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The Mathematical Reason Autofill Must Exist

alcatrazEscapee·1/6/2017, 2:37:25 AM·40 votes·2,859 views

I've seen a lot of posts complaining about autofill: the horrible experience of playing support one in ten games. I've also seen a lot of people who agree with the statement: "I would wait five minutes longer to get my role, instead of being locked in a 45 minute game playing something I don't enjoy."

That is not how autofill works! Take a simple example: let's say there are only two roles: Mid and Support, and people can choose to queue for one or the other. If you have more people queuing for Mid per second as opposed to support, that begins to build a backlog of Mid players waiting in the queue. A game is formed every time a support player queues up, since they are the limiting factor in the creation of a game. This backlog of mid players keeps getting larger. The result: queue times don't "go up by five minutes", they go up by five minutes, then ten minutes, then an hour, then two hours etc. until people start quitting the queue and the amount of people queuing for each role per second is equal.

Autofill is necessary in this system because otherwise there would be queue times that keep growing and never stopping, which forces people to quit playing due to absurd queue times.

Yes, this is a extremely simple model, but the core principle remains true. No, autofill is not perfect, and it still can be improved. (the two players getting autofilled into each other's role situation) But it is necessary.

Thank you.

67 Comments

Darius Taric1/6/2017, 3:18:01 AM10 votes

The entire point is that I (and many others) would rather wait X minutes than play a role that isn't fun. X = however long it takes. Yes, they will get long if you're playing the hot role that week and so long that some people may swap sides, but at the end of the day the only people who are being harmed by this are the people who are electing to wait longer. Each other role is free from the bottleneck. If a player wants to say "I am willing to wait 30 minutes while the rest of you guys wait 5" who is anyone to say no?

Everyone still retains the ability to queue fill, or queue for two roles if they elect to have a shorter queue time. There is, quite literally, no downside.

Edit: If it were necessary, if it must exist, it would have been in the game since teambuilder.

Ýisus1/6/2017, 3:28:49 AM9 votes

Your math has a problem though. When you only use 2 roles - the backlog of Mid players is much much greater than if you used the actual math of 5.

Your simplifying of the equation is actually creating an illusion. In Reality, Autofill was not around for season 5 or 6. And the Queue times were no longer than currently.

I like how you are thinking here, you are trying to make this into an economic efficiency problem. But the way to solve this problem is as follows:

Turn off Autofill and come up with an average queue time across the entire player base. Now turn on Autofill and find an average queue time across the entire player base.

Now find the average # of games a player can play before Autofill puts them in a role they do not desire.

Example: Made up Estimates from Experience.

With Autofill = 3.5 Min Without Autofill = 5 Min Number of Games player before Autofill Triggers : 8. Average Length of a Game : 35 Minutes.

We can now take 5 - 3.5 = 1.5 Minutes..... 1.5minutes x 8 = 12 Minutes. ... As we said 35 Minutes is your down time from being filled 1 game.

In Order for Autofill to Benefit the average player, Queue Times must be reduced by at least 4.5 minutes due to Autofill.

If they are reduced by LESS than 4.5 minutes - Autofill is not efficient for the average player.

LankPants1/6/2017, 7:53:41 AM6 votes

You're forgetting a factor. Support players complete queues and get back into queue quicker. This stops feedback loops like this happening in reality, because once you get up to about a 20 minute queue 1 in 2 support players who were in a game when you started your queue are now out of their game and able to requeue. You get priority to be matched up with this person while the people they were playing with do not. Because of this the support pool is artificially inflated from its base number of players. Support players simply had more queue pops per time unit than other roles. This is why there wasn't a snowball effect on queue times last season.

JackMcSnipeyz1/9/2017, 2:33:40 PM5 votes

No use explaining it here, people are acting like babies "Wahh, i want what i want all the time, everytime!". People explained why autofill is necessary for the game's health, yet people still spam threads because they get support once in 10 games.

Tychusfindlay9191/6/2017, 2:17:01 PM4 votes

The root of the problem then is that support is fucking boring for the vast majority of league players.

Maximum Morde1/6/2017, 3:12:11 PM3 votes

You are sort on on the right track, wait time for a given role is actually related to the ratio of the role to the lowest picked role.

Assume that you have a constant playerbase size, yes this is false because peak times etc, but for simplification.

Let's say that mid is the most popular role and there are three times as many mid players as the lowest, support. Every other role has twice as many as support. This means that the avg wait time for non support non mid role would be the length of a game match because all supports are in a match and you have to wait for one to get out and queue again. Mid will be twice the length of a game match.

Now. If you throw in the fact that everyone can pick two roles, but they don't pick support(or they'd be counted in support pool), you drive down the time of mid primary queues because they get slotted into a different role, but drive up the time of the other non support roles in proportion to the new bottleneck ratio from throwing mid players into their role.

So, it doesn't just keep increasing and increasing, it is limited by ratio. The more out of whack the ratio gets, the longer queue times grow. Don't get me wrong, it still grows to unacceptable limits.

Sraeg20131/6/2017, 11:53:15 AM3 votes

That's bullshit for one simple reason.

When autofill was switching on only when players were lacking, it was on for a second and then it was gone for another 5 minutes.

Plus players are quitting for some time now. Not because of autofill, but autofill only makes it worse by creating a highly toxic environment and ironically increasing queue times.

Before autofill I had, say 5 minute long queues. After autofill I have 4 minute long queues. Too bad that for every match I get at least 2 dodges, which actually makes the queue time at least twice as long.

Blanchimont1/6/2017, 3:18:46 PM3 votes

The problem with League is that longer queue times does not actually result in more balanced games. It is still just as terrible. Placing people in fill does nothing to improve match quality, team balance, or gameplay experience. If you pick those roles, you should be getting those roles, no questions asked. There's something fundamentally wrong with the game's design itself if people are specifically going out of their way to avoid certain roles.

ChargeItDownMid1/7/2017, 2:11:42 AM2 votes

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Víaggro1/6/2017, 3:25:21 PM2 votes

Well make it better. This wasn't an issue when new system was first released. But until I stop getting support autofilled multiple games in a row I will continue to hate it. I don't have tons of support champs, I don't play support that often, so if I get support, odds of the team losing go way up right then an there. Autofill might make you get games a bit faster but it makes the game 100 times worse and less enjoyable.

ForFoxSakes1/9/2017, 11:24:18 PM2 votes

{quoted}

A game is formed every time a support player queues up, since they are the limiting factor in the creation of a game.

This is false. My last 5 solo Q games I've just selected fill and STILL NEED TO WAIT 2 MINUTES to get into the first lobby before any dodges. Why is there that wait time? I'm in the most common ELO rating and fill should literally be an instant queue pop if they were just waiting on supports, but there's something else running in the background screwing with this

I selected support primary and jungle secondary in flex too and still also had to wait 2 minutes to get into a game