What would happen if Riot treated lanes like they treated the jungle since early seasons

VICHEL CHAOS·5/20/2018, 8:21:24 PM·1 votes·457 views

Hello, I'm RiotVichelChaos, lead designer since beta, from an alternate timeline where us the design team decided to change lanes like they changed the jungle in your boring universe, I am here to give you a rundown of how things have shaped up.

At the start we had the same laning you guys have, three lanes with fixed minion spawns etc, the lanes you have grown used to since the beginning. We decided to stir things up.

-First thing first we decided that each season we would change the durability of minions and how much damage percentage they take from turrets and other minions. One season they have more hp and armor but they also take much more damage from turrets, the next one they are very squishy but they take almost no damage from turrets. This changes every season as we see fit. Sometimes we even might change how many minions spawn and the experiece they give each to vary leveling up thresholds, so maybe one season you reach level 3 off the first wave but the next season you need a full wave and 5 minions to reach level 2. -Next, we wanted to incentivize more creative options, situations and variety in laning. This, we decided that every team would get 3 cannon minions per cannon wave, but the lanes in which they spawn will be randomized, so while one wave may have a cannon minion each, the next one could have all 3 cannon minions going to top lane while the opposing team gets 2 in mid lane and 1 in bottom lane. However, to keep a base line consistency, the first cannon wave will have all 3 cannons distributed one lane each. -Furthermore, we liked the concept of random stuff appearing and making things happen, so we decided to implement a couple of systems. The first one is that control wards may randomly spawn in lane bushes and side bushes randomly, lasting 20 seconds and may work for any team. The second is that pickups will appear randomly in lane which a player can walk on to activate. Once activated, for the next 2 seconds the player will get a 400 range on-use flash. This will encourage aggressive plays while also given you a chance to evade ganks if played aorund properly. We also tested out random health and mana pickups but decided to put them in the river instead. -Finally, instead of tweaking the starting items like they do in your timeline, we change them comlpetely, remove some of them, or add other ones with different effects. The catch is that every couple of seasons we change what items they build into, their characteristics or anything we feel like really, maybe even we remove the whole lot and add a new bunch completely different. It adds a lot more variety to gameplay between seasons. Also, we had the secondary summonner spell have effects depending on how you use it. Teleporting to a tier 1 turret made a ward spawn in the river, using it on a minion gave you an oracle elixir effect and using it on a cannon minion gave you poison damage aganist targets that hit you. It was fun for adding additional depth to gameplay. But only for a limited time, we changed it a couple of times and then scrapped it altogether.

Thanks for reading. As a disclaimer, I'm not arguing for or against any of the jungle changes mocked here (I like plants personally), just wanted to point out that us junglers sometimes get tired of the role changing completely every now and then and the situation that we are in.

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