Why is there autofill in ranked?

When we make a game, we want to find ten players of equal skill in the positions they want to be playing. But unfortunately, not every position is equally popular, so we have to get people to fill in for those positions to make sure matches happen in a reasonable amount of time. Without autofill, finding matches would not only take longer, but they’d end up involving a broader skill range, as we stretch our search outward to find the 10th player we need. Our goal is to strike the right balance between making you wait for a game and making the fairest games possible, and autofill is a necessary part of that balance.

While we probably can’t ever fully do away with autofill, we are looking to make changes to improve upon the system. We’re currently testing out “autofill parity” in some regions, which means that when we make a match with an autofilled player on one team, the opposing team also has an autofilled player so the matchup feels more fair. As soon as we know these changes are going well (hopefully within a few months), we will roll them out globally. And if it’s not going so well, we’ll roll it back and try again.



Once these initial changes are in a good place, we can even try to get both autofilled players facing off in the same position. No promises here though—forcing autofills to be in the same position can make queue times explode if we’re not careful, so we’ll be doing a lot of testing first.

- RiotIAmWalrus, Game Designer

