I’ve seen many posts about how more and more people are withdrawing from playing mid and, as a mid player myself, I want to pitch in on partly why I think that is.

Other reasons like action moving to side lanes because of portals and rosh pits locations aside, the biggest thing that made mid less fun for me is the All Pick rework. The 1vs1 nature of mid makes hero matchups very important and having to always blind pick your hero removes all the fun out of it, replacing it with RNG.

As a remainder, All Pick used to have teams picking heroes one by one, not 2 -> 2 -> 1 simultaneously, which gave ample opportunity to leverage matchup understanding and more diverse hero pools. Meta back then was to last pick mid instead of carry like it is nowadays but that doesn’t matter much IMO. Either way, you’d have games where you would pick after enemy mid, getting an opportunity to counter them, and games where you’d need to think about getting countered yourself.

Back then having this ability to pick a favourable matchup was constantly driving me to expand my hero pool and experiment with builds. It allowed one to be rewarded for keeping specialist heroes in the pool where nowadays blind picking anything but the cookie-cutter meta mids just feels like griefing yourself.

I remember people crying about how 2nd pick had an advantage (which I suppose is true) but for me it was definitively more fun. First pick was the time to leverage the “unbeatable” heroes of the patch while second pick allowed me to play my favourite off-meta heroes in favourable match ups or go all in on destroying enemy mid with a counter/cheese pick.

Even a compromise where heroes are still picked simultaneously, because I agree that last counter pick carry is probably too strong in the current meta, but one by one and not in pairs would be more interesting and allow for more variety in drafts.

Naturally, this applies to other roles as well (e.g. being able to counter enemy 5 as a 4 was a cool way to offset enemy 1 picking after your 3).

Thoughts?

TLDR: Bring back old All Pick!