We agree it can feel bad when getting autofilled you could just become a support Brand one-trick like me, but I realise he’s not for everyone. The only way for autofill to not trigger right now is if each queued position had an equal amount of demand literally all the time (20% of players per position). The design challenge is trying to strike the balance of you being able to pick your position, not having infinite queue times, and getting fair matches. We’ve been constantly working on the threshold for when autofill activates on each server, and we feel things are generally pretty stable right now.
Since 2016, we’ve given protection from autofill if you recently filled, played support, or if you’re in a promo series. Autofill was introduced as a last resort way of ensuring people didn’t sit in queues for ridiculously long stretches. We also tried labels showing which positions would have the fastest queue times, which initially closed the gap, but players went back to their preferred styles after a couple of weeks. We tried out position veto (which ultimately ended up sucking because basically everyone chose to veto support, lowering matchmaking quality overall). We’ve been experimenting with a number of alternative position select systems. We’ve been adding things like item quests, more interesting active items, a large variety of support champs to play, end-of-game CC and vision scores, and we’re going to continue trying to improve. We’re trying to tackle this on the gameplay side first and foremost by making support more fun/rewarding to play. Currently, around 70% of autofills are into support, and 30% all other positions combined. When we introduced position select for everyone, we saw queue times spike dramatically as few players wanted to play support.