Autofill is a Terrible Design Choice For Low Elo

I would much rather have a 2 minute longer queue

But would you rather have a 15 or 20 minute longer queue? What about an hour longer? Without autofill, that's what some players in Silver and Gold were facing any time they tried to queue up for their preferred role, and that was with double role selection where they probably wouldn't even get their main role most of the time.

Also, increasing queue times for anyone actually increases queue times for everybody. So even if you would be waiting 30 minutes for a game, it's possible that that would mean the entire playerbase at your Elo is waiting a second or two longer since the system is now missing 3 or 4 potential roles that it still needs to fill. Add up enough people like you and queue times get unacceptable for the average player. Allowing people to opt out of autofill would be the same as removing autofill completely as far as queue times are concerned because the people that autofill needs would be the ones opting out and the ones it doesn't need wouldn't.

While getting autofilled sucks, the tradeoff is that everyone gets significantly faster queues (except for support/fill players who now actually have a wait time instead of 2 second queues). And not only that, but more players get their primary roles more often.

And if you really want to avoid autofill, just play a game of support or fill. Then you get autofill immunity for a few games afterward and you've also done a good deed of preventing another player from being autofilled into that position. I bet playing support when you're prepared for it is a lot better than randomly getting forced into it.

I feel like we've rehashed this topic so many times, and Riot has released all kinds of articles and information explaining it, but most people don't tend to be informed on how the system actually works, so I guess we need to keep having these threads.

/r/leagueoflegends Thread