Riot Games has updated League of Legends‘ champion select system with a hard restriction, preventing players from banning any champion currently hovered by a teammate. The change removes a long-time griefing tactic, but it also creates new strategic headaches in draft.
In its last League of Legends update for 2025, which hit the scene earlier this week, Riot revealed that it will be moving forward with a change to champion selection. The new patch will block players from banning champions while a player is hovering over them, meaning that players with their heart set on a certain character are less likely to have their hopes changed.
In League, players can ban certain champions from a team comp, which will also disallow their rival team from using that same character. However, this can lead to griefing and ‘revenge bans’, as players intentionally ban a character a teammate is hovering over and about to select to purposefully cause upset.
This issue, in part, has been relegated to the past with these new patch notes, as now a champion cannot be banned while it is being hovered over by an ally. In Riot’s statement on the matter, it writes that “After a successful pilot and positive player feedback following the introduction of disallowing champions allies hover from being banned as well as faster champion select timings, we’re fully releasing both updates.”
This latest League of Legends change is seeing generally positive reception, with many players happy to be rid of this bugbear. Most of the fans celebrating the decision saw a notable reduction in destructive play only about a day after the patch was rolled out.
One-tricks and off-meta players stand to benefit the most. Players running Yuumi jungle, Teemo support, or other unconventional picks can now hover freely without teammates banning their champion out of spite or ‘for the good of the team’. Previously, many one-tricks avoided hovering altogether to protect their mains from ally bans.
On the other hand, some are nervous due to the issue of new champion releases. Riot releases new champions directly into ranked to gather balance data from serious matches, but many competitive players don’t want to deal with these experimental classes. With hover protection, though, new champions, who may be over or underpowered, are likely to run rampant in competitive play.
The change shows that Riot is still trying to cut down on toxicity that starts before the match begins. The developer has previously added role queue, autofill protection, and various warning systems to cut down on pre-game conflicts. This update keeps pushing in that direction—protecting team mental health at the cost of player choice.
