League of Legends players have uncovered a significant oversight in the game’s role assignment system that affects full premade teams. When five friends queue up together for Flex Queue or Swiftplay matches, they can accidentally end up without crucial roles like Jungle or Support if no one explicitly selects them.
The issue has some pretty serious gameplay consequences. If no player in a five-stack picks the Jungle role before queueing, the game won’t assign anyone to that spot automatically. Even worse, this means no one on the team can choose Smite as a summoner spell, which you really need to clear jungle camps and grab objectives like Dragon and Baron.
It’s a similar story with Support—if nobody locks in that role, the whole team loses access to support items, which are huge for gold income and vision. Not having these makes winning a lot tougher, so teams end up either dodging the match or just playing at a big disadvantage without those tools.
The problem started after recent changes to League’s role system. Riot Games made it so only the person playing Jungle can take Smite, and only the assigned Support can buy support items. This was supposed to stop players from trolling or messing around with odd setups, but it’s caused problems for groups of five friends who want to play together.
What really annoys people is that Fill doesn’t always cover what’s missing in five-stacks. Some players have tried going with “top, adc, support, and 2 fill picks,” but ended up with “2 tops and no jungle” anyway.
Riot is aware of what’s going on, and a developer has said: “We have a change in progress to make sure that when your 5 stack gets to a champ select lobby, there’s 1 of each unique role assigned now that they have gameplay attached to them.” So, until an update rolls out, five-stacks should double-check that every role is filled before hitting the queue.
This whole bug also takes away some of the fun flexibility five-stacks used to have. Before, groups could try out weird team comps for a laugh, like running double jungle or stacking multiple supports. With these new strict role rules, there’s not much room left for goofing around, which is a bit of a downer for casual squads.
