My experience with Teamfind so far...
League remains one of my favorite games, and every 6 months or so, I look for new ways to find community in the game. Because "community" and "League of Legends" in the same sentence is a bit of a joke. Every MOBA for that matter. Match-making where you never see the player ever again is not "community" from the player's point of view. It's all random. Naturally, players often treat other players as though they are just the in-game champion. Because they are. You'll never see that player again unless you and they actively try to connect again.
The only social feature in the game is instant messaging (specifically, XMPP). Sure, you can join chat rooms, but you are only going to find those rooms from out-of-band communication. You can add friends to your contacts after playing with them, but in general you'll end up firing off a few game invites which get rejected or ignored (most likely because they are afk), and either end up removing them or enjoying your collection of unused contacts.
Digression: I managed to make friends in game in exactly one case since 2011, but that was because my summoner name is a conversation starter.
League of Legends is seriously missing a guild-like or team-building feature. Have a great match? What if everyone voted to play again together? I've tried it (through friend requests), and often the second game falls apart fast, but it's an interesting idea. The Team Builder is in beta, but we'll have to wait and see if it works. I'm skeptical that it will build sticky teams, but I am optimistic that it will improve solo play.
I've uncovered a few guilds through tumblr and Google searching, but I found most guilds to be inactive throughout most of the week and those who get something up and running have to deal with a lot of trolls. Getting past the trolls, people would get too caught up in "What League are you in?" instead of focusing on teamwork. There's something about the MOBA genre that makes people take themselves too seriously.
There's pug.io, which was a weekend project and not very active. It has the neat idea that you can find a time to play and send a public low-friction link around to get a pickup group lined up. That means that you'd need enough people in your network in play League and want a set time to play. If you do, you could post the link publicly (or in your status message) and get some people together, but you probably don't have that kind of access to a network of players given the lack of social features in the game.
I saw Teamfind a few weeks ago, and I tried it out this weekend. I'm going to share some "quotes" that I found while looking for other players. I'm not going to use verbatim quotes, because I don't want to identify anyone (and the internet is searchable, you know). Note that I'm talking about player perspectives here, and not about Teamfind itself.
From the player side, two trends stand out to me outside of the base looking-for-group status, both on opposite ends of the spectrum it seems:
"I do not like playing solo queue because of trolls."
"I would like to become a professional League of Legends player. ... Currently I am in Bronze 3."
Players are either frustrated with solo queue (I know I am) or have a dream about being a pro player (even if it's mostly a dream).
Looking at team postings, most are stale. I narrowed down the thousands of team postings down to 30 or so using Teamfind's filters. Many have not been touched in more than a month. I posted messages at the start of the weekend to a few people who've been online recently. Silence. Messaging people in-game works okay, but you have to let them know that you found them on Teamfind or else they might wonder why a random person added them in game.
Here are the trends I see in team postings:
"Our ultimate goal is to be in the LCS."
"We want to make a name for ourselves."
Teams are either non-existent where a player posted a new team and have yet to get one started, or they are very serious about being the best team in the world. Can you make a pro team out of a single want ad? I seriously doubt it (and I'm trying not to laugh out loud, sorry). Get real, please.
Also, a lot of people like playing with Skype. Ugh, skype. The constant noise in the background and idle chat, how can people like this? I strongly prefer push-to-talk. There were not many mentions of voice chat systems, and of those mentioning voice chat, most use raidcall with a few teamspeak mentions. (I mostly use mumble and ventrilo.)
Here's where it breaks down. If you are trying to build your team, you'd do it like you recruit for anything else. Get some players into Normal queue, see if they are a good fit, meet their friends, and see if they are a good fit. Instead, and I can only speak to this as an outsider, it looks like people have extremely high standards and quickly pass on people they meet in Teamfind. Then they get discouraged that they cannot fill their roster, they stop looking, and their team posting gets stale. That's my experience, anyway.
I get it. I'm a casual (but serious) player, and the service attracts to serious players. But the serious players I see are seriously lacking awareness. Listen, you don't have enough access to good players; otherwise you wouldn't be using the service. If you can stop gunning for LCS and enjoy playing with people who take the game seriously enough to have some good matches, soon you'll have access to enough active players to build a roster. Youre first ranked team will not be your last. It takes several iterations and a lot of dedicated resources. Get real about that, and your dreams of LCS glory might actually start making sense. Otherwise, it's all delusion. Go watch a Twitch stream instead.
Summary: My experience with Teamfind has lead to a few fun matches, but clearly player expectations are inflated, so I don't expect much. We shall see.
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