Introduction

Hostility and trolling occur more frequently when players are left to figure things out among themselves. The more opportunity for conflict among players, the more likely it becomes that such conflict and hostility will arise. We saw this in seasons past with blind pick and 'calling your role' in champion select for both normal and ranked queues.

Modern matchmaking removes a lot of this by giving people clearly assigned roles based on what is needed while also factoring their preferences into their assignment. (Thanks so much for this btw! It has made my pregame experience significantly less stressful!) However there is still one area of ambiguity where players are left to figure things out on their own. Namely, role swapping.

The Problem

Sometimes players are assigned a role different from the one they want to play. And sometimes these players will request a role swap for the role they want. This is not really a problem in and of itself. But factor human nature into it and suddenly a wild conflict appears! The core problem arises because some players are unskilled at asking kindly, or they forgo asking entirely and simply demand the swap.

Setting up an AI to monitor chat for these negative exchanges is complicated, inefficient, and poses some unnecessary risks. So I would like to propose another way to reduce / prevent this issue while also making it easier to track the events of champion select, enabling Riot to reward players for cooperating with their team and punish players who act maliciously.

A Proposed Solution

Riot please implement a role swap function, similar to the champion swap function. Either of the following ways might work:

• When Player A is assigned a role that they do not want to play, they can click a general "request a swap" button and a general popup appears for everyone saying something like, "Player B is requesting a role swap, would you like to help them out?" Any player can then click "offer your role" to give Player A a choice to trade roles.

• Or a more precise version, when Player A is assigned Player B's primary role, Player B could click a button on the Summoner's Rift Map Graphic to request that role, causing the other player to receive a popup, "Player B is asking you to swap roles with them, would you like to help them out?" With yes and no buttons. This removes the need for players to ask in chat, and makes it very clear to the champion select system when players switch positions.

The Potential Benefits

1. The system would enable Riot to identify players who willingly swap roles, possibly granting auto-fill protection or other rewards to such players and further encouraging cooperation in champion select.

2. Players would have less opportunity to figure things out among themselves, thus reducing the possibility or likelihood of conflict in champion select.

3. The system would make it much clearer and easier to track and identify patterns of events, such as when a player bans another player's pick intent to force a dodge or a swap.

4. Tracking the actual played role of every player each match potentially opens up new opportunities for matchmaking in the future, such as the ability to measure the same player's MMR differently for each role, thus enabling more fair matchmaking when they play their off-role.

Thoughts?

Please share your thoughts in the comments below. Also, let's try and break my idea so we can figure out if/how it needs improvement!