The 2017 Season Changes: The Great, Seemingly Good, and Possibly Ugly.

I just saw some of the changes planned for the 2017 season; and there are good things happening, and there are great things happening. But there is also something happening that really looks 'ugly' to me: I'll start with the good.

A new client: still plenty of bugs but it looks cool and feels fresh. It does take some getting used to, and the individual holiday discount page is absent this teemoing, but I'm sure these things will be resolved soon enough. I'm 60/40 on this, it's a good change but I will miss some of the format of the current client.

I think the assassin updates are neat as they add some complexity to the assassins that are often easy to snowball with while giving some extra scallability (I hope that's a word, if not, it is now) to those few that had trouble staying in the meta. Good luck balancing them Riot, you'll need it.

Now for the great. Replays look to be the cream of the new season crop along with a practice tool in the works that will help anyone learn their role better (the practice tool will take more time to be ready if I remember my articles correctly).

Ranked will be more accessible for the highly dedicated (or friendless) solo/duo players while letting the not-quite-a-full-team players keep a solid place in this more competitive aspect of the game. I think "ELO hell" will be less pointlessly punishing this upcoming season.

But there is something that looks to be unpleasant, and maybe even downright ugly: the "living jungle".

In the linked article (about 3/4 the way down the page), you talk about depth and complexity; and this new jungle is, quite frankly, the opposite. Let me quote part of it here:

__"Having a lot of depth frequently leads a game design to being complex. This doesn’t have to be the case. The game of Go gets cited a lot as something with pretty simple rules, but a lot of depth. By contrast, a board game like Monopoly has some complicated rules, but there isn’t that much depth because sooo much of the outcome is decided by the dice roll itself."

Well, Riot has pretty much done what this paragraph argued against. Complexity has been added that removes some of the depth of jungling and moving through river. People will be less responsible for warding and counter-warding; they will have opportunities to heal up, removing some of the challenge of early jungling; allow anyone to jump in on dragon or baron - which takes away from the challenge of choosing the right champion or managing your cooldowns properly; and the uncertainty and danger of going into the jungle will be lessened quite a bit for key moments.

While I have my frustrations when I'm the only one who bothers to ward (because apparently support needs to ward everything according to some annoying players), there is a sense of satisfaction when you're well informed because your team was smart with warding; or when your opponent is falling into your traps because your team successfully denied vision to them.

Blind spots are lessened; and unless the team (probably racing against a death timer) wants to take extra time or take on extra risk, they may not be able to safely take drake (dragon) or Baron. I predict that the majority of losing teams won't even bother to capture river objectives anymore because it will be too much of a risk: if the opponent is ahead, it's already easy to get caught. And it may influence the meta strategy even further: this "living jungle" is more optimized for steals, which may result in a regular stalemate of river objective hunting - two teams may forever wait for the other team to initiate because stealing is easier and now less risky.

It may not show much in the pros or higher tiers of play, but in the lower tiers (normal through gold), it might just be the new dominating strategy.

I simply feel that this new jungle is the old jungle with training wheels added on and some extra padding to soften any hard starts.

Anyway, that's my view on the changes. What do you think? If someone from Riot reads this, well, you know my feelings now. Have a good day everyone!