Roles Are Design Debt
Even though I'd categorize myself as mainly at RTS player, I've been an avid follower of League of Legends since Season 2. Over the 15 years (jesus) it's been fascinating to see the trajectory of its evolution for over 10 years and how the designers face its various problems. However, in the past couple years, the biggest issue that seems to have plagued the designers time and time again has been the problem of defined roles.
For some quick history, the roles of LoL top, mid, jungle, ADC, and support simply did not exist when the game first arrived. Even when I first started playing, seeing 2 people top and no jungler was a common sight in lower elos. It wasn't until Fnatic, the Season 1 World Champions, would come to define "the EU Meta" which was solo bruiser top, solo mage mid, tank jungler, and support/AD Carry roles that would define League of Legends to this day. Even the fact that it was called a "meta" sort of implied that this was never supposed to be codified, but rather simply the strongest arrangement of players at the time.
The idea of picking your roles was a literal game changer when this was announced
But going back to the present day 2026, comes the introduction of Role Quests which are meant to force the players into their specific roles by giving them rewards for doing something they would already be doing in that role, and by actively punishing them for going to the wrong lane.
If you've queued for top lane, you will be given a quest that when fulfillled will give you a strong buff, and these quests are designed in such a way that they can only be filled by their laner. That way, you are encouraged not to move between lanes, and to stay within your role.
This was introduced mainly as a fix to a strategy where the laners would rotate between all the lanes in order to avoid bad matchups, which was perceived to lead to stale and frustrating gameplay. Before these were introduced, minor changes would be introduced as fixes to previous laneswap metas, such as increasing turret health or turret gold distribution to try and combat lane swaps. With all of these changes, we should have the breathing room to just design the next champions to be in one lane, and there will never be a laneswap again right?
Even with these heavy handed changes, AD Carries champions which relied on auto attacks are being played in other lanes, and their traditional roles are being supplanted by spell-based mages. Supports are roaming around the map, and utilizing their quest EXP to slingshot them back into the game. And once again, we are back where we have started of needing to force players back into their roles.
So what are some ways we can try and avoid these problems in the first place, and what are some tradeoffs that we make when doing so?
Well first, it's important to understand why roles exist in the first place. It's easy to say that this problem never would have happened had Riot Games never codified the EU Meta in the first place, but the reality is that roles are an inevitable part of any team game. Even games like soccer (or football for any non-Americans reading this) have defined roles such as strikers, midfielders, defense, and even special rules for the goalie role. Since people, characters, or champions all have different abilities, naturally players will gravitate to playing the game in whatever manner they find most fun, appealling, or just whatever they happen to be best at. Thus, roles will just naturally form as people play to their strengths, and lean on their teammates to shore up their weaknesses.
Roles are an important part of a team activity, as it distills the jobs of a player down into meaningful archetypes that can help onboard a player quickly. What those roles are happen to usually fall into a combination of what's the strongest and what's most digestible. For instance, a football defender has a pretty straightforward job that at the end of the day sort of just boils down into "get the ball away from the net".
Roles in League of Legends were important to codify in that it removed the need to call your roles as soon as you arrived in lobby. This often meant that if you lived closer to the servers and/or had fast internet you got to play your favorite role, and if not then you'd better start learning support or jungle.
By codifying the role, it removed experience of getting your role stolen, but introduced a litany of design debt in and out of the game that the Riot team is struggling to pay off still to this day. Some form of roles of were likely inevitable, but we can look to other games to see how they deal with them.
Ah the good old days...
Be very careful when you have more players than resource islands
In League of Legends each lane gets waves of minions that give gold to a player whenever they deal the killing blow or the "last hit" to them. This means that in a minion wave, there is a finite amount of gold that can be given to each player, and having multiple players trying to go for last hits will often result in the detriment of both. Importantly, these lanes are geographically isolated, such that it's impossible for a player to obtain the resources in both lanes at the same time. Rather, they have to commit to staying in one lane.
However, in League of Legends there are 4 players that go into lanes, but only 3 lanes where these minions spawn. This is why supports (which traditionally share a lane with the AD Carry in the bottom lane) were given special items designed specifically for them even very early on in the game specifically to supplement their income to make up for their lack of gold.
If we imagine a world in which there were 4 players per team, the need for defined roles would be greatly reduced. Rather, each lane would just have their lane opponent to face off with. The possibility of switching lanes would be more palatable design wise as it doesn't change the fundamental laning experience. No matter what, you would be playing against one other opponent, and double-teaming (other than ganks) would come at a great cost of lost resources. I don't necessarily think it would be more fun as a support main myself, but I think it shows how certain distributions of resources let somebody stumble into a more codified game meta than they might initially have hoped for.
Or you could just play the cat :3
Base your game around a centralizing and universal mechanic:
In League of Legends, practically every stat, auto attack, and ability is significantly different between characters. It's what makes mastery of each champion such a deep experience, while also letting players express themselves individually with simply the champion they choose to enter the Summoner's Rift. But this means that across roles, the difference becomes even more stark, and it's very difficult to switch roles as a casual or even competitive player. This means that if the codified meta shifts, it can leave many players with a frustrating experience, because their expectations on the rules of the game they've put many hours into has been completely upended.
Funnily enough, to illustrate this point we can look to Riot Games' tactical shooter Valorant to see how this shapes out. In Valorant, every single character has multiple abilities similarly to League of Legends, but the difference is that they all have the exact same guns. Every single character can buy the same guns and use the same weaponry, and the main way to interact in the game is indeed through the gunplay rather than the abilities. So while the abilities do define and differentiate all the agents from one another, much of the skill is just the raw universal pointin n' clickin.
Roles DO exist in Valorant depending on what the abilities each character has specializes in, but they aren't codified into the fabric of the game as you can choose any number and combination of different roles. Valorant (and many other shooters) can get away with this because their universal guns are what the game is centralized around, thus individual character differences aren't as game defining as they are in League of Legends. So even if you can't get your role that you usually play, you're probably able to be at least semi-competent in your role. But if you take the average support player and put them in the jungle (where there isn't even a lane), it's unlikely they'll be competent at all.
Quick tangent: Funnily enough Overwatch is a perfect example of this in reverse action. Despite also being an FPS, every character is extremely different and thus ran into pretty much the exact same problems as League of Legends to the point of even changing the team sizes due to how overpowered one of their classes were. I highly recommend checking out this video: The WatchOver: Every Era in Overwatch Explained to learn more about this. Overwatch doesn't even have limited resources and thus doesn't have to deal with a zero-sum resource game like League of Legends, and yet still suffered from this by sheer class power imbalance.
IYKYK
This is all to say the more specific classes you have, the harder your life will become
It isn't necessarily bad to have a role only sequestered into one location, so long as there's a "natural" reason for that role to exist. Take for instance, jungling in League of Legends. Rather than fight the minions that regularly spawn, there is a forest between the lanes in which there are monsters that similarly give resources. Naturally, a jungler role emerged as it was more efficient to have somebody fully dedicated to getting resources from these monsters, rather than sharing lane resources with another person. The map design lent itself to a role that was defined merely by where they went and what they did without having to put in external and opaque rules to shoehorn players into their places.
One of the classes that gets the most grief from getting its role subsumed would be the AD Carry class. While other roles are defined merely by their location, AD Carry is specifically designed for auto-attack based champions to exist. While this has more recently moved to being called Bot[om] lane, the vast majority of players in this role specialize in these auto attack champions and usually enjoy playing these champions exclusively. Because the damage type is baked into the role alongside the location, it can be very frustrating for these hyper specialized players to be pushed out of their role. This recently has been happening due to the strength of mages in the bot lane which were traditionally reserved for the mid lane.
Classes are hard, but can be very rewarding when designed well
The more specialized your classes are, the more problems you may have to face because you are fracturing your playerbase into different segments. Inevitably, some of those segments will have periods of strength sometimes compared to the others, and maybe even at the detriment of others. This may give you cause to implement out of game matchmaking role queues and codify them into the game to improve player out of game experience. But be careful if those defined segments didn't actually have to exist within the context of a competitive metagame in the first place. If the roles were merely a transient meta that you as the developer have now locked into the game, you may have accidentally signed a design mortgage you'll spend the entire rest of the game's lifecycle paying off.
Just because something carries much design debt, doesn't necessarily mean you shouldn't have them. Having a role is what it means to live in a society, as we literally "have a role in society." When a team of players come together to become more than the sum of their individual parts, it can be some of the most rewarding experiences multiplayer games have to offer.
Hope you have a good day and may your next team not have any autofills~
Jerry
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