Changing Winds: The General Idea of What Needs to Happen

Here we are, the beginning of Season 7, and there is much work to be done. Currently, we face an issue with snowball effects leading to many players seeing the game as "Lost at the 12 minute mark" at least. The main reasons for this, simply put, are that the main rewards for good play come into the game very early on ON TOP of kills. So, we shall study the nature of the game.

The Laning Phase is an Era of Gold and Set Up

What this means is that the primary objective in the laning phase for all players should be based on one thing: how will this affect my gold income? If it does not positively affect it, it HAS to provide a large benefit in the long run to allow your gold income to suffer due to it. Fair examples of this are Dragons. The stat buffs they provide give whichever team kills them with an equivalent to what gold would provide them and potentially more. Movement speed, offensive stats, objective control, and duel regeneration are all things that can be bought with gold, meaning, in a very technical sense, you ARE boosting your gold income by taking Dragons since the Dragons essentially instantly provide and spend the gold they provide you with on the stats they provide. Therefore, we are back to the main point that GOLD IS EVERYTHING IN THE EARLY GAME! This is something that, without changing VERY core gameplay mechanics, will almost always stay the same through all metas that have and will ever come to pass. Gold is a global benefit that every champion benefits from, some more than others. Never the less, all sources of gold income that can be taken advantage of in the early game WILL be as long as they are large enough to warrant not simply farming minions. A good example of something that DOES NOT currently warrant such is Rift Herald. Alas, the poor monster, we hardly know him. He provides gold, sure, but it requires two players minimum to kill or one player for an extremely inefficient amount of time to kill. Not only is Rift Herald harder to kill than a Dragon, but in 75% of situations he is less rewarding to kill. The global gold is not nearly as much as the old Dragon provided and the buff it provides disables when you are grouped with allies, something mostly essential to winning the game. Not only this, but the buff isn't permanent. It's duration is extremely long, yes, but it isn't permanent, meaning eventually Rift Herald will have only provided global gold and non-global EXP for the team that killed it. Not only this, but it never respawns, so you never get the sense of "Hey, if I kill Rift Herald now, we can kill it again to have two buffs and get more gold from it." Nope, once old Herald dies, it's gone and provides very little. Something that is currently the opposite of Rift Herald in terms of usefulness is First Tower Blood Gold. 400 Global Team Gold to be exact. Not only does this gold come ALMOST naturally since you don't have a choice to NOT kill towers, but it's a HUGE benefit. This incredibly huge benefit that comes on top of the normal tower kill gold gives an INCREDIBLE amount of gold to the first team that kills a tower, leading to events such as Ziggs Bottom Lane. This is an early game gold advantage (a big one at that) that doesn't even require you to put yourself at risk like a Dragon does. In conclusion, it's the safest AND biggest gold income to get. This is something that needs to change. While the thought of "Reward early pushes" sounds great, it should be done in other ways, such as perhaps an innate advantage of naturally owning part of the map. Something done in a beloved MOBA that was shut down by EA, aka Dawngate, were gold generators in the jungle section of the map. Invading one of these while the enemy team still possessed towers in a lane was extremely hard and risky, but once the towers were gone, it was much easier to take.

The Solution To the Current "Early Win" Issue: Remove First Tower Blood Gold, Add Terrain Advantages, and Make Late Game Restricted Objectives More Rewarding and Possible to "Stall" to Get

Basically, what needs to be done is First Tower Blood Gold needs to be removed. The reward is too boring and "quest" like to be in a MOBA. What should be done is there needs to more of an innate advantage within the terrain for both sustaining a tower's life and destroying a tower's life. An example already mentioned here are Gold Farms that could maybe be maintained by Supports (new role for Supports to make them more attractive?) and/or other players on a team. Or perhaps a lane's tower powers up Guardians in each Jungle that defend the land so to speak. What I am saying is such an innate action as killing a tower shouldn't provide bonus gold. It should just have a natural advantage of doing it as quickly as possible through terrain advantages. Finally, the late game objectives need to provide more fall back for teams that are behind. For example, perhaps Baron Nashor provides an amount of gold that increases the more levels behind your team is when compared to the enemy team. Perhaps the monsters in the Jungle "evolve" once the game reaches 35 minutes with the Elder Dragon's presence to provide greater rewards for killing them that the team overall benefits from. A return of Smite rewards possibly? All in all, there needs to be more power in taking control of parts of the map come late game.

Summary

In short, we need more rewards for controlling parts of the map and less rewards that come innately throughout the course of the game like First Tower Blood Gold. The innate advantages setting up to defend a part of the map through defensive advantages will not only make games last longer, but make players feel like they have a chance at fighting an overall more fed enemy team due to a natural "home ground advantage". This would also make "crush" games end sooner most likely since a team that can quickly secure most sections of the map under their belt will starve the enemy team of gold and quickly overcome them. Basically, games that are an absolute crush will end just as quickly, but games that aren't will last longer and provide more opportunities for a defending team to make their way back into the game. From a pro play view, this might even make the early game more exciting to watch if pros can find ways to aggressively try and take these "home field" objectives to secure themselves more gold in the early game while also denying the enemy team gold. From all views, this idea is solid.