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Any intention to promote support/fill in ranked?

Dr Poro··2 votes·441 views

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xwPa1SGLGv0 After watching the recent video discussion about Qynamic queue, I feel that they didn't talk about an important issue that contributes to the shitty timers and matchmaking quality. Having all 5 roles filled more evenly will make the matchmaking and queue times a lot better.

They talked about 'popular roles' (mid) and 'less popular roles' (support), but they didn't talk at all about why those roles are not as popular and how they could be made more attractive. Secondly, there is currently no reason to pick 'fill' in ranked, because it puts you at a competitive disadvantage as you can't be evenly skilled in 5 roles as someone else is in their best 2 roles. More people picking 'fill' would mean a faster match making.

Support Support is obviously where the big lack is. If you pick 'fill', you'll be getting support very often. It's probably very hard to make this role more attractive due to the nature of the role being dependant on your team. However, it might be worth considering creating a new 'big plays' support to help make it more popular. I don't have the statistics, but from my experience, support role became a lot more popular after Thresh's release. This champion, even though average at performance, is still the most popular support. People like him because you can make plays. There are people who pick support because they want to passively assist their team, like soraka or janna (which also take a lot of skill, but aren't very flashy or interactive with the opponent), but a big part of the community prefers champions that interact with the opponent. They want to land skill shots, dodge abilities, kite, faceroll their keyboard, 1v5 (not gonna happen as support).

I think that a support with a dash, a spell shield (sivir) that heals your allies upon soaking an ability and a skill shot as basic abilities would make for a pretty cool support concept. You can add the rest to make it a balanced support, but I would certainly love to play a champion that could soak things for my team, while being mobile and deal some damage, but without the permanent tankiness like Braum. Braum is actually pretty close to what I suggested here, but he's slow and generally clumpsy to play as. In addition, he's just permanently tanky and while his shield makes his even more tanky, it's not that spectacular. Actually, there's still no support at all that has a non-targetted dash. People like to play champs with flash/dash (zed, lucian, kindred, azir), but support only has Braum who has a clumpsy low ranged allied-targeted dash and a few champions with enemy targeting dashes, but no free-style dashes.

Fill Filling is currently horrible. Riot basically forces you to pick 2 roles and commit to them if your dream is to climb as high as possible. While picking a main role was already a strong strategy in climbing in the past, you still had to be decent at all roles (unless you want to queue dodge). Now, I don't want to force others to play all 5 roles, but for me, league has always been the most enjoyable when I have a variation in roles. In soloQ, I would let my team pick their roles, usually calling 'pref top' because I mained wukong, but open to play any other role if someone else mained top as well. Right now, this flexibility is a lost perk. It doesn't matter how good you are at all roles if you can only pick 2. While I would definitely love to pick fill, I feel like I'd just make my own performance less consistent without getting anything in return (and no I don't care about a shorter queue time in ranked while trying to get back to diamond).

Having people pick more than 2 roles would benefit everyone. I think that aside from fill, there should be the option to pick a tertiary and quaternary role. In addition, I think that the matchmaking should adjust for the amount of roles you're playing and have your MMR rewards adjusted accordingly, so that it's fair for everyone (this will need vigilance and fine-tuning).

Another reason why fill is unpopular is because you're almost guaranteed to get support, so you might as well pick support. However, if the issues addressed above get fixed, this one should automatically be fixed because more people picking support and more people picking fill will leave some breathing space for the 'fill' population.

7 Comments

Lost R1 votes

People don't want to be support for one very simple reason. Kills. People want kills. They want ALL the kills. They want enough kills to drown in the bodies, because that's the thing that gets hyped up the most. They don't care about their team, they just want the kills.

The support generally doesn't get kills. Yes, it's possible, but it's not their primary job or outcome. Their primary job is to aid the team through indirect means, and while the effects of their intervention can be MASSIVE, it's not out in the forefront enough to get hyped up over most of the time. I started doing it back when someone who didn't want to be support who got the role meant a permaban due to their grossly negative reaction, and I decided to be the adult in the room and remove that option for people JUST TO HAVE THE CHANCE OF A NORMAL GAME.

On top of this lone wolf mentality throughout League, people also think that teamwork and cooperation is a one-way street, directed only from the support to everyone else and NEVER the other way around or between other players. And any failures is the support intentionally trolling the team, even if the loss is attributed to an ADC who lost their shit over one minion kill or a toplaner going 0/10 before level 6. In that climate, why would you want to be the support?

This is a fault of the community, pure and simple, and short of hyperbuffing the support role until they have Ascended URF Doombot strengths (and even then it's an iffy prospect), all the XxCallofCODFan92xX's out there would rather drink a gallon of bleach than play support for one nanosecond.

That's the state of the game right now, and the game is being buried alive because of it.

BluePolarizer1 votes

I used to be 40% support. Now I am 1% (when I duo). Why?

Simple. I don't want support every game. Queuing as jungle/support, I expected 50/50. Instead it was 10/90. So I just take my chances top instead, even though I am worse at top than support, because at least I get jungle sometimes.

Dr Poro1 votes

Same for me kind of. I used to main top and have supp as secondary, mainly because that was most often the role that needed to be filled. However, if I'd pick support now, I'd get that role almost every time, while I'm still better at top. So I instead pick jungle now.

Dr Poro1 votes

What you say is true. Support will probably never be as popular as a carry role because of KILLS. However, there are things that Riot could do to make the gap a bit smaller. For example, add more statistics that show how well a support played like 'amount of shield damage absorpted', amount of seconds slowed, amount of seconds Hard CCed. Right now it's just damage and healing done. But a big portion of supports don't do those things and feel like there is little statistics to value your performance on other than assists which is greatly dependant on your team's performance as a whole, same for your champion grade.

Lost R1 votes

I feel that it's unnecessarily pandering to people who won't give a crap about those stats. The XxCallofCODFan92xX's out there want kills, and giving a stat for how many seconds total you stunned/slowed/charmed/knocked up/polymorphed the enemy doesn't matter for the people who don't and won't pay attention to anything that isn't kills (and it'd be difficult to keep track of, the way crowd control stacks on top of each other).

Dr Poro1 votes

Yes, but not everyone or not 90% of the players are COD fans. I for example don't care about kills, just wins and plays. However, in the current situation, I'm not queuing up as support, even though I wouldn't mind at all to play support 20-40% of the time. I'm just not willingly putting myself into that disadvantage (as support isn't my primary role).

dim2a1 votes

I don't care much about kills. But I find support not as interesting because you're sooo reliant on your adc. So i think whoever said people don't like support because people like kills is mostly wrong (tank top mains is another example. Not sup, but no kills).

I used to be jg main sup secondary. It worked for me, since most of the time I'd play my favorite role (jg), but if needed I could sup. And teammates knew not to expect sup main level skill from me. I can not do that in DQ -- for one, I would get sup all the time (and I don't like it enough to play it all the time). And secondly, since sup is played by sup mains almost exclusively, supports got much better, so queueing for it as not sup main feels worse.

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