League Of Legends Queue Times Have Gotten Ridiculous For Some Players Following Matchmaking Changes

In the latest patch for League of Legends, Riot decided to try a little experiment on the MOBA's EU North East, Oceania, and Russian servers. They have removed "Autofill" from the matchmaking queue, meaning players are being matched up solely based on their primary and secondary role choices. While Autofill can sometimes lead to players being assigned roles they may not have wanted, it did help move matchmaking along at a quicker pace.

As pointed out by Games Radar, players in these regions are now reporting queue times substantially longer than they were before the removal of Autofill. One post from Reddit claims a three-stack of players were waiting over two hours in the queue. Another was queueing for an hour and a half, changing around their secondary role choice to try to hasten the process.

It's still early days of testing the matchmaking system without Autofill in League of Legends, so we'll have to wait and see what Riot's next step is, but so far it sounds like Autofill may be the necessary evil that makes matchmaking work within a reasonable amount of time.