Good one

This change is so good that it made me create a thread for it; I'm not sure how often it happened to you, but in many of my matches I've encountered players that were AFK in the picking phase, thus getting a random hero that didn't fit into the line-up at all, making the game way harder than it should have been. Sometimes the player keeps being AFK even after he gets a random hero, so this change is really, really good, at least in my opinion.

What do you think, was it a necessary change or is it too severe?

Nearly fell a victim to that today - I remembered I was in a game 20 seconds before the clock started.

Good think I firstpick every game.

Hell yeah it's a good idea. It's just consistency. The last player to pick is already not allowed to random, so it's only normal that the game can't random for him.

Hell if it were me I'd remove the random button from the game completely and replace it by "random carry", "random support" and "random midlaner" buttons.

Besides if a player is completely AFK during the picking stage there's a high chance he'll either be AFK later as well or at the very least has a garbage connection. So quitting that game altogether is a good thing for everyone.

Finally the frog is doing commom sense, now he just needs to ban peruvians from my server

Agreed, tough titties to anyone who falls foul of this. OK it's possible to be super-unlucky with a disconnect, but 99% of the time this happens for other reasons.

Terrible last picks and enforced randoms have ruined many games before they really started.

Agreed