LoL in-house team balance — splitting teams without an argument

• Captains draft: two people pick alternately. Fast and fun, but the last picks feel it.
• Random: easy and unarguable, and regularly produces a 4-1 stomp.
• By rating: split so both sides look even on paper. Needs data or at least honest self-reporting.

Most groups end up cycling through all three. The reason is that each one is good at something different — captains for atmosphere, random for speed, rating for actually close games.

A Diamond mid who never plays support is not a Diamond support. Rank tells you a ceiling, not what happens when they get put somewhere they never play.

That's why a split should look at role as well as rank. Two evenly ranked teams can still be a blowout if one side is playing their mains and the other is filling.

• Ask for two or three playable roles per person, in order — not just their main.
• Rotate who fills. The same person soaking support every week quietly stops showing up.
• If two people insist on the same role, put them on opposite teams and let them play it.

Once you have a few nights recorded, the most useful signal isn't anyone's solo queue rank — it's how games went inside your group. Some players are far better in a five-stack than their rank suggests, and some are worse.

ONNJ's AI Team Builder uses exactly that: role preferences plus a rating computed from your group's own games, arranged so both sides' expected win rate sits near 50%.

It will sometimes. Ten people is a small sample and one bad game doesn't mean the split was wrong. Swap two players between teams and run it back rather than redrafting from scratch — it keeps the night moving.

Locking a role for a specific player and re-rolling the rest is usually enough to fix a bad-feeling split.