Nobody wants to play support. It has been 7 seasons and still no one wants to play it because its incredibly boring and unfulfilling. Just delete it. This season and the previous are incredibly bad because whoever has more autofilled teammates loses. But its much better to ruin the integrity of games then to fix the problem properly right?
Umbral Regent3 votesHow exactly is removing the Support role entirely going to fix anything? Even if Autofill is a band-aid solution to the problem, removing Support outright would be trying to fix a paper cut by chopping off a limb.
specter4242 votesNo its not. No one likes playing support so they have to force people into it for shorter queue times. It ruins the game.
Fine Ionian Silk4 votesNo its not. No one likes playing support so they have to force people into it for shorter queue times. It ruins the game.
I have become a nobody... how glorious.
Umbral Regent1 votesWell, let's do a bit of hypothetical thinking here.
Let's say we do remove the Support role entirely. Sure, we'll still have Support Champions, but they'll effectively fall off into a niche that shows up in, say, 20% of games altogether. Now, instead of Support, we just have Bottom lane 1 and Bottom lane 2. Hypothetically, this'll just be two people who want to be the carry, they'll fight for higher scores than the other, fight for creep score, kill claiming, and so on, and will generally fail because neither will be doing good because there's so much conflict.
And what does conflict breed between teammates? Toxicity.
Do you really want two random players who aren't part of a bottom lane duo queue to spend the entire 30-40 minutes cursing each other out because they both want to be the KDA/CS MVPs?
And this is just in a very narrow scope of cause-and-effect. This is just for Bottom Lane alone. Let's take a look at how this would affect the team as a whole, now.
So, no Support = no guaranteed healers and no guaranteed vanguards. Y'know what makes up the Support Role? CC Tanks and Healers and/or Disruptors. Sure, you could argue "well there's champions like Nidalee, Kayle, etc.", but who really plays those champions nowadays? Nidalee's seen trouble in the jungle changes lately and Kayle's seldom picked because of her mechanical simplicity and ease of being countered.
So, your average team comp is going to be champions with abilities that either focus on themselves, or their enemies. Lots of lightweights (mages, marksmen, the occasional diver/bruiser/tank/juggernaut) - this puts a lot of stress on Jungle and Top lane because now, to fill in the gap of Support, they have to play tankier champions with no thorough sustain since nobody's inclined to play healers.
And, guess what? No Supports means your team will generally fall flat in teamfights, unless you have some supreme coordination. No Support means many, many more losses on the larger scale.
But yeah, sure, let's rip on the Support role and the fact that nobody likes it.
Oh, but wait! I'm not done yet. You're saying that Autofill is a band-aid solution to the Support "problem" - it isn't. Autofill is not a band-aid solution by any means. It's a solution to a broad problem in League of Legends, which is - people having an exclusive disposition to a single role and getting annoyed when they get anything different. It's a problem that was revealed when Riot put out their most recent iteration of Draft Pick queue, after Team Builder. Having to pick two roles frustrated a lot of people.
Hell, it even frustrated me because, as it was, everyone at the time wanted to play mid, and eighty percent of the games I wanted to play mid, I had to settle for top lane, ADC, or Jungle. But, I was willing to accept that getting mid lane was going to be few and far between - sometimes interspersed with people queue-dodging and dropping me back in those other unwanted lanes.
And, with that in mind, Autofill is a solution two-fold. Players have a chance of being autofilled into any position, not exclusively Support. Yes, you're much more likely to get Support, but autofill is there to fill in the gaps of regular matchmaking. On top of that, although less overt, is the fact that it can also help players ease into the role they want to get, or the role they're proficient in, even without having it as their selected role.
So, with the knowledge that removing Support would cause a ton of problems and that Autofill is actually a lot more help than harm (although it's pretty close to 50:50), I am still staunchly against your ill-thought out suggestion. If you even bothered to think it out any, that is.
Quepha2 votesAutofill is actually a really good long-term solution and players just need to get used to a little concept called "taking turns"
Yours is actually the band-aid solution as it would just move the bottlenecked role to something else eventually as it's incredibly unlikely to make the remaining four roles all perfectly equal in appeal.