League of Legends.
Reframing Autofill as a choice, not a punishment, with a pre-game lobby redesigned as a modular dashboard for the longer queues that follow.
Riot has since shipped much of this. 🎉
- Scope
- Product Design
- Status
- Concept
- Team
- Solo
- Jul – Aug 2023
What is League of Legends / Autofill
League of Legends
Riot Games’ 2009 free-to-play 5v5 MOBA, where each player chooses a role, Top, Jungle, Mid, Bot, or Support, and one of 170+ champions with unique abilities. Teams fight over gold, XP, and objectives to grow stronger and destroy the enemy base. Famously deep and hard to master, it’s been esports’ #1 title since 2013.
Autofill
In ranked play, players queue for specific roles and are expected to compete in the role they are assigned when the match begins. Autofill is a system that occasionally places players into a different role to keep queue times reasonable, meaning players who main highly contested roles get autofilled the most often.
Autofill offloads the system’s constraints onto the players least willing to bear them.
The rising ranked player spends their out-of-game time studying their main role to climb. Their goal isn’t to play more games, it’s to play better ones. Imagine training as a Wide Receiver, then finding out at kick-off you’ll be playing Center, with no way to opt out. That’s Autofill: it sabotages the quality of every match it touches, punishing the very players working hardest to improve. I set out to redesign it as a choice rather than a punishment, without breaking the queue-time stability it exists to protect.
Matchmaking Analysis
A cluttered home screen breaks convention and slows you down.
Every mode decision is crammed onto one screen at once.
Autofill punishes regular play, with no way to opt out.
Unpopular roles get queue priority, shifting the cost onto you.
Then you wait, staring at a blank screen with nothing to do.
Autofill as a choice, with the trade-off made visible.
Riot treats Autofill as a necessary evil: some roles are far more popular than others, so forcing fills is how queue times stay sane. But you can reach the same equilibrium without forcing anyone. Let players opt in or out of Autofill, and show the estimated queue time that results from their choice, live. Some will happily wait five times as long to lock their main; others just want into a game. Like a free market, if waits get too long more players opt in and times regress to the mean, so the system balances itself on human nature instead of coercion.
If players choose to wait, give them something to do.
Opting out lengthens the wait, and Riot wants players engaged in the client, not off watching a video elsewhere. So I rebuilt the lobby as a modular dashboard of game-mode content: video lessons and champion spotlights to study, drills and strategy quizzes to warm up, and quick access to runes, spells, and emotes pulled forward from Champion Select. The kind of in-queue activity most modern games already have.
The client remembers the role and mode you queue for almost every time, so a single Play button on the home screen drops you straight into queue instead of five clicks deep.
A modern visual language in place of Hextech.
Riot has since reworked the Autofill system. 🎉
Riot rarely overhauls its core systems; players had lived with Autofill largely unchanged for over a decade. Yet, in the years since, the one system they chose to rebuild is the same one I singled out here, and what they shipped points to the same diagnosis and closely mirrors the changes I proposed.
An in-lobby Autofill status indicator. The lobby now explains, in place, when Autofill is possible and how role-fairness works, surfacing the reasoning rather than springing the outcome on you.
LP rewards for playing an off-role. Aegis of Valor pays double LP for an autofilled win and refunds the loss, so an off-role game is a chance rather than a sentence.
Full LP refunds for ruined games. Lost LP is returned when a game is decided by an AFK or a troll, attacking the same prisoner-of-the-game feeling that motivated the project.
Ever-changing nav icons now label on hover.
Your profile picture opens your profile, not a settings dialog.
Perpetual error alert now surfaces for real emergencies only.
Free champion rotation now intelligently surfaces for players still building a roster.