Fixing ranked
Ranked in 2017 has become a massive headache. Beyond the balancing issues. Im talking about just player to player interaction and the Auto fill issue. Im going to start off with the PtP issue. First off ranked games are a serious thing to many people. Its about the climb and reaching higher elos. But then you get people who don't take it seriously and ruin the game for others. And Riot just likes to take the easy way out and say "Play as a team better". Its impossible to play as team when someone doesn't want to. Before people brush this off as a rare occurrence. I could go through my match history where ive had to report someone for leaving the game after they get first blooded, they forgot they had something coming up and cant play anymore or whatever their reason is. The chance of bringing a 4v5 to a win is next to impossible. So I have to take a loss and -20 LP because of someone else. Then there are the trolls. The "im going to pick blitzcrank jungle" guy and they feed all lanes then go afk. I have countless games where someone treats a ranked match like a normals game. Which, you guessed it, means ANOTHER -20 LP. These happen more often than riot cares to accept. I have reached Gold 5 last season. That is all I wanted to reach. This season after doing my promo matches. I have been stuck in silver elo. I have games where im dominating and the game is too easy for me. Clearly I dont belong in this elo. But for some reason, when i get on a "hot streak" i lose 3-4 games in a row. I dont get this. Its practically guaranteed to happen. Going to my match history you will see a crazy loop of Win 4-5 games in a row then i lose 4-5 games in a row. Its almost as if I was setup to lose the game. And rarely is it because of the team outplaying us. Its because of those terrible PtP interactions. What I dont get is this. If this new honor/report system was supposed to separate those who intentionally ruin games for others from those who try their hardest and those who are team players. Why am I getting consistently matched with players that do these things.
Another issue with ranked is Autofill. I know im not the first person in the world who hates Autofill. But I feel if enough people voice out against it then maybe Riot will do something about it. In my eyes, here is how I see how autofill hurts more than it helps. Autofill in low elos barely change anything. When close to 50% of the player base of League of Legends are in Silver and Bronze Elo Queue time is under 4 minutes at all times of the day. What good is shaving off 15 seconds when by doing that someone on your team gets a role they don't want or aren't comfortable playing in ranked matches. This causes people to take it to extremes by just trolling or just feeding to get the match done with.
Here is how I break it down, if I get someone on my team that autofills into a role they dont want chances are im going to lose that match losing that match means -20LP -20LP means 20-35 minutes of wasted time losing AND that means +1-2 hours getting that LP back up where it was.
By removing the Autofill feature, sure you add close to 10-15 seconds to Queue timers but it also removes the gamble of matches now. Now I dont have to worry about a Top/Mid main getting played to be support. Which arguably support is the backbone of the team. So if someone gets autofilled into support that essentially means there is no backbone. The point im making is, if one team has a support main going up against a autofilled support. There is an unfair advantage to the team that has the support main. This shouldn't be a feature in ranked matches.
I would much rather wait 5-10 minutes for a match that doesnt have anyone get autofilled than to join a match in 30 seconds where someone does get autofilled.
Anyways, that is my little Ranked 2017 rant. If you feel this same pain please up-vote this. Maybe with enough support on this post Riot will do something about the plague that's ruining the experience of ranked matches.
