Rework Shop and Support Items to Fight Gold Funneling
I think everyone, except for those that use the exploit, can agree that gold funneling is a problem in League. From what I can tell all gold funneling strategies all take advantage of using multiple gold income items to boost a champion hyper carry in addition to the traditional adc support champion. I think that the way to get rid of or punish this is to limit each team to one support item. I propose that Riot reworks the shop so that only one gold income item can be purchased by each team. As far as I can tell, each shop resides locally on each players individual player's game client and there is no cross talk between the players shops. I think that the shop functionality should be moved to the server side where an instance of each team's shops would reside. Each players client could then sync up with their team's shop and by having a limited inventory of 1 gold income item each team could only purchase 1 and if someone made a mistake, the item could be sold and another player could have the opportunity to buy it. This way there is no need for something like a team wide unique passive for gold income items or other more convoluted reworks to champions and/or gold income items to fight gold funneling. Now if a team wanted to gold funnel with the mid and jungler the support player would have no gold income item and would be put at a large disadvantage. The team wide shop could still function like how the current local shop does i.e. limiting non-smite players from purchasing jungle items and things like Kalista's black spear. You just have to have some simple privilege checks to see what items each player can see in their shop purchase options so the GUI for the individual players wouldn't change nor would their interactions with it, with the exception of the gold income item. I don't have any experience programming client-server but I don't think that this change would dramatically increase the amount of information being exchanged between player clients and the game server. In addition to making gold funneling less appealing, having each team pulling purchasing options from a common shop also opens the opportunity to add other unique items that only a limited number of players on a team can possess at a time. Opening up more possibilities for itemization strategy as well as creating another way to balance the way players itemize.