottom three players on each team get to choose a ban, one per player. Previously, only the team captain was allowed to ban all three champions, so this gives more of the team a voice in the banning process.

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Then after all that is done, you get to choose your official champion selection for the oncoming game.

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Obviously, this system isn’t airtight when it comes to making everyone happy. The reason one of my teammates started calling me an idiot in one team building phase, for instance, was because I had selected a ranged champion named Graves to play on bottom lane, but he wanted to play him in the jungle. Teammates wanting to choose the same champion will undoubtedly still be an issue, and in this future system the arguments will be more pointed—people going back and forth about whether Graves is better as a jungler, top or bot laner, and so forth.

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But, still: it’s a whole lot better than what we have right now! Hopefully it’ll be coming into the main game soon.