Autofill rant: Does this sound familiar to you?
More often than not, my games this season have been decided by which team's autofilled player is more uncomfortable in their given role. Every game feels like a coin toss. Many times, an autofilled player will even refuse to play their given role and try to force someone else to play it; a situation which I've personally never seen result in a win either due to troll pissing contests or just very poor team morale going into the game. Usually, though, people will play their given role. Usually, that role is support. Usually, that support feeds, or misplays and causes both themselves and their ADC to feed. Players begin to rage; some quit, some intentionally feed, some refuse to communicate, and we lose the game. Sound familiar? That's because it happens all the time.
I get it, Riot, these games are always _going _ to happen, they always _have _ happened, etc, etc. The rate of which they occur, though, could be lowered, and removing autofill is without a doubt a step in that direction. Hell, don't remove autofill. But if you're not going to remove autofill, then please, PLEASE give us the the ability to opt out of being autofilled ourselves in exchange for a longer queue time. I would personally take the longer queue time 100% of the time. I've never met a player who has said otherwise. There can still be autofilled players in my games, I don't mind at all, but I want it to be people who feel comfortable enough in every role, and who have made a conscious decision to queue up for ranked knowing full well that there is a possibility that they could be playing any role.
I know, Riot. We all complained about queue times. We asked for you to reduce queue times. But we never asked for autofill. You never asked us if we wanted autofill to become permanent. We hated it when it only happened sometimes, but we understood that it was sometimes necessary. But every game? Obviously you realize how uncommon it is for people to pick support or fill in their primary or secondary roles. During low-traffic times, ranked is basically unplayable because you can count on support being autofilled every game. I started playing this game in 2009 and I've never been in my life been closer to quitting. It's not even that the games are hard. It's that every other game, my teammates are telling each other to kill themselves, spam missing ping (which needs to have a stricter limit on it or work along with player mutes btw), spamming the "alive" ping (same), or finding other ways to BM/flame each other for misplaying. It's too much. League of Legends' community was objectively just as bad as every other community before this season began, and now I can confidently say that it has the most toxic community I've ever experienced in my 12 years of online gaming.
