The Inherent Issue with Primary/Secondary Roles

So Season 6 has begun as of last month, and I was rather optimistic. With the new champion select, I was going to get my role without a hitch, strategize a team comp during champ select itself, and win games. Oh boy. The issue - I'm a mid main. What's my second favorite role? Support. So the major issue is that people are turning away from having Support as their secondary because it's the least popular role.

Confused? Allow me to explain. If you put your primary role as Mid, Top, Jungle, or Bot, then one can assume that it's your preferred role. You want to go into a game of League as that role. Your secondary role is your second best role. In a perfect world, everyone would put their accurate second-best role and get picked for it somewhere around 20-25% of the time. The issue is that though I may be somewhat fond of support (ootay), most people aren't - likely because it isn't as rewarding to play as the other roles, but this isn't necessarily the sole reason. Regardless of what the reason is, support has always been the least popular role. When new champ select first came out, people recognized this fact. In addition, they recognized that if they picked support as their secondary role, they would get it slightly more often than their primary role. As such, in order to heighten their chances of getting their primary role, they would pick any position that isn't support as their secondary. Even I switched my secondary role from support to bot (more on that later). As such, support became even less popular, and if you take support as your secondary role, you're almost guaranteed to get it. With more and more people avoiding support, it will only be a matter of time until the role becomes completely obsolete because only support mains will put down the role.

Furthermore, putting down fill is essentially a guarantee of receiving support. With support as the drastically least popular role, if you put down fill, your chance of getting support skyrockets. As such, people who want to play their primary role also can't put down fill, because it makes receiving your primary choice nearly impossible.

But the final problem - getting mid is drastically unlikely in comparison to any other role. It isn't much of a surprise that people like mid. Perhaps it's because of the lane's variety, or because of the diverse champion pool, or because most (though I would presume not all) mid laners are Faker wannabes. For me, it's because if I play Karthus bot in ranked, my team will call me an autist, so I play him mid, where people on my team are less likely to get tilted. However, upon the launch of new champ select, people who main any role that isn't mid came upon the realization that if you put down mid as your secondary pick, then your chance of receiving your primary pick goes back up. As such, everyone began taking mid as their secondary to get their primary. Now, since most people have mid as either their primary role (because they main mid) or their secondary role (because they want their primary role), the chance of a mid main receiving their role is infinitesimal.

I played some ranked in the last few days. I chose mid as my primary role and bot as my secondary role for 5 matches. I only got mid in 1 match. Two of my friends and I played some games the other day where we all took fill. Of the various games, we noticed a trend - the three of us would get support, bot, and jungle. As such, role popularity seems to be Mid > Top > Bot > Jungle > Support. Whatever role you put down that's less popular is the one you're more likely to get. This is an excellent time for support mains, but a terrible time for mid mains.

Riot needs to either make support more rewarding to play (which may be rather difficult) or chance the primary/secondary pick chances. My proposition is that the moment you queue up, you get a 75% chance of queuing as your primary role and a 25% chance of queuing as your secondary role. That way, people can out support as their secondary without fear, and less people will take mid as a secondary in order to simply get their primary.