Concerning the new ranked set up coming next season...
So, I'm sure all of you remember the announcement from not too long ago explaining how ranked will be changing next season.
If you have no idea of what I'm talking about, here is the announcement:
https://nexus.leagueoflegends.com/en-us/2018/04/dev-updates-to-ranked-for-2019/
Now, don't get me wrong, everything said in this dev blog is fantastic, and I support all of it 100%. However, over the weeks, I have noticed just one problem crop up that this new system brings about: switching roles.
Now, a VERY large portion of the playerbase really, really does not like autofill, and for good reason. The client is automatically putting you or a teammate in a position that you or they are not comfortable in. This leads to games to where you would perform worse, and possibly even lose, against possibly having a good chance at winning had you been in your normal position.
This new ranked system kind of fixes that, since each role will have a unique rank attributed to it. You could be Platinum level jungler, but your ADC is bad enough to where it's hard stuck Silver. This new ranking system makes it to where you don't have to worry about being autofilled, because even if you are placed in your worst position, you will still be going against players of an equal skill level.
But then you run into the problem of people that despise a certain role, or only plays one role, and always asks to get a different role whenever they are not in the role they ask for. Now, not all the time do they get the role they want, some people just won't switch roles, but there still are plenty of times when someone is generous enough to switch roles, and let the one person get the role they asked for.
When this happens in the new ranked system, it is, in a way, intentionally making smurfs. Say the person who asked for switched roles gets placed in the role they are worst at, and thus gets placed in a much lower tier than their main role (like a Plat ADC, being placed in a silver game because his top lane is silver tier). When the game starts, that player will absolutely annihilate everyone in their path, since they are playing at such a higher level than everyone else in that game.
Now, in the dev blog, Riot did say that they are already looking at solutions for such a thing:
"We’re solving a number of other edge cases like these, including position swapping in champion select or in game, and we’ll talk more about our solutions for those in future updates."
That being said, I really only see 1 true solution for this particular problem, and that is removing autofill entirely. It's simple....people will not switch roles when they are placed in a role that they asked for (unless you're one of those assholes that asks for a specific role after putting in "fill"). Unfortunately, this causes a problem at higher tiers, specifically challenger and master tier. The queue times can be so ridiculously high up there, that people can be waiting for a game for nearly 20 minutes.....it's just how it works. Autofill helps correct that, by cutting queue times nearly in half. So, I'm sure it's quite evident that higher tiers simply need autofill.
That said, Riot already has something possibly in the works that could help with this:
Master and Challenger are a little bit trickier. Those players don’t get their primary position as often, and it’s important for the integrity of the ladder that every game they play counts toward deciding whether they’re the best. Our current thinking is that once a player reaches Master tier, all their games will count toward a single rank, similar to today. If that player is demoted, their individual position ranks will be displayed again. We’ll continue to evaluate whether this makes sense and adjust as appropriate.
Once the ranked changes go live, the positional placement will likely only be active for Diamond and below. Master and Challenger will likely still have only 1 tier for all of the player's positions.
With that, the solution becomes quite simple.......remove autofill entirely for Diamond and below, but keep it for Master and Challenger tiers. You're essentially killing 2 birds with 1 stone! You are removing the "intentional smurf" problem of people switching roles, while also keeping queue times for Master/Challenger down to where they are now.
That's just my 2 cents on the subject. Feel free to share your own!
