Personally.. I don't really care if they keep or drop blind pick.. Since I just run in a circle till someone wins anyways.. Doesn't really change anything for me.. I am just happy it doesn't make the SCS take longer..
I'm so sorry... I didn't choose squids, they do their own choices. Yes.
I actually think that blind picking is more competitive than counter picking.
This way it encourages competitive pilots/captains to research who they're going to be up against. Watch previous streams and make not of the most used builds, play a psychological warfare game where you have to judge what build your opponent would bring, which does give you a high chance of hard countering the team you're observing. Equally, teams renowned for bringing recognisable ships can use this to their tactical advantage, they will know their regular builds biggest weaknesses, assume their enemies intend to counter this weakness and counter their weakness with something else.
Well actually no. The comp scene is sooo huge you totally can't expect Daniel to bring a mobula or Keb to bring a squid. You have to watch previous streams a thousand times to be really sure...
So you can safely assume that either mobula or hwachafish will work and of course that the second enemy ship is going for your first ship hardcounter. In fact, you don't really have to think about the second ship in the lobby, unless you intend to hardcounter first enemy. Whatever.
And I forgot, you can't really bring very situational ships as the first choice. Because you'll end up flying a kill squid against two hwachafish. Lobbies of Icarus counterattack on a new brand level.
Thus adding to the time and effort required of the competitive player, as opposed to now where people can just keep playing counter game until the other accepts the counter. But honestly of all the matches I've been involved in, hard countering and counter of Icarus was a rare occurrence.
Really? I found it far more annoying than current two stage blindpicks. Teams waking up a minute or less before the timeout and deciding to take the hardestest hardcounter possible don't make me happy I'm afraid. Lobbies like that end up in fascinating matches that take forever because I always love to fly double lumberjack galleon and together with hwachafish it's such a good ship combination.
Also do realise that hard countering is a very... doubtful... virtue. Many teams were aiming for that.
Often it ended up in a situation with one team being hardcountered and of course perfectly happy with that fact. Of course.
Often it enforced the other team to change their ships combination and that's annoying when you feel like flying something entertaining and you just can't because you got hardcountered. And if you change the ship you might get hardcountered again. On the other hand it requires some dedication to take an 'entertaining' ship with blindpicks enforcing more meta versatile loadouts.
Now, the blindpicks system makes hardcountering fully legal and fair so it solves that huge countering problem. And sending the loadouts to the ref was not particularly exhausting. Also it makes ship choices easier to make and lobby is less hectic in general. Possible adjustments to the second ship don't take half the time that thinking about both ships and enemy possibly reacting to them take. That's a huge success, too.
Despite the dominance in few previous scses Team Predators were unable to unleash their fury on their opponents...It was because they lost the lobby game. At least two times in a row. And in my opinion it's not the system's fault. It's because if the enemy can bring loadouts that hardcounter your one and only ships combination then seeing that loadout won't help you. If that's not the issue, and I know that's not the issue, do play the lobby game smarter.
All in all, I think this two stage blindpicks system is rather nice because it both solves the ungentlemanly hard countering problem that tended to drive many people insane and reduces the lobby time issue. And that's more than the cons which are awful amount of metabuilds we're about to see and adding complexity to the lobby game.
I'm not sure what impact it's going to have on teams playing style diversity though.