F*** Autofill
(Tl;dr at bottom) Seriously. I got home from class today around 4 pm, and I thought to myself "Hey, Kled seems like a fun champion! He's a goofball floofball with a lizard." So I queue up with top/jg in hopes of learning this champion, as I hadn't really played him much until yesterday. I played 4 games, with all the queues being between 4 and 7 pm. Riot claims that autofill is only active during periods of long queue time, when there are lower amounts of players. This was in the late afternoon/evening, without any sort of major holiday anytime soon. This seems like it would be one of the prime periods to play League. I was given my preferred role in 2 of my games, but I was autofilled for the remaining 2. This shouldn't be a problem where I don't get either of my preferred roles for 50% of my games. I was autofill protected for the middle 2 games, then the protection wore off and I was immediately autofilled again.
It's not like I'm in a division particularly devoid of players. I'm currently in Gold 2, and I've seen play against players from silver to diamond, so I have a rather wide pool of players to draw from. There's not much of a worse feeling than being in queue for 5 minutes, only to end up being thrown to support. The queue times are long anyway - no need to have it be long and THEN I don't even get a role I want. I haven't seen a single person say that they appreciate autofill. It's a frustrating system that only leads to more toxicity in champion select, and the fear in ranked when someone types in chat "I can't support. Give me [different role] or I feed." Generally, this doesn't happen. But I don't think autofill should even be necessary in relatively low levels of play (such as bronze, silver, heck, even gold or plat), where there are always a decent amount of players online, especially during the day. The 1, maybe 2 minutes of queue time that autofill saves from each individual queue is not worth the usual 2 or 3 dodges during champion select, or the 30-50 minutes (including time in champ select) you waste playing support when you're just trying to learn a champion.
I understand why autofill would be necessary for the highest levels of play (Diamond 1+), or during the early hours of the morning (2-6 am). But I really don't see why I should be autofilled during** 50% of the games I play** in a well-populated division in a well-populated time period. Now, I do understand that this was a rather niche circumstance, and most of the time games don't go like this. But still, Riot, you messed up on this.
Tl;dr - I played 4 games, was autofilled twice during daytime hours. F*** Autofill.
