Flipping The Script: The history of lane-swaps
Contrary to a popular videogame aphorism, war is always changing -- at least on the forested battlefields of professional League of Legends, where teams must constantly update their strategic playbook to stay ahead of the opposition.
This tactical arms race is particularly apparent in the evolution of lane-swaps, which have transformed the landscape of professional League and the manner in which it’s played at the highest level. But why did lane-swaps ever become a thing? What problem were players trying to solve by scrambling the chess board of Summoner’s Rift? And when you break a lane-swap down, what do the moving parts look like? We spoke to pros, analysts, casters, and Riot’s live-gameplay team to get the inside story.
“Once you understand how a lane-swap works, it becomes a lot more fun watching a lane-swap,” says Martin “Deficio” Lynge, EU caster. “Because you want to see if somebody's messing it up, if somebody's doing something different. Then maybe that can be another thing about watching League that viewers will find entertaining.”
MUSICAL lanes
Put simply, executing a lane-swap involves pulling a switcheroo on your opponent by reversing your top and bottom lanes. If it’s your team initiating the lane-swap, you start the game by sending your AD carry and support top to square off 2v1 against the opposing top laner, while your top laner goes bot to fend for himself 1v2 against the the opposing team’s AD carry and support.
The initial motivation for lane-swapping was about giving your top laner a chance to dodge an unfavorable matchup. In his characteristically blunt fashion, veteran top laner Mike “Wickd” Petersen offers a TL;DR on the mindset of lane-swap pioneers: “Back then it was basically just, ‘Oh, our lane’s shit. We don’t want to play this lane, we’re going to move around.’” In other words, the lane-swap gives you a chance to alter the normal state of a game into a state that’s hopefully beneficial to you.
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You may be thinking to yourself, wait a second, how is leaving your top laner outnumbered preferable to the 1v1 you’re dodging? Isn’t there a cancelling-out that happens by trading one disadvantage for another? You’d think so, but in reality there are certain top-lane champs such as Rumble that can hold their own just fine 1v2. The mech-suited, flame-spitting Yordle remains effective on low farm once he hits level six and the team starts grouping around objectives. Or maybe you’re running a scaling top laner like Vladimir who’d get murdered in a 1v1 against Darius, but is all too happy to farm under tower in the 1v2 as he builds toward his power spike.
A lane-swap can also be an effective way of punishing a top-lane melee opponent such as Irelia who needs time to scale. “People would be so surprised by it that the top laner would be stuck in that lane trying to get CS,” recalls Mitch “Krepo” Voorspoels, EU caster and former pro support player. “Obviously if you're a melee range champion against two ranged, you're going to have a tremendously hard time getting that farm, so that was kind of the initial thought pattern: ‘How can we use our resources to shut down their resources the best?’”
BEYOND MECHANICS
We all enjoy watching the pros pull off flashy outplays or solo kills in lane. We thrill at teamfights where the VFX from 10 simultaneous ultimates looks like somebody lobbed a grenade into a firework factory. These moments are the coal that keeps the hype train’s engine furnace burning bright.
But picking apart high-level strategy can be less sexy for casual esports viewers. For the same reason nobody posts a photo of their university diploma on their dating profile, intelligence lacks curb appeal. Even the term ‘lane-swap’ sounds like a tactic used by drivers to shave a few minutes off their morning commute. Yet in present-day League of Legends, strategic ingenuity is what separates the top teams from the rest of the pack. Snazzy outplays may win fans, but deftly executed strategy wins tournaments.
“The longer the pro scene exists and the more professional players there are, the more players can at least match each other,” says Deficio. “Once you start having 40, 50, 60 professional players who are almost equal level in terms of mechanics, then strategy will always win, because then it's more about shotcalling, it's more about game knowledge, it's more about pre-planning… You can’t have five of the best players in the world but zero strategy and expect to win.”
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Origen top laner sOAZ, whose earliest memory of lane-swaps involved HotshotGG lane-swapping Galio at IPL 4 back in April 2012, agrees that lane-swaps really emphasize the importance of strategy and teamplay in pro play.
“Lane-swaps helped the game to be a lot more strategic,” he says. “When you play in a 1v1, 2v2, it's a lot more about individuality, the better player will win most of the time. But the lane-swap made it so that even if you are the weaker player, if you are better strategically, you had a chance to win still. So it was not as bad if you are the weaker player but had the best team, you could win. That's what lane-swaps have impacted the most.”
FIRST CONTACT
Back in in July 2012, Krepo was playing support for the legendary CLG.EU squad alongside iconic EU pros Wickd and Froggen. The team had flown to Korea to compete in Azubu The Champions Summer 2012, a welcome opportunity to bootcamp in Korea ahead of Season 2 Worlds, testing their mettle against the most dominant teams in East Asia. When you travel to far-flung corners of the globe you expect a bit of culture shock, and Krepo and his teammates found it when they stepped onto Summoner’s Rift during scrims with Chinese team World Elite.
“We had no idea what they were doing,” says Krepo, recalling his first impressions of World Elite’s lane-swaps. “Initially we thought they were cheesing us, but then they did it in all the games. They actually lane-swapped in every game regardless of the matchup. They seemed to like that strategy more than just laning, so it actually evolved to a point where we predicted the lane-swap eventually and just met them there, but only because we knew they did it so often.”
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Wickd remembers trying to keep a level head, adapting his approach in real time. “In the beginning we didn't really know what to do,” he admits. “We were kind of confused, but we were like, ‘OK, this is what they do, that's fine, what do we do against it?’ In the beginning you take a safe approach, you're like, ‘OK, don't die, just take out what you can in top, figure out how strong you can be, and stuff like that.’ And then we'll try to give you jungle pressure to make sure you're fine. Because we don't really know what we should do exactly.”
World Elite would start the game with a lane-swap, send two people top and then quickly send their jungler to join them and rush down an early tower. The natural counter CLG.EU devised involved sending their jungler to the bottom side of the map. However, instead of sending him through the lane, they sent him behind the lane, at which point he could dive the unlucky enemy champ left defending the tower and then take the tower for himself.
RIVAL OF THE FITTEST
As the lane-swap meta progressed, Krepo saw teams try to prevent that dive by sending their support to reinforce the top-lane champ on the bottom side of the map. You’d get this weird scenario where your ADC is now your solo laner up top in the 1v1 against the enemy top laner, which tended to be a favourable matchup for champs like Corki or Lucian that benefit a lot from levels, had a gap-closer and could bully melee-ranged top laners. Meanwhile, the top laner and support combo had the potential for some unexpectedly potent synergy.
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When asked about the genesis of lane-swaps, CLG’s veteran AD carry Doublelift deadpans, “We did it ‘cause it was new.'” The answer seems glib, but if you think about the dizzying number of games played by any pro, it seems perfectly natural that in an effort to keep things fresh, the urge to experiment will prompt mutations in how the game is played. Lane-swaps turned pro play into something resembling a chemistry lab. You could mix the various elements of your team together in a much wider variety of styles and see which combinations created the biggest bang.
Clement Chu, an LMS caster and analyst for the Taiwanese region, remembers the lane-swap emerging mid Season 2 as a desperate attempt to curtail a reign of terror by one of the region’s most dominant top laners.
“There was a huge skill gap at the time between the Taipei Assassins and the rest of the teams,” says Chu. “And one way that was apparent was through Stanley. He played whatever he wanted and he killed whoever he wanted in lane. Other GPL teams started to swap the duo lane against him. Teams didn’t understand the aspect of fast-pushing then, but it successfully stemmed the amount of lane kills that TPA had.”
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Chu views the rise of the lane-swap meta as a mixed blessing. “It brought depth to the game,” he says, “spawning a need for analysis, for more attention on the international game, and really separating professional play from solo queue. At the same time, lane-swapping detracted from the game as a spectator sport. It’s a very complex process where leads are often gained without direct confrontation between players.
“It also heavily limited top-lane champion pools. Watching top laners trade with each other in lane one-on-one was the reason I fell in love with the game. Before lane-swaps, top laners were the stars of the game. Imagine Maknoon, Reapered, or Stanley going head to head on a wide array of champions. It was infinitely more exciting to watch than seeing an AD freeze a lane.”
LANE BEFORE TIME
Since lane-swaps seemed to emerge for the first time at some point in Season 2, this raises an obvious question: why not sooner? Why didn’t the lane-swap innovation occur shortly after the game’s release? Surely there were unfavorable top-lane matchups then? I put this question to Patrick “Scarizard” Scarborough, the Rioter in charge of design communications.
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“Players just didn't want to do it,” he says. “You're taught from a young age in League of Legends that [laning 1v2] puts you at a massive disadvantage. And solo laners like Voyboy and Dyrus are known to be some of the team's biggest playmakers, so is it intuitive for you to think, yeah, let me put my strongest guy at a terrible disadvantage? No, of course you wouldn't want to do that. You want to give them these big champions that go ahead and crush the game.
“So the game for a long time was in an arms race. How high can we get people up there to start crushing lanes? Until we hit the point where top laners became nukes -- it was like, if you go top lane, no one else can fight you, we have hit the apex of what the champion pool could possibly do. At that point lane-swaps were just the natural innovation. It's like, what do we do? We either keep running the same three champs at each other. Or we beat the power pick some other way.”
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Wickd thinks that the substantial gold reward for securing dragon in Season 1 affected teams’ mindsets and made them reluctant to shift the duo-lane top, thereby losing pressure on that objective. “Back then it was just a hard sell,” he says. “It's like, dragon gives a thousand gold. Do you want a thousand gold? Or do you not want a thousand gold? It's very straightforward, right? If you can't get a thousand gold by getting a tower or getting a lot of CS or something, it seems not worth it. Even if you get an XP lead, which would be worth it, it seemed not worth it because it’s natural to focus on the hard stat of gold.”
TURRET’S SYNDROME
As Season 3 wore on and lane-swaps grew in regularity, the situation in top-lane began to feel increasingly abusive. The old days of thrilling duels were history, replaced by an increasingly predictable scenario where you as the blue-side top laner sit pinned beneath your tower, zoned off CS and XP by the enemy team’s AD carry and support duo. They build up an enormous creep wave, and right as it crashes into your tower, you’re still level 1, the duo laners are level 2, and then the jungler rocks up and the three of them dive you. There was negligible room for counterplay. As a result, the viable pool of top-lane champions dwindled precipitously. You could only play champions like Rumble that could remain useful to your team even while being miles behind.
In July 2013, when the EU LCS hosted week six of its schedule in Tenerife, Spain, Scarizard flew over to conduct a design summit with some of the pros. He remembers sitting with Wickd and Krepo, listening as both expressed their distaste for the 2v1s so prevalent at the time. “Krepo is at the table with me telling me how 2v1s are terrible for the same reason we’d kind of thought about it [as a design team]: you can’t opt out of it. You have to plan for that scenario and then you could get shafted if they don’t do it. But you have to play as if it’s going to happen.”
When Scarizard returned to California, Riot’s live-gameplay team began considering how to address the feedback he’d received from LCS pros in Spain. The team considered making a new tower item. “We did some things we’d never really done before,” he says. “In players’ minds we enforced the meta a bit.”
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After much deliberation, the decision was made to put damage reduction flatly on certain towers before 10 minutes to disincentivize the 2v1 blitzkrieg. The idea was to create a trade-off where if you decide to lane-swap, you risked losing your bot tower. But instead of being dissuaded, teams simply doubled down and picked hyper-aggressive tower-sieging duos like Jinx and Nunu in order to brute-force it.
Then players devised a 4v0 tower push that the opposing team would be forced to mirror on the opposite side of the map or risk losing critical seconds assembling team members to defend. This effectively delayed the start of the game by several minutes, at which point there were two towers down on each side before the teams began interacting with one another. “Then we had really hit the absolute darkest time,” says Scarizard. “Shit’s just in a bad place at this point because nobody’s playing, no one’s doing stuff.”
The design team examined why the 4v0 tower-pushing strategy had become the default in most pro matches and decided it was important for towers to remain valuable conquests, but not necessarily as valuable when five people take them. The solution? Gold from a destroyed tower would be distributed across the team instead of awarded in a flat sum. This tweak reduced the focus on early-game towers. Pros gravitated toward strategies that involved trapping foes and denying them, giving rise to big-play junglers such as Lee Sin, Elise and Evelynn.
“It’s not that lane-swaps were ever inherently awful,” says Scarizard. “It’s just that this thing that removed options became the default choice all the time… When the game becomes rote in any form, that’s not what we like. And I think you can tell because we haven’t eliminated lane-swaps. Teams still do it. They did it this weekend. They’re going to do it next weekend, just not in every single match.”
MACRO MACHINES
For any studious observer of the international competitive League scene, it’s clear that the once-enormous skill gap between East and West has narrowed. Case in point: 2015 saw North America’s Team SoloMid sweep Team WE in three games to triumph in the IEM Season 9 World Championship Finals. Then at the Mid-Season Invitational, European powerhouse Fnatic took Korea’s SK Telecom all the way to five games. The West’s heightened mastery of lane-swaps accounts for at least some of this increased competitiveness.
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“You could put H2K and Fnatic in Korea and give them Korean names and you would just think this is a standard OGN team,” says Deficio. “Some Western teams have adapted play styles that we see in Korea or China, as opposed to the traditional western approach of just bringing some good individual players and smacking them against each other to see what happens - a strategy that clearly does not work. The current top teams in the west put a lot more focus on shotcalling and overall macro play now.”
According to Scarizard, it wasn’t just that players lacked ingenuity -- they just flat out didn’t want to swap lanes. “They would just both opt out and say honorably that they wanted to 1v1, but the truth was, they didn't have the ability to pull off the 2v1,” he recalls.
“When you see people who are paid to play League of Legends revolting against how the game is played at a top level, you know there's something wrong. It's like, theoretically, this ‘2v1 style and then dive the guy’ is how you play League of Legends. But these guys don't want to get better, because the thing that requires them to be better takes away from what is fun and resonant with them in League. It's crazy to me that that happened, but it happened.”
STRAT ‘O CASTER
With good humor, Krepo admits to falling into this category of players who proved less elastic in adapting to shifts in the tactical meta. When asked what makes lane-swaps such an enthralling subject for him, he grows pensive.
“Mostly because in terms of flexibility and strategy, it's been one of my weak points in my career,” he says, with a note of regret in his voice. “We got completely dismantled as a team in Season 3 because we were unable to adapt and we felt there was one way to play League. I'm a much more lane-dominant player. I just prefer laning for 20 minutes because I like perfecting a certain style, but it's not the way you play League right now.
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“You can’t master just one aspect. Because you'll just get countered. If you're really good at laning 2v2, people will just continually lane-swap against you and exploit you that way. If you can't lane 2v2 at all, people will just find the lane 2v2 and destroy you. So there's this mix between being able to lose gracefully in bad matchups, find the right openings, and combine it all together and be reactive as a team, group up at the right times when you have item spikes. So this flexibility in strategy and being able to do that in game, I have so much respect for people who can do that, because I could never do it.
“If you compare League players back in Season 2 to a chef, teams would make the same recipe over and over until they get it perfect - which was lane, lane, lane, group and team fight. Every time. But as the game progressed, one recipe is not enough for your restaurant, so now these good teams, they can make 17 different recipes and they're good at all them because they're so flexible in their approach to League of Legends.”
FAMILY TREE
One of the chief joys of following League of Legends is having that front-row seat from which to observe the game’s evolution and deepening complexity. Pulling up a gameplay video on YouTube from just a year or two ago, it’s hard to fully register that you’re looking at an adolescent snapshot of the same title -- that epoch of League history B.C.E., before the crab era. Lane-swaps form yet another discrete evolutionary branch of this big old tree in which we climb and play and periodically tumble.
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Lane-swaps are special, however, in that Riot never never deployed them in a patch. Tracing the trend’s forking branches back to their point of origin leads you not to an office whiteboard, but to the spark-emitting intellect of League’s most exceptional players. Riot may have built the game, but it’s players who really make it.
