Autofill should not exist. Riot should be encouraging, not forcing, players to play unpopular roles.

Autofill is a giant pain in the ass. It's as simple as that. Especially when there are less people online, meaning more people forced into roles they don't want to play. In normals, it's not too much of a problem, but in ranked, a person forced to fill a role they don't know, don't like, and/or don't want to play is a huge handicap for the team.

Sure, the argument could be made that one should just learn all of the roles in the game, and that's why I don't care about autofill being in normals, but in ranked, that argument falls apart. Players that are good at a certain role aren't forced into other roles in actual competition except in the movies, where suspension of disbelief comes into play. If you were a competitive Toplaner for a big team like SSW or SKT or whatever, and your ADC wasn't available, you wouldn't be forced to play ADC while some random filled Toplane for you, the sub for ADC would play instead. Even if you were playing a minor game in a season that had barely any impact on the over-all performance of your team (like solo-queue ranked), you wouldn't be forced to play a role you aren't good at, because you aren't as good in that role. League is a competitive team-based game, and the same logic should apply: In ranked, at the very least, you shouldn't be forced to play a role you didn't explicitly queue up for. It forces you to either play a role you aren't as good at, handicapping your team, or to queue dodge, costing you LP and time as you have to wait for your dodge queue timer to expire before queuing again. This is especially a problem with less people in the queue: I'd rather wait an extra 20 minutes for everybody on my team to get a role they queue up for then have to dodge 4 separate queues because I got put in Bottom or Support instead of my preferred Mid and Top roles.

Give players that queue as less unpopular roles more IP. Give them more frequent loot drops. Give them better loot drops. Give them more LP per win if you have to. Just do something to make people want to play the unpopular roles instead of forcing people to play them.