Roles in terms of Map Positions is Naive

Positional queue was a blot on Season 9 and caused one of the greatest upheavals of ranked in history next to the MMR reset of Season 3. The reason for this is because of its premise and its execution, resulting in many people going up the ladder, while consolidating the idea of smurfing, creating a chaotic mess that Riot couldn't fix until they had to artificially force people back down to lower ranks. But I'm not here to argue about ranked. I'm here to argue about the idea of "Roles."

In sports, people are assigned roles for strategic positions on the field. In football, you have your linebackers, your wide receives, your quarterback, and couple of miscellaneous roles, that all exist so create the most optimal offense and defense possible. These roles have changed throughout history, either with an influx of new players or with rule changes. Same for in basketball. When rebounders were becoming more agile, teams adjusted to accomodate for it. This is what we call meta, and roles naturally evolve from the meta.

League of Legends is very anti meta about the way they see roles. I'll explain. The point of positional queues and role assignments before queuing is because to Riot, they believe that people specialize in positions on the map. A top laner is Top, a mid laner is mid, and a bot laner is someone at bot. Then there's a jungler. The problem with this is that all these roles mean nothing in the context of League of Legends. First, there's the logistics problem. Being a top laner doesn't mean anything. In strategic terms, being a top laner could mean that you are good at holding the top lane, good at splitpushing, or good at roaming for top map or mid lane ganking. Mid laners have a greater expansion of options due to their position on the map. They can go anywhere on the map far faster than anyone else, so champion picks adjust for this. Bot lane exists solely for dragon control, which is why most of the team is placed there for strategic reasons. So on the surface, this all seems like it would work as it is. Unfortunately, this runs into what I call a **static **problem.

Unlike in sports, League of Legends, like lots of video games, experience the greatest amount of rule changes. Champ updates, item changes, every patch changes the game rules. As a result, all the underlying meta changes. But unfortunately, positional roles remain, which destroys the concept of positions in the first place. What top lane meant in one patch could mean something different in another. When Black Cleavers were introduced, it changed who could be in top lane and what role top lane became. No longer was top lane about sustain with a beefy champ and scaling into mid game fights. It became an early game fiesta that uprooted everything a top laner was suppose to do. As a result, top laners were forced into jungle. They were no longer top laners by design because of the "playstyle" they play. If football had an update where players could oil themselves up to get past bigger players far easier, the role of a linebacker or defense line would change. He would either no longer be allowed to play or would have to change somewhere else to accomodate for the new strat of bigger guys being easier to get by. This is just a silly example, but highlights what I am getting at.

So you might be asking: "So are you implying that roles should be changed to playstyles like splitpusher, ganker, carry, mage carry, etc?"

My answer is: no. In video games like League, Riot changes the rules of the game way too much for there to ever be a set positional meta. Imagine playing Blackjack and rules changing every two weeks. Strategies could not be developed or seen. Like, "Ace now represents 3 and King in order to lower its power". Those kinds of rule changes make it difficult, if not impossible, to ever main anything. After the adc update, top laners and mid laners became bot laners due to adcs losing power. It's these kinds of changes that concludes the inferiority of Riot's current design about roles. Faker can be a bot laner, top laner, or anything, if the rules favor his champions going into those roles. In way, this could be pushing for more specific champion classes as a role instead, and I wouldn't be against it, but rework and champion updates destroys this concept too: instance, old Sion vs. new one.

Conclusion: League of Legends is near impossible to create player roles. It would be one thing if the game had little change from season 1 to now. A meta would have been developed by then like most real life sports, and the game would be about constantly playing in that ruleset, with minor tweaks. The nature of League being a video game and being ran by a company whose design is based on rule changing every month, is not a stable game for competitive roles. It becomes a circus where you come back each month to play something new, never able to settle into a set ruleset.