Quick Gameplay Thoughts: March 21

Hi folks,

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Usual Disclaimers

These posts will often contain talk about future work we're doing, or planning to do, that isn't yet guaranteed to ship. The nature of the work could change or, depending on what we discover, projects mentioned may get put delayed or even stopped. If you'd like to see a Tweet whenever a new one of these posts goes up: https://twitter.com/RiotMeddler

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Solo Snowball versus Team Snowball

We're going to be looking at how some of the rewards in the game contribute to solo snowball versus team snowball over some upcoming patches. We shifted a few things towards team snowball a while back, aiming to give more agency/impact to roles who needed it (jungle/support at the time) and reduce the degree to which the other positions would sometimes get so individually far ahead they were too hard to deal with. In retrospect we think we went too far in that direction though. That reduced concentration of power makes it harder to get ahead enough to really carry and means that when you're facing an enemy team that's ahead it's a bit too much that they're all ahead and threatening than that there are particular enemies who are really high threat you need to try and play around/shut down.

We're planning to start by shifting shutdown gold back to going to whoever killed the enemy on a killstreak, rather than being split globally with the team. That's also got the benefit of making it more possible to get back into a losing lane if you can manage to get a kill on someone who's significantly up on kills on you.

If that shutdown gold changes goes well we'll then look at see whether we should shift any other team rewards back towards solo rewards. Want to make sure we're getting the desired result before doing that though and cautious about swinging back too far in the other direction.

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Next Champion Roadmap

I've been seeing questions about when we'll have the next Champion roadmap start to crop up quite a bit recently so I checked in with Reav3 (who writes them) yesterday to find out. Current estimate is the next post is likely to in mid to late April, so about a month from now.

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Homestart tuning and invades

We'll be doing some tuning to the start of game speed boost in an upcoming patch, probably 8.7. Back in pre-season we increased its speed significantly so that we could reduce time until minions spawn without cutting into invade times too much. That's worked well overall, the exact implementation can be a bit too punishing for aggressors though, given they'll sometimes be trying to chase down defenders who haven't yet entered the river and so still have the large speed boost themselves. Looking at adjusting things a bit as a result so defensive positions aren't rewarded quite as much. That's likely to look something like removing the speed after passing the outer towers (instead of the river), reducing the speed buff duration a bit, or making the speed boost start higher but decay.

http://ddragon.leagueoflegends.com/cdn/6.24.1/img/champion/Ziggs.png