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

Novanious·Mar 8, 2017·3 votes·1,627 views

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.

8 Comments

EmbertineMar 8, 20172 votes

So you got auto filled into a role you hate playing and you lost your match so you decide to rant about it?

I remember back in the days when everyone had to communicate and work together to decide what roles were played by who. Well I say communicate, but what really happened was a lot of arguing, dodging, trolls, and the always popular, "Mid or feed noob!"

I say getting auto filled once in a while is an acceptable trade to how the system used to be.

NovaniousMar 8, 20171 votes

The system used to be the current system but without autofill. It was great.

The system before that was garbage except for Team Builder. That's why they changed it.

DrCyanideMar 8, 20171 votes

Team Builder was garbage, which is why they removed it.

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

They tried that, but you didn't go play the unpopular role then so they're forcing you to now. Pretty simple concept.

NovaniousMar 8, 20171 votes

Team Builder was garbage, which is why they removed it.

It wasn't, it was actually what they based the new queue system on, but okay.

They tried that, but you didn't go play the unpopular role then so they're forcing you to now. Pretty simple concept.

Please, elaborate on why forcing us to play unpopular roles is better than encouraging playing them through other means. I'd love to hear an actual argument about why using autofill is better. Be the first person to actually give me a reason. It'd be a nice chanfe of pace.

DrCyanideMar 8, 20171 votes

It wasn't, it was actually what they based the new queue system on, but okay.

The new system most certainly is not based around locking in a single role and a single champion, then waiting for people to join your lobby and kicking them if you don't like their single champion in that single role and how it fits with your team. The only thing the two queue systems had in common is that you had to tell Riot what role you wanted to play instead of telling your teammates, but that's not enough to say that it's based on it. They learned from the mistakes of Team Builder and built a system that was completely different.

Please, elaborate on why forcing us to play unpopular roles is better than encouraging playing them through other means. I'd love to hear an actual argument about why using autofill is better. Be the first person to actually give me a reason. It'd be a nice chanfe of pace.

I haven't played it myself, but I've heard that World of Warcraft had a reward system to play unpopular roles, and it resulted in people only playing the unpopular role to farm... whatever they used as an incentive. We'd have the same problems with bonus IP or altered LP gains, either the amount is too little to care about or it's enough that everyone would flock to it, creating a reverse problem (too many Supports, not enough Junglers for instance). Striking a perfect middle ground would be near impossible, just like everything tied to balance in this game.

Plus, what do you do if someone queues as the unpopular role, is assigned said role, then trades (or worse, steals) another role? Do they still get the bonus? How do you decide what should happen in that case? What do you even chose as an incentive, as there are many players (particularly ones in higher elos) that have more IP than they know what to do with?

There already is an incentive to put Support: You get Auto Fill immunity for a few games, which guarantees you won't be placed in a different role you don't like. How is that tempting you?

TL;DR: There's no incentive that would work universally without causing bigger issues.

I think it's worth noting that we have Auto Fill because of the shortcomings with Fill. At first, people joined games as Fill, thinking it'd be about the same as Blind Pick Fill (~37% Support, ~63% someone else calls Support before you). But the system didn't have any understanding that just maybe people putting Fill didn't want to get Support 90% of the time. So fewer people started putting Fill, then people who put Fill got Support 95% of the time, so they stopped putting fill, and the cycle became a downward spiral. Same thing with Support Secondary. Now anyone who would put Fill/Support Secondary won't because they'll get pegged with Support all the time.

You can't have an "opt out" option for Auto Fill, otherwise you're in the exact same boat as before where the people who don't opt out get Support more often so they opt out. If you forced queues where people who opted out could only be paired with other people that opted out the queue times would likely be hours, since Support mains already have Auto Fill protection and wouldn't need to opt out.