LoL matches with autofill imbalances ‘effectively eliminated’ as Riot hunts for ranked fairness

Riot Games has today declared a huge victory over imbalanced League of Legends matches that were filled with lopsided autofill players. It’s a big step for the developers as they continue to massage the MOBA’s matchmaking towards proper fairness.

The latest swing at League matchmaking and its balance came in Patch 14.17, when Riot’s developers targeted side parity as well as matching LP gaps. The biggest slice of this change, however, leaned into solving autofill by leveling out how many appear in each matchmade party—a core objective the devs now seem to have conquered, with League balance boss Matt Leung-Harrison declaring the issue “effectively eliminated.”

Elimination’s exactly the right word here too: Before these League Patch 14.17 changes were added to the MOBA’s match creation coding, as many as 15 percent of ranked games all across the ladder would have an “imbalance” (e.g., three off-role players on one team and one on the other). Today that number’s been dragged all the way down to as little as 0.1 percent, according to the League play metrics Riot’s been looking at in-house.

The work’s not quite over for League‘s team yet though, with one issue still remaining: Some ranked matches still load up with an autofilled player on one side and none on the other. “We want to do more work in this area,” Leung-Harrison admitted, adding higher MMR matches were the clearest pain point for that last issue right now.

How Riot plans to overcome this final hurdle wasn’t explained, though it will now mark the third time the League developers have delved into the matchmaking code this year.

One thing that could prove the turning point in Riot’s ongoing war with fairness in ranked is the TrueSkill2 program the devs have been cooking up for some time. While it’s not specifically related to the autofill system, players being more accurately squared against each other in matches should mean less need for off-role assignments.

Several tweaks to how many League Points players were being deducted for losses should also help somewhat, with the system now expected to stop punishing defeated teams so hard by “taking more LP per loss than they’d have gained for winning.”

“We’ll let you all know [how everything is looking] once we have an update on what testing has shown,” Leung-Harrison said in his sign-off regarding matchmaking.

These matchmaking victories—and Riot’s ongoing plans—couldn’t have come at a better time for League, with the game now preparing for a cataclysmic change to seasons. Starting in January, the MOBA will now cycle through three seasons across each year; a huge expansion from the one it’s hosted every 12 months since launch.

This surprise overhaul, which was unveiled in a League developer update at the same time as Leung-Harrison’s autofill victory declaration, will add clear themes to each season and more closely tie future champion releases and lore to the resets.

Said League‘s studio head Andrei van Roon after the announcement: “Our goal is for each season to feel distinct with different experiences, themes, and moments highlighted.”