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Two Hidden Costs of Autofill Harming The Ranked Experience

Jaiimz··10 votes·4,875 views

I think this is my first post but I really feel this topic needs to be addressed in detail. I tried to be as concise as possible without missing crucial elements and opportunity to provide solutions.

It is immediately apparent to anyone playing ranked that the autofill feature does reduce the queue timers. For a lot of people who aren't as competitive or have less time(if you only have time for a single game then you aren't really committed to the game in the first place but this still effects your experience either directly or indirectly) this may save them a minute or 3 even. There are two major hidden costs that has been hurting the ranked experience and actually making it more frustrating and time consuming than before autofill was introduced. Before anyone jumps in to say this is rare, I experience this trolling in champ select EVERY day. I don't remember the last day I didn't dodge at least two games from absolute trolls. I used to not dodge but then I analysed the lost games where someone would ragequit and the examples mentioned later on come from these experiences. Disclaimer All of this only applies to ranked. Please go to normals to try those new champs and roles, it's ok!

  1. I don't want to dodge but it's just not worth the time in game where you're not playing the role/champ you want to/are good at in a competitive mode or have several teammates who have been autofilled.
  2. Similarly, winning games with multiple autofilled opponents is far less satisfying. Here I think it takes away some of the integrity of the ranked ladder setting as a competitive environment.

Note: Prior to autofill I would only dodge on the VERY rare occasion that someone straight up stole my position so I never had any issues with the queue times, whether it was 2minutes or 7minutes, once the accept button came up I knew we should be ready to play some LoL! eg last pick played decides they will going the same role with another player and suddenly we have no jungler or they even said they're going to run it down or something(int)

There are two hidden costs

  1. The ACTUAL time it takes to get into a RANKED game which isn't an instaloss. Due to being autofilled or multiple teammates being autofilled which is very, very common(or they are literally trolling and decided to first time a champ in ranked) there are many champ selects which are dodged either by myself or teammates because we don't want to play a competitive game where 2-4 members have no idea what they are doing and we're locked in for 15minutes minimum and odds strongly against (who can carry if 2-4 players don't know their role or abilities AT ALL?).

The higher rank you go the more often you will enter a lobby where you have a good idea who the enemy players are from the previous game, so knowing you have 2 autofills and 2 first timers and the enemy team has duo smurfs/solid-main-role players from previous game/lobby is an obvious dodge.

2 Reduction of INTEGRITY in RANKED games which occurs when rng is inconsistently applied. Which role is going pull players today? Is it top lane? Support? Some players get autofilled more simply because of their chosen roles and they are not aware of it while others are more fortunate to get autofilled into roles they actually play/want to play.

If the idea is to reduce queue times to reduce time spent not playing the game, I think it should not taken away from MEANINGFUL game time, that is a professional mid laner should be able to practice mid consistently when he wants to practice mid lane. So should the player in silver who is really enjoying mid lane/practicing a synergy with their duo friend who is a jungler. If the game tells you your roles are high in demand at least you can decide whether or not you want to wait the x minutes or perhaps just change role/mode for a shorter queue if necessary/load up some youtube. The better you want to get/play well it is more likely you will want to specialise more like becoming more of a mid laner or adc so getting autofilled effectively denies you your specialised practice.

Bottom line

  • I read that autofill reduces the time per INVIDIVUAL QUEUE by 2/3rds, however if you take into account the dodges resulting from garbage autofilled teams you end up with a much longer time queueing up.
  • Results of dodges lead to a cycle of mutiple champion select lobbies and reset queue, back and forth sometimes for over 15-20minutes. (experience across bronze, silver, gold, plat and diamond games)

Champion Select "trolls" (technically terrorist would be the formal word lol) Fellow players value their time to either play their chosen role, force someone else to dodge or suffer a loss. Some players even derive satisfaction from trolling the game so that other players will "learn to dodge" when they troll the champ select or suffer a wasted 15+minutes of a trolled game.

"enjoy your loss" is literally the anthem of champ select since autofill was introduced.

Eg 3 junglers because 2 jungle mains got autofilled and the jungler is actually not a jungler but refuses to swap because they don't play the roles the jungle mains were given). Eg 0 players on main role,noone accepts role swap, noone wants to dodge, someone takes disco nunu and says nothing(opgg them and realise they have never played nunu before oh NONONONO!) This makes for a terrible champ select experience where you are either forced to dodge or basically held hostage in game and you can't even report the champ select trolling. Many players would prefer not to dodge for various reasons not limited to the following:

  1. They just have time for one game today
  2. They are trolling/smurfing/not serious about climbing/think they can carry
  3. They just dodged one or more times and just want to play
  4. They ceebs opgging every single champ select and are feeling edgy let's play! The amount of times this was me - nek minute realise shoulda dodged

Counter arguments

  1. You can just swap roles The issue with the above is firstly that many people eventually give in after the first dodge or two and "just play" first timing some champion or flat out refusing to swap to put you or them onto main roles.
  2. Enemy has equal chances of autofill A terrible team(3 autofills including autofilled adc and no tank) is more likely to be dodged than a good one(all on-role/secondary roles) so if the enemy doesn't dodge, chances are they have 2 or less autofills and a few players on chosen roles. Thus if the enemy isn't dodging and you have 2 or more autofills it is logical that you should dodge = yet another queue or penalty timer for however many minutes wooh~

Solution Part 1 If the timer is below a certain figure(scaling per rank?) minutes per game switch autofill off. There should be barely any dodges. eg the following are just arbitrary values and would be adjusted as required

  • average timer below 8minutes in diamond = autofill off
  • average timer below 7minutes in platinum = autofill off
  • average timer below 6minutes in gold = autofill off
  • average timer below 5minutes in iron/bronze/silver = autofill off The issue of longer timers?
  • Often there is a certain role, which isn't getting enough people queuing up so teams aren't formed quickly Solution Part 2 Highlight the LEAST CHOSEN and MOST in demand roles and people will be much more motivated to alter their roles and pick it up as a main/secondary
  • We saw when people started realising support has the lowest queue timers and suddenly people started maining support and the quality of supports improved drastically from people having no idea what supports do to people loving the role and buying skins for these champions, etc
  • I don't want to get too anecdotal eg Too many mid laners and not enough top laners = Mid lane highed in red, top lane highlighted green

Summary TLDR (Solution provided above)

  1. Shorter Queue timers
  • Most players have knowledge of more than 2 roles so being able to adjust roles to shorten timers is a plus and provides agency of either being happy to wait for a certain role or being happy to play a secondary role to shorten timer without the unwelcome rng(players not happy to save 4minutes of queue if they have to dodge anyway or have players troll the champ select due to being autofilled and thus ending up with 15+min before playing the game)
  1. Players reliably getting chosen roles
  • whether they are good or not at these roles they at least have are motivated to play the game and don't feel like riot screwed them with rng roles and experiencing the wrath of autofilled player frustration including champ select trolling. = Even if they end up first timing a champ/role at least they are keen to actually play the game. Eg Players shouldn't need to be thinking, oh well I can just run it down/ give up if I die twice because I don't care AT ALL so just force early end. Conversely Players shouldn't be sitting and seeing a disco nunu typing "enjoy your loss" or a first time jungler who has your role, refused to swap and like the individual they are, types "enjoy your loss" or something like that or nothing at all. Rip

Bottom Line I truly think the above solution or something like it is not only good for players serious about just being able to play the compeitive game they signed up for with minimal trolls,streamers, pros, noobs, foreign players and players with communications issues as a way to balance the integrity of the game as a whole but also reduce much of the frustration through creating more agency for the players.

The one additional(I really want to refrain from using the word "alternative" here) solution that could help with the trolls would be to introduce reporting for champ select trolls, but alas we know they will still troll as long as they have the motivation to do so because the frustration of autofill is too GNJDFNGLNGDKJG and sometimes they can still end up playing the game seriously and enjoying a win while still ruining teammates experience(unnecessary frustration can make the game experience bittersweet at best).

Thank you for taking the time to appreciate this post,

GLHF

26 Comments

GilxeN5 votes

Pretty long post, your validation of the queue issues deeply looked at, but I am sure Riot won't bat an eye to fix the autofill and this frustration.

HeeroTX2 votes

LONG time vets will tell you that "way back when" Ranked did not have role select and everyone was pretty much required to be proficient at all (or very nearly all) roles. I didn't play ranked until role select was a thing for exactly this reason. One recommendation people have made for YEARS is for Riot to add the "DON'T play X role" feature so they can avoid the one role they absolutely suck at. Clearly that still has not happened so it's doubtful that that will ever happen.

What I would recommend is a variant on another longstanding suggestion: Riot should add a checkbox to the role select screen: "I am willing to play any role" If you check that box, matchmaking will proceed exactly as it does right now. You have your two selected roles which matchmaking will try to fill and if it can't find you a match in X amount of time you will be autofilled into whatever role needs you. Recommended that things stay EXACTLY as they are now so if you AF, then you get your pick next game. If you do NOT check the box, you will get put into one of your two selected roles, whether that takes 2 minutes or an hour.

And if high elo is so poor that they can't afford the option, then just disable it once you get past X rank. But I would think that the high elo overlords are so godly that they would all select the checkbox, or else they're clearly boosted.

Saezio4 votes

On the contrary. In high elo, the difference between main role and off role is much greater than in lower elo. Because the enemy is not autofilled and they will abuse you. None would check the box in high elo.

Only way this works is if they make it so a game can have 10 people with the box unticked (so they don't affect other people's waiting time) or 0 people with the box unticked.

HeeroTX3 votes

{quoted}

Only way this works is if they make it so a game can have 10 people with the box unticked (so they don't affect other people's waiting time) or 0 people with the box unticked.

People have been asking for THAT for years, because a bunch of us would sit through significantly longer queues to get our preferred roles, but all the impatient people can't deal with that but don't want to accept that we don't want to bolster THEIR queue. There's a BUNCH of people still salty about TeamBuilder being taken away..

Saezio2 votes

The thing is. How long do you think it would take for such a match to be made? Considering you would need 2 support players that for some reason opted into not ticking the box even though they are almost guaranteed to get their main role every game?

HeeroTX2 votes

According to you, almost EVERY support player would opt into ticking the box because THEN they get to be with a first choice (ie. not AF) adc, rather than "who knows what".

(Also, I main adc, but secondary support, so if you give me the checkbox, I'll ALWAYS have support as my second choice)

Unker1391 votes

{quoted}

According to you, almost EVERY support player would opt into ticking the box because THEN they get to be with a first choice (ie. not AF) adc, rather than "who knows what".

(Also, I main adc, but secondary support, so if you give me the checkbox, I'll ALWAYS have support as my second choice)

If you check the box with support as your secondary, you will get support far more often than adc because of the shortage of support. The only thing the box will do then is make sure you only get those two.

As a low elo support main, I would not check the box because I already get my main most of the time and that system would increase the chances that the other teams support is autofilled giving me an advantage.

HeeroTX2 votes

Again, I was (am?) a fan of TeamBuilder. I WOULD be willing to sit 15 minutes (or more) to get a GOOD game (right now my queue is around 1-2 minutes for comparison). And as I said, I secondary support so I'd be fine playing it even if it happened a lot. (that said, I've been in plenty of games with people that're clearly primary supports)

Honestly, I think the dearth of supports is overstated. I'd be actually fine playing support more often in ranked if I can get non-AF JUNGLERS, since I'm sick of losing with people that don't know how to do THAT.

Saezio2 votes

I think we need pick order back. This way it is at least FAIR who gets to chose their role first and there is communication between the team members.

People will tell you there was constant arguing in seasons 1-2, but go check any Videos from that time, having trolls was actually VERY RARE. Because back then if you trolled, you get banned because tribunal exists and not IFS which only cares about swear words. If you had bad scores and were reported enough in a series of games you actually got punished like you should.

Oleandervine1 votes

The Tribunal was a severely flawed system of volunteers that could not feasibly deal with the massive amounts of reports that came in daily; as such, their queue for going over reports was massively backlogged, so nothing actually ever got done in regards to doling out punishments. The game is too big to rely on human volunteers to manage it's discipline system, which is why the Tribunal was canceled.

Saezio2 votes

I know it was. Nevertheless it did punish trolls and inters better than IFS

Edit: Riot could have had the IFS handle flaming and toxicity reports and another system(maybe tribunal maybe not) to handle trolls and intentional feeders. Because it is very clear an automated system can't punish those categories effectively

Subdue1 votes

{quoted}

I know it was. Nevertheless it did punish trolls and inters better than IFS

Edit: Riot could have had the IFS handle flaming and toxicity reports and another system(maybe tribunal maybe not) to handle trolls and intentional feeders. Because it is very clear an automated system can't punish those categories effectively

There does not exist an automated system that can determine whether someone is feeding intentionally or "trolling" except in very blatant instances, and this is in no small part due to player's propensity for report people who are doing poorly even if they're not intentionally doing poorly. As a result, review for those things has to be manual.

Saezio2 votes

Well there needs to be a better system. Especially for ranked. Someone having consistently negative scores, even if it is not intentional should mean they are either punished or demoted to lower tiers.

Subdue1 votes

{quoted}

Well there needs to be a better system. Especially for ranked. Someone having consistently negative scores, even if it is not intentional should mean they are either punished or demoted to lower tiers.

If your contribution to the game is below average it will result in losing more games than you win, which in turn will result in a drop in MMR. That means consistently doing poorly will mean you will get demoted. For matchmaking purposes, this is pretty much instant. However, there's a lot of protection built into the tiers and divisions so that you have to fall quite a bit for your displayed rank changes.

Tokishi1 votes

{quoted}

The Tribunal was a severely flawed system of volunteers that could not feasibly deal with the massive amounts of reports that came in daily; as such, their queue for going over reports was massively backlogged, so nothing actually ever got done in regards to doling out punishments. The game is too big to rely on human volunteers to manage it's discipline system, which is why the Tribunal was canceled.

regardless, I would 200% agree that until around season 4 or 5, trolls were very uncommon in a ranked game. I'm in mid plat now, but would say that 1 in 4 games have someone rage quit for a random reason, and or soft int or literally run it down, with those rates increasing to 1 in 3 if a player does stay in the game. It's an absolute mad house these days in ranked because the automatic system for banning those players is very lenient as opposed to calling that said person an idiot where the bot has a clear ban target now. Tribunal was flawed, but because it was monitored by players, it wasn't stupid. I would say the Blitzcrank Bot is dumber than the actual bots in the game currently. It cannot tell the difference between situations, cannot tell the difference between actions, and likely makes me believe that the comments you leave on a report mean nothing unless you word it for the bot. Makes me realize now the key for banning a player is using hot words in the comment section of a report for the bot to pick up on.

Darkdemon6532 votes

Autofill simply needs to be made optional.

Subdue1 votes

Having the ability to opt out of Autofill is a prisoner's dilemma issue. The result will be everyone will opt out and queue times will sky rocket. Ignoring MMR for a moment, for a simple scenario. Imagine that there are 100 people playing LoL. If there are 20 Mids, 20 Tops, 20 Junglers, 20 Bottoms, and 20 Supports, then the queues would pop immediately for all 10 games. However, if there were, for example, 30 Mids, 25 Tops, 25 Buttons, and 10 Junglers, and 10 Supports, that would mean that the game queue would pop for 5 games, and then the other 50 people would have to wait in queue until the Supports and Junglers are freed up. This effect is lightened somewhat by new players coming into the queue, but it's largely the same whether we're dealing with 100 players or 100,000. If the pool of any role is significantly limited relative to the other roles and there is no autofill, queues get really long, really fast.

Also, for those of you advocating for the old "pick order" system that existed before, what's the difference between getting autofilled and being arbitrarily the last person to pick?

Saezio1 votes

You at least know you are last pick because your MMR is the worst in the room. You can also negotiate by linking your OP.GG stats on a champion and people were WAY more likely to let you get your role if you were performing amazing on that champ. Right now people are "Sorry no you play what you got". Another thing is, right now there can be 2 or even 3 people autofilled in a single team. With pick order only the last person was FORCED into a role. Also, the lower in the pick order you were, the more likely you were to have seen your opponents pick, so you could counter or at least know you aren't countered yourself. But mainly, autofill doesn't care about your role preference other than the 2 (primary secondary) it should be allowing you to state how you think about all 5 of your roles so you are stuck less time with your LEAST wanted role. And people being autofilled should always be vs other autofilled people in that role at least. Or vs people with lower MMR

Subdue1 votes

{quoted}

You at least know you are last pick because your MMR is the worst in the room. You can also negotiate by linking your OP.GG stats on a champion and people were WAY more likely to let you get your role if you were performing amazing on that champ. Right now people are "Sorry no you play what you got". Another thing is, right now there can be 2 or even 3 people autofilled in a single team. With pick order only the last person was FORCED into a role. Also, the lower in the pick order you were, the more likely you were to have seen your opponents pick, so you could counter or at least know you aren't countered yourself. But mainly, autofill doesn't care about your role preference other than the 2 (primary secondary) it should be allowing you to state how you think about all 5 of your roles so you are stuck less time with your LEAST wanted role. And people being autofilled should always be vs other autofilled people in that role at least. Or vs people with lower MMR

Literally none of what you use as reasons are actually different between the two systems.

Can you negotiate for a different role? Yes. Can 5 people who want top/mid end up in the same game in the old system? Yes. Can you trade to hide your picks? Yes. If the last pick on one side is forced to support, and the last pick on the other side is forced to jungle, then it's not auto-fill vs auto-fill.

In other words, none of your reasons constitute actual differences between the two systems.

Also, "worst MMR in the room" makes it sound like there was a wide difference in MMRs. In most games there isn't. In most games, your MMR is within 1-2 games worth of wins or losses relative to the rest of your team. However, in the old system you could game this by duo queueing with someone significantly lower than you are. That would automatically give you first pick, as everyone would necessarily fall between your MMR and your duo queue's MMR to balance the team.

Saezio1 votes

5 people that want mid top end in the same game. With the new system the other 3 roles are filled 100% randomly. With the old system, the 3rd person to pick picks their 3rd favourite role, then 4th person to pick picks from the 2 left and only the 5th person is FORCED into a role. With autofill all 3 are forced into positions. You can negotiate for a different role sure, but it almost never happens. Even if you have 85% winrate with Zed over 50 games they never give you mid for support. Just doesn't happen, and the rest of the team doesn't back you up because "Dude he got mid let him have it even though he has 51% winrate on the champ he is picking", back in the day it was "Give that man Zed and we will get a free win". If the last pick on one team is support and on the other team it isn't support, at least the person FORCED to support knows their matchup.

Subdue1 votes

{quoted}

5 people that want mid top end in the same game. With the new system the other 3 roles are filled 100% randomly. With the old system, the 3rd person to pick picks their 3rd favourite role, then 4th person to pick picks from the 2 left and only the 5th person is FORCED into a role. With autofill all 3 are forced into positions. You can negotiate for a different role sure, but it almost never happens. Even if you have 85% winrate with Zed over 50 games they never give you mid for support. Just doesn't happen, and the rest of the team doesn't back you up because "Dude he got mid let him have it even though he has 51% winrate on the champ he is picking", back in the day it was "Give that man Zed and we will get a free win". If the last pick on one team is support and on the other team it isn't support, at least the person FORCED to support knows their matchup.

Again, what prevents those last 3 from talking it out and saying, hey I'm autofill and I'd be better at X role, let's trade? Nothing! How hard are people who were autofilled going to hold onto the role they were assigned?

Plus, you're looking only at the scenario where you have to negotiate. In the old system, you would get mid as Zed as first pick 20% of the time. 80% of the time you're at the mercy of your team and their willingness to give up the role. And, depending on where you are in the pick order, if the 1st and 2nd pick both want mid and you're 4th pick, you're most likely not getting it, even if you are able to negotiate with the 1st pick. In the new system, you get your pick 70%-80% of the time by default, with no negotiation required. And then in the 20%-30% of the time when you didn't get the role you wanted, you can try to negotiate.

Saezio1 votes

So, in your experience you get your PRIMARY role 70-80% of the time?(provided your primary is mid or adc, the most wanted roles) Sure if your primary is sup or Jg you are very likely to get those.

Also, no if I negotiate with first pick, they first pick me zed and I pick them something when my turn comes.

Also, in role select a big issue is that it doesn't SHOW who is autofilled. So if I want mid top and am given adc, I am most likely to ask for mid or top, I am not going to ask for my 3rd preferred because I don't know mid and top are the only ones that are not autofilled. With pick order you saw everyone getting what they wanted from the roles that were available.

Subdue1 votes

{quoted}

So, in your experience you get your PRIMARY role 70-80% of the time?(provided your primary is mid or adc, the most wanted roles) Sure if your primary is sup or Jg you are very likely to get those.

Also, no if I negotiate with first pick, they first pick me zed and I pick them something when my turn comes.

Also, in role select a big issue is that it doesn't SHOW who is autofilled. So if I want mid top and am given adc, I am most likely to ask for mid or top, I am not going to ask for my 3rd preferred because I don't know mid and top are the only ones that are not autofilled. With pick order you saw everyone getting what they wanted from the roles that were available.

My primary role is jungle, and I get it 100% of the time.

If your suggestion is that in champ select it show what you queued for and whether or not you're auto-filled, I'm fine with that.

haaaaaaalp1 votes

Instead of making up numbers, we have the actual role distribution: https://www.leagueofgraphs.com/champions/main-stats each role is largely always within 4-6% of each other depending on server and rank. On top of that, each player selects two roles, not one which adds another layer to releave pressure on the ranked ladder. That is why queue times even without autofill were fairly short for anyone except those above diamond:

https://am-a.akamaihd.net/image?f=https://news-a.akamaihd.net/public/images/articles/2016/june/DQU/graph-queuetime.jpg?v=1 and that was under dynamic queue which naturally has higher queue times than solo queue.

Honestly, people need to stop fear mongering about queue times with autofill. All of the objective data that we have shows that solo queue would be fine without autofill except at the very ends of the ladder. There is no reason why solo queue needs autofill to exist for iron 3 through diamond 1.

Subdue1 votes

{quoted}

Instead of making up numbers, we have the actual role distribution: https://www.leagueofgraphs.com/champions/main-stats each role is largely always within 4-6% of each other depending on server and rank. On top of that, each player selects two roles, not one which adds another layer to releave pressure on the ranked ladder. That is why queue times even without autofill were fairly short for anyone except those above diamond:

https://am-a.akamaihd.net/image?f=https://news-a.akamaihd.net/public/images/articles/2016/june/DQU/graph-queuetime.jpg?v=1 and that was under dynamic queue which naturally has higher queue times than solo queue.

Honestly, people need to stop fear mongering about queue times with autofill. All of the objective data that we have shows that solo queue would be fine without autofill except at the very ends of the ladder. There is no reason why solo queue needs autofill to exist for iron 3 through diamond 1.

I'm not sure what formula league of graphs is using to compile those numbers. However, from the conversation it sounds to me like Saezio who is ranked lower than I am doesn't get his primary role, which seems to be mid, more than 70-80% of the time, and I've gotten my primary role in solo queue 100% of the time by queuing as Jungle/Mid across 100 games, so I find it questionable that they've found jungler to be the most mained role.

As for your chart, I'd be interested in seeing the source, either data behind it or at least the site where you pulled it from.

haaaaaaalp1 votes

May not get primary role but league requires everyone to select 2 roles and not 1 specifically to avoid bottleneck problems. No need for auto fill on top of that.

The chart was pulled from an ask riot post during season 6 which riot claimed was the results of extending auto fill beyond high masters and very low bronze. Back when they were trying to throw anything and everything at the wall to keep the player base from revolting over not bringing back solo queue.

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