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Something Interesting I've Found Out From Playing on Smurf

SpongebobIsLife·11/15/2019, 2:04:00 PM·1 votes·1,895 views

So, ever since Senna's release (a post will be made on my thoughts about senna later), I've been queueing up as bot/fill in solo queue on my smurf, robot takeover, and if you look at my match history, https://na.op.gg/summoner/userName=robot%20takeover , you will notice that in almost every single game that I'm filled, it's in Top lane. Throughout this whole experience, I have never once been filled to support. It's been all top lane and I think one game of jungle and mid.

Why is this important?

A few years ago, maybe even sometime early last year, Riot was experimenting in other small regions, in allowing people to select one role that they did not want to be filled to. Their results ended with a large amount of people opting to not support which then created unhealthy queues in Riot's eyes. Now that the role has expanded to more play styles outside of tanks and enchanters and has more carry potential than it has in any previous season, more people tend to flock to it.

So now, I am curious as to how autofill would fare with an except x position at this moment, as I think there are more people nowadays that would not mind filling top in comparison to how many people would have minded filling support back when Riot first conducted this experiment. This is because top lane has more carry potential than support did a few years ago, and has arguably, "more fun" champions.

It's probably important to note that there are probably like 3-4 games that I filled, but someone dodged in champ select so they aren't shown here.

1 Comments

Smyrage11/15/2019, 3:35:09 PM2 votes

There are some reasons why you got such results.

First and foremost: Senna is out. Generally such champions like Senna will encourage other players to play Support. This tendency is going to die down within a week or so.

Second, and I think this is the most important to note. Support is still the least popular just not by that far. Mid is still the most popular role, however Top, Jungle's and ADC's popularity kind of died down:

  • Top Lane is much more matchup dependent and Jungler reliant than ever, furthermore it has the least impact on the game, therefore people started abandoning it. This will probably change in the preseason, because Riot is increasing their impact
  • Jungle has undergone a lot of changes, which made junglers abandon the jungler role and pick other roles e.g Support, because they can't keep up with the changes and each change is highly unfavourable for certain junglers
  • When people started picking Mid lane mages as Support and Pyke was introduced, ADCs started playing other lanes, because many of them couldn't bear the heavy rain of pokes from e.g Lux.

What you said was true, but you are still more likely to get the Support role. Support will forever remain the least popular role simply because you can't earn much money through Support. Only those picks are going to work which can operate on Support budget, which isn't true for many champions. This will be even more prevalent in the next season.