League of Legends is one of the media juggernauts of gaming. When it debuted in 2009, I wouldn’t have believed you if you had told me that a concept that started out as a Warcraft III map would form the basis for multiple games, several fun music videos and live K-pop performances, and of course a popular one. Netflix show.
With League’s continued expansion, you could assume that League of Legends, which is sharpening its 13th anniversary, is entering its retirement phase. But League is as good as it’s ever been. Constant balance changes, new champions and complete reworks of old favorites mean there is almost always something new to learn.
That’s not to say there aren’t live issues. With Riot reporting at the end of 2021 it had over 180 million monthly players, it would be impossible to please everyone. But after years of experience, the development team has become incredibly skilled at interpreting and responding to these issues, often quite quickly and with a good amount of communication. I think the League and the community in general is in one of the best positions it has been in many years.
What has happened lately?
The sustainability update, which Riot implemented in May, has been a topic of division since its implementation. One of League’s biggest mid-season patches, the aim of the update was to make champions tankier after years of damage crawling through virtually every area. Each champion in the game gained more HP, armor, and magical resistance, while systems like healing, shields, and anything else that can be used to try and maintain your health pool during combat were rebalanced, with most being more effective were made to stay in line with the increased health pools.
The purpose of this update was to try and make fights longer and reduce the frequency of one-shotting opponents before they have a chance to react. The impact on the meta was almost instantaneous and largely lived up to, with fights extending into longer battles and the ability to shoot an opponent in one shot greatly reduced.
I think the only realistic solution is to keep individual champions balanced.
But there was one big impact of the update that most people, including Riot, weren’t thrilled about. Because every champion is now more tank-like from the start, kills became harder to secure during the first minutes of matches. At the highest levels, this meant the meta shifted to champions scaling to their late game peaks, such as Gangplank and Jinx, as the typical counter to shut them down early when they’re weak wasn’t particularly effective. They were often supported by healers and other champions who can help them right into the late game.
Most recent patches have attempted to address this in a number of ways. In patch 12.14, healing potions and defensive runes were significantly grained, making it harder to stay in orbit and regain full health without a trip back home. While champions with strong healing abilities, who sometimes felt like they had to choose, have mostly reduced their effectiveness in recent updates.
It’s certainly been a step in the right direction, but it still feels like more could be done to make the early game more meaningful. Simply increasing the damage would just reverse the impact of Riot’s sustainability update. I think the only realistic solution is to continue to balance champions individually, hopefully to make some early game support effective enough to occasionally shut down late game scaling champions in the first minutes of a match.
Are players happy?
Recognizing that League’s player population is one of the largest and most diverse on the planet, the answer for most players is yes. Despite some shared frustrations, League of Legends is in good shape, and crucially, when a major issue crops up, Riot has quickly fixed it over the past few years, as has with the durability update with the first changes coming in the first few days and a huge patch in a few weeks..
League’s recent controversies, or at least the controversies that have been big in western communities, have tended to focus on systems outside the game itself, such as Riot’s communications, management of the professional scene, or customer service.
We recently got to see Udyr’s new look and first impressions are good.
There’s been a lot of talk about both the pro scene in North America and how Riot is marketing the game in the region. An example of this is the disappointment of fans when they banned LCS players from participating in the big Mr Beast vs Ninja celebrity show match, then banned former pro Doublelift from streaming the LCS together due to criticism of their decision. Then there was the viral story that easily topped a Korean streamer who got trolled for three hours in a single match and then banned, which isn’t a great look.
When is the next big update?
The next game-changing patch will come at the end of the year when pre-season hits. Slowly the details of what to expect in the preseason are trickling out, with the first big change being the jungle.
Riot revealed that it aims to make the jungle less intimidating, which is incredibly welcome for someone who only ventured there when jungle Graves first became a thing and was OP. Systems to show recommended paths in the early levels, simplifying the line mechanics, and even adding pets that will help you take camps have all been revealed as things the development team is working on. While there are no details yet and this could all change with a few more months of Season 12 to go, the thinking is that the jungle is a role that you can just invade and play quite easily with a wide variety of champions like the most of the others are quite exciting.
Until then, we can expect the smaller, incremental patches to continue tweaking the strongest and weakest champions, and most likely continue to tinker with systems to try and manage the impact of the durability update.
Fans of Udyr can look forward to his full rework that will hopefully breathe new life into the old champion when it launches with patch 12.16. After winning a fan vote where he had more than double the votes of the next champion, we finally got to see Udyr’s new look recently and first impressions are good. Visually, it’s a huge improvement, with many fans on Reddit liking its more grown-up dad-bod look which is much more in line with his knowledge. Early PBE testers suggest that the new and improved Udyr retains the core champion design (iconic stances between which Udyr can change), and that the bonuses you get from switching stances add depth that wasn’t there before.
The other change that could have a major impact on the game for most players is the addition of League of Legends to Xbox Game Pass, which is both exciting and slightly disturbing. Game Pass subscribers will unlock each champion, which should encourage some players to experiment with new characters. The potential downside to this is that for the first few weeks after it’s available, chances are your games will be filled with people playing champions they’ve never used.
Things I’d like to see in the future of LoL
A new or just significantly improved customer, please, literally anything to make it better
The League of Legends client remains disappointing at best and incredibly frustrating at worst. Many players continue to complain about the system resources required to do seemingly very little, you have to sit on the loading screen for a while rather than loading assets in the background like pretty much any comparable game, and it lacks basic features like being able to view. of a skin you may want to buy in-game.
Unfortunately, a client update does not appear to be on Riot’s priority list, with no significant client updates announced. The sense of community, especially on Reddit, also seems to become less positive over time, with at least one major thread a week about customer condition, no doubt helped by how resourceful the recent Star Guardian homepages were. The second most updated thread on r/LeagueOfLegends in the past month featured video clips of some nice improvements to client animations that Riot showed in 2016 that never materialized.
A big map change
Games can and should change their play spaces. The three-point line of basketball – something we associate inextricably with the sport – was not introduced until 1979. Valve has overhauled and tweaked Counter-Strike maps that have been around since ’99. I’m sure many players would object to major changes to the League map, but there hasn’t been a truly groundbreaking update to the core map since 2014. At this stage in the game’s lifespan, everyone knows the best routes to take through the jungle, the main objectives and the optimal locations to fight or stalk opponents. Wouldn’t it take us all out of our comfort zone if much of that ingrained knowledge had to be relearned?
Looking across the river, map changes are one of the main ways Dota 2 has kept itself fresh and exciting over the years. The map is almost unrecognizable from the one it had in 2014, and the map changes have proven to be far more effective at shaking up the entire game than customizing individual heroes or core systems.
When shrines (healing baths scattered around the map) were added to Dota 2, it created a meta where you had to take down enemies quickly before they could heal without a trip to base. As they were removed and outposts were added (a neutral structure on either side of the map that can be controlled by a single team), position and territory control became even more important. The repositioning of Roshan, Dota’s version of Baron, completely changed the way combat takes place around the goal and removed one of the main advantages for one team. All of these changes meant that players had to relearn the most important parts of the game for years to come.
It would take some getting used to, and it would undoubtedly be one of the biggest shakeups in LoL history, but after eight years of largely the same map, it certainly feels like a good time to turn the table on Summoner’s Rift.
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