Dear Riot Games (my thoughts on the position ranking system)

Dear Riot Games,

Hi! I am a player of your game. This fun, competitive game called League of Legends. Now, recently I watched this video you guys posted on YouTube about possible ranked changes that you are going to be testing out. Well, I'm writing you this to say that this whole idea of ranked positioning is completely pointless and will not help the ranked functioning in any way. Here is my view point on how this is.

I am a top lane main. I focus most of my time into playing the top lane. I feel most comfortable in the top lane and I try to abuse my experience as a top laner to win matches and play to the best of my ability to be able to climb in ranked as a PLAYER. In the end, I do not care if I am top lane. My position shouldn't matter as to how good I am as a player overall and I want that to be reflected in my rank. Although, I am only silver. Big freaking deal. This guy isn't good at the game anyway, and he almost always plays one position so what does it matter to him? It matters because, as I mentioned before, I do not care if I am top. Meaning I do not care what position I am at all. I am still going to play to the best of my ability to win the game because in the end that is what will make me climb (and I know that this ideal does not apply to all players like ones that feed to end matches sooner to get to their main role if autofilled). I don't want to only climb in one position (yes, I know that there is LP splash for other positions, but I am not factoring in that feature since it's not something I honestly care about), I want to climb as a player as a whole. I want to be able to play any position I am set at with players of the same level as my knowledge of the game. Not getting autofilled into a role that I don't play as often and either destroy lower tier players that are on the enemy team, or get destroyed since I have a lower tier teammate that ends up feeding to someone on their team that is in a higher tier of their role and have a better understanding of the game (position not mattering especially since position swapping in select is a thing). I don't care how people see how good I am as a top laner. I want people to see how good I am as a PLAYER, whether I am the type of player that can play any position or if I am a one trick position/champion player. Pants Are Dragon made a video on this system and discussed how it would ultimately be bad for him since he is a good autofill player that has something for every position, meaning it would take players like him MUCH longer to climb, because again it's not a matter on the position you play, it's a matter on how good you are as a player, and that's how the current ranked system reflects you. And you best believe that Pants Are Dragon is REALLY good player as a whole. Anyone can just look up your profile to determine how well you do in a role or position just by looking at your match history especially considering most players focus on one role in general to begin with.

For the people that one trick a role or champion, the splash LP into other roles does not matter to them because they want to climb with their main role and want to play the role that they like the most making it just like it was before. Playing the same role and climbing with that role. Only now people get to see that they only play that role. The LP splash is literally just an extra bonus that they don't really deserve because they didn't contribute anything to that role to earn LP for it. Let's say someone one tricks jungle and the get a lot of points for climbing in jungle while ONLY playing jungle besides maybe getting autofilled. Meanwhile, they are still climbing other rolls they do not play. So they only have that one high ELO role while the rest are really low ELO because they never play them at all. And then if they get filled into an off role, someone that is good enough to be in a high ELO at all should have enough game knowledge to be able to stomp just about everyone making the game unfair for the other team, even if the other team also has a high ELO player in an off role that can destroy the other players. In the end it would just be a race for which of those players is going to get fed before the other and be able to shut the other one down.

So, as you said in your video you aren't afraid to dial things back in case things don't work out, and I am telling your right now that they won't. Just like how Nintendo get nagged on about how easy their games are and they only ever keep putting out these easy games, not helping their position in that aspect at all, I'm sure you are aware of how the League player base nags on you guys on what they view to be stupid changes, getting mad over every little thing and putting up all caps heated posts that have no rational sense to them. I am not trying to be toxic when I am saying this, but this is one of those times. This, at its core, is a pointless and stupid change, not to mention a BIG change. There's a saying that goes "if it ain't broke, don't fix it". Can't really apply it here because ranked still has it's issues. So I'm going to say this, "if it functions well enough on its own, don't mess with it and end up making it worse". The best thing to do is keep the ranked system as it is. Yes, it's not the greatest system in the world and it still has its issues, but in the end it still does what it's supposed to (most of the time). Changing it to position rankings literally offers no real benefits and ends up hurting more players than it does helping them all the while it causes even more confusion with match making in general. I hope you actually read this and take these thoughts into consideration. To Riot and to anyone else that reads this, I'd love to read your thoughts on this matter so please put them in the comments below.

Sincerely, Talon Gerrard