Making Twisted Treeline fun again
I've been playing this game off and on for a few years and have always been a huge fan of 3s. Twisted Treeline and its fast paced, all in, aggressive play style always attracted me much more so than Summoner's Rift and I believe Riot has taken this glorious map in the wrong direction beginning with the changes rolled out back in 5.11. For everyone who doesn't recall, the 5.11 patch is when Riot added 4 more turrets to the map (2 in each lane) making the map significantly more safe for laners
Let's take a look at pre - 5.11 Treeline
http://media-copper.cursecdn.com/attachments/thumbnails/28/725/600/600/twisted_treeline_map.jpg
Notice that if laners had any intention of farming, they had to position themselves quite a ways from their turret which made this the sketchiest, ballsiest map ever. It made the map revolve around attempting to shove lanes so you could roam the map to control the other teams jungle or gank the other lane. It also gave the junglers huge potential for ganks because the laners were so far out in lane so keeping control of your jungle and ganking were huge.
There were 2 different team compositions you could approach the map with which kept things spicy. Generally speaking you would either run a bruiser top, jungler, and a control mage bot lane, OR you could run some sort of hyper carry champion top along with a tank support, with a control mage bot lane. A jungle meta team would generally attempt to constantly shove out both lanes so the whole team could roam together for objectives and a support meta team would generally shove out top, starving the opposing top laner in the process, while the bot laner attempted to freeze the lane in the middle, allowing the carry and support to roam and gank bot or pressure the opposing jungler. Needless to say, these 2 different approaches to the map opened up A LOT of variability to how a game might play out and how your team would would play based on which meta the opposing team was running.
One other thing I always looked at as a core part of Twisted Treeline was the length the games. Generally speaking a game of ranked 3s was significantly shorter than 5s. The fast paced, hyper aggressive play style seen on Treeline usually guaranteed that one team would have a significant advantage by the 10-15 minute mark but after the changes Treeline is much slower and stalemated which results in extremely long drawn out games.
Adding the additional turrets changed 3s drastically in many ways. It Effectively removed the support meta entirely as a result of the new lane being so small. On the old Treeline, the distance between the center of the lane and the turrets was so big it gave way for lots of roam potential because there was so much time the carry/support could leave lane before the opposing top laner could push the wave back to the center of the lane. The new turrets also make the lane so safe that it's much more difficult for a gank/roam to get a kill. The new and improved Nexus turret is also so powerful it makes it extremely easy to turtle around it preventing any progress from being made in the game. I've had games where the other team completely out played us and snowballed but my team was able to turtle around that turret and farm for 15-20 minutes and ended up out-scaling them and winning in a very long and boring game for both teams.
The overall result of these changes are very long, stalemated, boring games where laners farm and junglers either clear camps or dance around the center of the map staring at each other because they're both unable to gank effectively and can't invade without it being painfully obvious. I think removing these turrets and making the nexus turrets much less powerful would do a lot towards making Twisted Treeline the super fun map it used to be where games can be played in a much shorter time compared to Summoner's Rift.
Any thoughts / comments other 3s players have would be awesome! Cheers everybody! :)
