40 placement games for "fill" people is a nightmare scenario.

This is a bit long winded I'll admit, but I do hope Riot is watching the forums and is ready and able to swallow the bitter pill of reality I'm about to put forth.

EDIT: Since people wanted a TLDR, here you go. 40 placement games are WAY too many for an average fill player to have to do to get a rank in each role. Doing 4 games a day for 4 days a week it would take 2.5 weeks to do all of them doing JUST the 8 per role and nothing else.

As someone with a 9-5 job and who loves to play every role in the game to some degree, I literally feel like this new system is not just a simple slap in the face to those of us that like to play each role. Rather, it's a mach speed sucker punch with a lead-filled boxing glove to the groin, followed by a roundhouse kick to the face with a steel-toed boot after we're doubled over in pain from the sucker punch.

I've played 7 placement games tonight. I went 4-3 in that time which is MUCH better than I did last season with my poor 2-8 record, but yet I'm upset. Now, I'm not upset I've dropped an entire division from where I ended last season down to Bronze 4 to start the placements at, but rather the fact that since those placement games were split amongst Top, a Jungle game I swapped cause the jungle got auto filled and couldn't play it well, Mid, and Bot, the BEST I have to show for it is 3 out of 8 placements done for mid and then 1 for top, 1 for jungle, and 2 for Bot.

NOT 7 out of 10 placements done like before where a 4-3 record would be on a good track to at least go even, but rather it's 7 out of FORTY...40...FOUR ZERO.

Considering on a normal weeknight when I play roughly 3-4 games and Saturday and Sunday I play anywhere between 4-10 both days depending on how tilted I get during said time frame. Going off that, I could expect to be done with all my placements in roughly a week. "Well that's not bad at all now is it Softpaw? See our system works just fine for you fill players."

I hate to burst your bubble of positive thinking there, but let's be honest with ourselves Riot for just one brief moment here shall we? I personally am very much a close in when I'm not at work. I rarely go outside my apt aside from grocery shopping, maybe eating a meal somewhere, or going to and from work. I personally can dedicate time to this "40 placements" system you put into place if I wanted to cause I live alone with my cat, don't have really any real friends outside the game that I interact with, and I literally spend all my time at home on the computer either playing video games or watching youtube stuff. Great life I know, everyone would love it. But that's a fairly big extreme towards having the time commitment for doing 40 placement games.

Now let's take the average fill player who can only find a few nights a week to play or maybe only on the weekend. And even then they have commitments in real life that limit them to maybe 2-3 games MAX a day. So let's be generous here and give our average player 4 days they can comfortably play League with, again, a generous 4 games per day. So assuming they wanted to be a fill player and do all their placements to get their actual rank for each role, it would take them 2.5 weeks to do all of their placements before they can consider starting the season in full swing. And that is if they ONLY play 8 games per role and don't mix it up in any way shape or form along the way. And I was being generous with my numbers here, please keep that in mind.

Do you honestly think a fill player is going to enjoy having to basically be chained to forcing themselves to play like that? I can't speak for all fill players, but I imagine for most of us the biggest reason we play fill is so we AREN'T forced to have to play a certain role just to get a rank.

But that's not the worst part. The worst part of this convoluted system is if you didn't finish your 8 games right away at the start of the season, it could be weeks before you actually do finish them and get an actual rank for the role. I'll admit, while I do like playing everything, support isn't something I play often cause it has a harder time carrying. So what happens if I wasn't in the mood to play my 8 placement games of ranked for Support at the start of the season? Or hell let's say any role or two cause while we enjoy them we just don't play them quite as often?

That means that it might be halfway thru the 1st split before your truly finished with all your placements in each role.

I'm sorry but as a person that plays each role and a fair amount of the time will swap when someone else gets auto filled into a role they're not comfortable with, I think you guys clearly thought of us fill players as a "meh whatever" when you designed this system. Go back to Season 8's system if for nothing else than to spare us "fill" people from being forced to do FORTY placement games with a total of 8 per role just to actually get started playing the way we enjoy to play.

And sitting here typing this I thought of another thing. Yes, the role ranked separates your skill lvl in each role, but honestly as a fill if I saw I was say Gold 5 in mid but only Bronze 1 in Top, it would seriously make me not want to even bother with top in ranked cause "what's the point, its much lower ranked than the other role is" and that again is just dumping on us fill people. I feel like I'm being FORCED to play 1-2 roles, MAYBE 3 as a big stretch, just to not waste my time over the course of the season.

I do hope you reconsider this terrible system and revert it back to Season 8's setup like you were going to do as the emergency "We 'F'ed up!" plan cause this system does NOT cater to all players.

As one last thought, at least with Season 8's system you knew your rank. Your rank was the sum of ALL your skill, not just skill in one lane, but in the ENTIRE game. I'm my own opinion, Role Rank just cheapens the ranks to the point of ""oh you're only good with this role or champion, let's prop you up high with it, but let's make you play with worse ranks cause in other games cause your other roles aren't as good".

And I know it may sound crazy, but a good league player is someone who can adapt to a situation, adapt to a role, adapt to a new playstyle or champ, and adapt to how each individual game is unfolding before them. While Diamond Mid laner might be fantastic at mid lane, their other roles might be like Gold or something cause they can't adapt to the other roles. So your not saying the player as a whole is Diamond quality, just their mid lane game.

And its even worse if its a one trick. I dare say, and I know I'll get flack for this but bring it on, that one tricks are the worst offender as far as "good players". You take their one trick away from them and what happens? They go from possibly Master or Grand Master quality of gameplay down to them either having to dodge cause their champ was taken or banned or play something much more underwhelming, borderline trolling cause they legit don't know what they're doing.

I will say one last thing. Yes, splashing might help alleviate some of these issues, but I personally feel like it's just putting a band-aid on the problem and saying "See? All better now?" But I will be honest and say it's too soon into the season to know just how much impact "splashing" will create. In a few weeks we'll have a better idea where "splashing" is getting us, so till then I'll leave it at that.

I hope everyone who read this got a little insight into the mind of a fill player presented with this new ranked system is thinking. To Riot, I hope you do take this as constructive criticism for the most part and not just a "bash fest" that a lot of players are prone to doing. I want to make this game as enjoyable to everyone as possible. While I don't agree with things like "I only play 'this' role or 'this one champ'" mentalities, I understand they exist and I don't fault them for that. We each enjoy this game the way that we do.

To all of you players and Rioters out there...Have a good evening and hopefully a pleasant Season 9.