I don't see why they couldn't add this in as an option. 'Meta mode' and let people decide if the queue times and resulting games are worth it.

aka

awesome thread bump.

Why can't I play Garen mid? I mean, why not? Your idea right here and now is that we can only play champions in the role that Riot thinks is appropriate for those champions.

You know about Udyr, right? Go look. On "Tips and Items," Riot describes Udyr as "one of the best junglers in the game," yet he doesn't get a jungler tag. He gets melee and fighter as his tags. Using your idea, I'd only be able to play Udyr top lane.

Or how about Alistar, Blitzcrank, Cho'gath, Fiddlesticks, Leona, Nunu, and Zyra? That's 7 perfectly viable support champions, including 2 on the permaban draft mode as supports (Blitz/Ali) and one that is picked in a ridiculously high amount of matches as support (Nunu) that all would no longer be allowed to play as support because none of those champions have the support tag.

Riot's tags in terms of who can play what role are terrible.
I'd like it to be noted that this post was made within 24 hours of Vi becoming available, and while I think it is most likely no one will see Vi as an ADC or as a support, it's really hard to say what's appropriate for her. Her kit isn't quite as straight forward as I thought it was going to be from having just read about her.Nothing guarantees that you won't also have dodges with a queue-by-role system. So on top of the already extended queue time (to fill all the roles), you'll still have dodges from people that don't like their own team comp, are afraid of the enemy team comp, or notice that they've been counterpicked. You'll still have dodges due to "Oh, my friend just logged on, I'm gonna go play with him."The problem is it drastically increases both the queue time of the people who select the option, but it also increases the queue time of the people who don't want to do this. You're removing people who otherwise would have been in queue with me making match-making take that much longer to build my match. And what's more, the longer match-making takes, the broader its search gets. So instead of finding people all within 50 Elo of me, it might find people who are within 100 Elo, or 150 Elo, or larger and larger and larger as time goes on. This will make match-made games less and less competitive and enjoyable. Increasing queue time is a much larger issue than I think some of you realize.

True, role-based queuing will not eliminate people who play the game only to troll. These people suck and they are able to achieve their troll-y goals in the current system as well as they would in a role-based queue.

This proposed change is aimed at addressing the situation where two people want a single role, leaving no one to play some other role. At best this results in someone playing a role with which they are not comfortable and do not enjoy. At worst it results in someone deliberately sabotaging their own team's chances of winning. The situation is completely avoidable. A role-based queue can ensure that there is at least one summoner on every team for each role.

People who queue just to anger their teammates can already do this with or without a role-based queue, that's what the Tribunal is for. Also, perhaps the tribunal could show the role for which the reported player queued. TrollFace1234 queued for support, selected Darius and it looks from chat like they went top while arguing about it with teammates? Makes it real easy to click that "Punish" button.

Absolutely. Just as you can't control the champ selections of your teammates now, a role-based queue should not limit anyone's choices. I may not like it when my support chooses Karma, but at least I was lucky enough to be teamed up with someone who likes to support!

These are very real issues, but the worries people have about this are speculative. We have no idea how much longer it would take to use this system, because it hasn't been rolled out in beta. I'd argue that waiting an extra few minutes for a more enjoyable 40 minute game would be worth it.

You can enjoy the game from positions other than your preferred role.

Moreover, "OMG HOW DO YOU QUEUE FOR MID AND PLAY MID SO BAD!!" will start happening en masse. Guaranteed.

It already happens when people call mid, get mid, and have a bad game. Why wouldn't it happen even more when people queue up for mid and get it guaranteed.

And even if I'm not that mid that's getting harassed, or the idiot who is doing the harassing, I'm still not going to enjoy the game because I have to put up with an idiot harassing a teammate because they're having a bad game.

Queuing by position doesn't guarantee an enjoyable game.


Moreover, you didn't address at all the other issue related to longer queue times. Please read this part. The longer your queue time, the wider the search range. If you find a match almost instantly, the game has paired you with people who should be essentially identical skill level. With passing time, the match-maker broadens its criteria. With passing time, getting the player into any match starts to take priority over getting the player into a competitive match with players of his own skill level.

So if you lengthen the queue time, you decrease the competitiveness of matches by broadening the skill scope the match-maker looks in. If we're talking about ranked Elo matches, it may be a team with a couple 1500 players, a couple 1200 players, and a 900 player, against a team with four 1000 players and a 1400 player. These games would absolutely be no fun, regardless of whether or not you're in your preferred role.

True. All it can do is help to avoid the situation where two players want to play one role, and no one wants to play another. Trolls will still troll, pseudonymous people on the internet can still be ******s. (Hehe, it censors ass-hat.) This proposed change cannot solve everything, but I believe that it would help enough to be worth the potential cost.

How this change would be implemented and how it would affect matchmaking is completely unknown. Yes, it is possible that in order to shorten queues there could be an increase in the range of Elo levels in any given game. It's very hard to say how much of an increase, just like it's very hard to say how much longer we might have to wait in queue. But I think that it's a good enough idea that it would increase the enjoyment of current players and serve to lessen the difficult learning curve for new players.

If there were two solo/duo queue options, one for role-based queuing and one for the current system, which do you think more people would choose?

By the way, Pogo^4, thank you for your reasoned and intelligent debate on this. I think the idea deserves consideration and I hope that our conversation will make more people think about it and maybe prompt a Red response to shine some light on their thinking! Props to you.

Okay first and foremost, you simply can't argue that it's impossible to have any idea on how queue times would be effected and what impact it would have on match-making. To make this claim, you have to have zero understanding of how match-making works.

Just because I mention Elo doesn't mean that normals are immune to this, because normals have a hidden Elo. Riot wants matches to be fun, and in order for the match to be as fun as possible for both teams, it needs to be a close competitive match. As such, there is a hidden Elo for normal matches so that the relative skill level of all the players is as close as possible. It's used for match-making.

Right, so here's a rough idea of how match-making currently works (in a system with no role option). Let's say I'm a 1200 player. I queue up. Match-making tries to find 9 other players that are 1200 Elo. That's where it starts. It starts just by looking for other players in the queue with identical Elo. As time passes, that scope broadens. It will look for 1200. Then it will look for 1190-1210. Then it will look for 1180-1220. Now currently, especially if you're pretty average skill level, the scope doesn't have to increase by very much to fill the lobby out. In a lot of cases, the lowest Elo player is only about 100 Elo below the highest Elo, and that's not a very big skill gap. Everyone else in that lobby is somewhere in between.

But let's talk about a role-queuing system. Let's say you're a 1200 level player and you're queuing for Mid. Okay, there are tons of mids, so you probably already are given one of the longest queue time. The first thing the system will do is match you with people very close to your level. It will probably easily find another 1200 mid, and a couple 1200 tops to go on either team. The scope for ADC will probably be pretty narrow too. It may be 1150-1250. Jungle may be in the same neighborhood. It just depends, and it doesn't really matter. For these 4 roles, match-making very well may not be any different then it already is...

But now we have to find a support. By the time it gets to 1 minute, 2 minutes, 3 minutes gone by looking for a support player, the Elo range it's looking in can get pretty massive. Now, if it were just going to stick two 1800 supports against each other in a 1200 match, well, that'd be okay for all the 1200 players, but the 1800 supports would hate having to play that match. But the thing is, that's not even what's going to happen. The range gets expanded upwardly and downwardly as time passes. It's just as likely that one team gets an 1800 support while the other team gets a 600 support.

Now one team has a player who is so much better than everyone else that he can potentially single-handedly carry the game (even from the support position) while the other team has a player who is so much worse than everyone else that he becomes a major liability and could potentially single-handedly cost his team the match.

And if you think complaints about getting bad teammates are bad now, just wait until you screw with match-making with a system that takes so long to put teams together that there's no reasonable expectation that everyone is approximately the same Elo as there is now.

And this is partly speculative. There's not a way to know EXACTLY how it will work unless it's beta tested or something, but you can't simply write the issue off entirely. That kind of defeats the point of even having the discussion. If your counterpoint to my point is "we can't know unless we beta test it" then we're not having a debate.

We can take what we already know about match-making, take everyone's admittance that role-queuing will increase the time it takes matches to be made, and make some reasonable expectations on the repercussions of increasing queue times.


And I, for one, would much rather play a role other than my preferred role in order to have a competitive match than to work in a system that guarantees me my favorite role, but means matches are less competitive (and therefore less fun).


I don't know. I think giving the option for both is actually significantly worse than forcing one or the other (for queue time reasons primarily).

Hello.
So I read this whole post thinking I was for this idea and Pogo^4's last post completely changed my mind.

I'm one of those people who is willing to play every role, so I get really pissed when people are stubborn and refuse to do what's best for the team. Moreover, I'm not even level 30 yet, so my hidden ELO is pretty low and I'm usually matched with new people who don't really care that much about the meta and do whatever they want.

Even if you don't think the meta should be followed exactly, no one can argue that having a teammate who takes your ADC's cs or having no jungler when the other team does won't make the game much harder to win.

Therefore, I think this is really needed. However, the matchmaking issue Pogo^4 just brought to the table is much more serious than I ever thought. So now, I'm really unsure as to what should happen.
This post may be pointless as it doesn't bring new information and it doesn't argue for or against, but I'm willing to continue the debate and see what happens.

By the way, I meant to comment on this specific part of the post earlier and got wrapped up explaining how match-making works.

The thing is, new players don't really play by the meta. There are so many other things to learn about the game that the meta is actually a pretty foreign concept to most players until at least summoner level 20 or so when you can really start jungling. And I'm talking about legitimately new players, not smurfs.

A role-queuing system might help them learn the meta earlier, but we get back to the enforced meta argument. And the biggest problem here is that if you force someone to play by that meta from their very, very first game and they do nothing but play that meta all the way up, then if the meta changes, they're extremely lost. Plus it will be harder to learn how to deal with variations of the meta.

And again, like I said, you can't really legitimately jungle before you get access to tier 3 runes, so you're applying this meta role-queuing system to a lot of players that really can't even jungle. 2-1-2 is a perfectly legitimate meta. It even gets played in level 30 blind pick matches, and it's definitely the norm in low level matches.