A League of Legends player who plays on the North American server recently conducted an experiment in ranked solo queue. Instead of choosing two preferred roles, they simply opted to autofill and let the system decide the role they played in ranked.
Reddit user u/SometimesIComplain (don’t we all) charted every role they were assigned in 120 games, plotted their distribution, and shared their results on the League of Legends subreddit.
Suffice to say, even they were surprised.
- Oh My God prove Shyvana top is actually viable in the current meta
- Olleh catches TSM by surprise with completely off-meta Dr Mundo support
One Reddit user’s autofill role distribution says a lot about the current state of League of Legends
Out of 120 autofill games, u/SometimesIComplain shared that they were allocated jungle a whopping 50% of the time at Gold rank.
“It’s no secret at this point that it’s the least liked role in the game, largely due to the fact that you’re the scapegoat for everything,” they wrote. “And maybe partially because Riot has changed the jungle quite a bit and people don’t want to deal with their role changing so much.”
Even though the jungle is a game-changing role, especially at pro level, they’re also blamed the most in solo queue, especially by laners who may feel that they’re constantly getting ganked by the enemy jungler while their own jungler is nowhere nearby.
| ROLE | NO. OF TIMES ALLOCATED |
| Jungle | 61 |
| Bot | 25 |
| Support | 22 |
| Top | 9 |
| Mid | 3 |
What surprised them the most was that they were given bot lane more than support. While it wasn’t by a large margin, they expected support to be the second most autofilled role.
Support, after all, is dependent on how well the bot laner performs, and how the team makes use of your crowd control, ward placement, and overall macro. Bot laners on the other hand, are built to be the highest damage dealers in the game, with high potential to influence its outcome.
“Nobody wants to play the two most team-dependent roles,” Reddit user u/LSatou replied, putting forth a different view based on the results. “Jungle is at the mercy of lane pressure in most games and AD is at the mercy of their support for the first 10-15 minutes.”
Another user u/Ky1arStern echoed this sentiment. “That’s why I got out of ADC. I hate that my performance is entirely related to whether my team will peel for me,” they wrote.
What was undisputed of course, is that mid and top, the only two solo lanes, were the least autofilled roles since the ranked solo queue mentality is all about “win lane, win game.”
When LoL first debuted, solo queue roles depended on how fast one could type in chat, and how good you were at negotiating with your random teammates. It was in this chaotic environment that memes like “mid or feed” were born.
In 2016, five years after the game’s first beta, Riot Games finally implemented a role selection feature in ranked. Before queuing up, Summoners can now select two preferred primary and secondary roles, and the system will — most of the time at least — allocate you one of those two roles.
Besides the five available roles, autofill is a sixth option. This accommodates players who may not have a strong preference for a specific role, and also reduces their queue times.
READ MORE: Azir has a positive win rate in only one region among LCS, LEC, LCK, LPL
