Quick Gameplay Thoughts: October 10

Hi folks,

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 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

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

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Removal of the jungle funneling penalty

As mentioned when it was introduced one of our goals for preseason is to remove the jungle funneling penalty (Monster Hunter). That penalty was added to discourage funneling both jungle and lane farm onto one champion without interacting much in either position with the enemy.

Our current belief is that two of the preseason changes should reduce the appeal of funneling enough we can remove Monster Hunter without an explicit replacement:

• Bounty scaling - Bounties will now be scaling somewhat off minions/monsters killed, not only off champions killed. That means that focusing farm so heavily on one champ becomes a bigger risk, with greater payout for the enemy if they can shut them down, given better options against funnel strats.
• Barricade (temp name) gold - Being able to gain rewards from pushing on a tower even if you can't take it down entirely makes leaving a lane uncontested a higher price to pay. That also reduces the appeal of funneling play in most circumstances.

We're still testing whether the combination of those two things should be enough. Looks hopeful so far though.

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How popular are the different queues?

Something I thought it would be good to share was a look at how popular the different queue types in LoL are, both from an overall perspective and looking at how they vary region to region. Chart below showing a % breakdown (hours played in each mode) in early September for a few regions with different habits.

https://imgur.com/a/7ClMRFs

Looking at the regions shown:

• Overall - None of the regions, whether those shown here or the others not listed, is highly representative of the overall average. Every region has at least one queue in which they're noticeably divergent from average play rates.
• Korea - Korean players like solo queue a lot more than those from other regions, with low play in normals as a result. They play average amounts of ARAM, but have low interest in other modes compared to players elsewhere (e.g. Nexus Blitz or most RGMs we've run in the past).
• NA - NA Players play less Flex than almost every other region. They're bigger fans of non SR modes, with the most Nexus Blitz play of any region and nearly the most TT play (EUW has slightly more TT games).
• Brazil - Brazil's a newer region and so players there follow a couple of trends we see on newer servers, with more normal play and Co-op versus AI than average and less ARAM.

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Some small item/rune changes in 8.21

We’ve got some small adjustments to a few items in 8.21, bit of context:

• Essence Reaver - Cutting 200g off the cost as short term help. Might have something larger for it later in the year, want to make it a better regardless now though.
• Edge of Night - Cost reduction by 200g as well. No current plans for changing its functionality, think we’ve definitely got it overpriced though.
• Time Warp Tonic - We’re looking at different possible ways to nerf TWT, given the amount of health/mana restoration it’s offering is excessive. Current version in testing is a change where instead of offering increased duration and MS during the duration it instead gives some restoration up front, doesn’t change duration at all and still gives the movement speed.