Over the years, we’ve experimented with a couple of alternative position select systems, including one where you could “veto” a position. Essentially, it ended up sucking because everyone chose to veto Support, which lowered matchmaking quality and increased queue times dramatically.

Autofill was introduced as a last resort way of ensuring people don’t sit in queue for a ridiculously long time. We try to avoid autofilling you if we can, but the design challenge here is striking a balance between you getting to pick your position, not having infinite queue times, and getting fair matches. Currently, the only way autofill wouldn’t be necessary is if each position had an equal amount of demand—20% of players—literally all the time. This is a tricky thing to get right, but we’re going to continue looking for ways to get you the position you want and make every game feel winnable.