My Thoughts on What Riot Should Do
This post is very long as I have a lot of ideas I would like to share. Because it’s so long I don’t have a TLDR since writing one that would do the post justice would also be super long. I also don’t want people to just simply read a summary and then start writing comments. My intention for this post is to start a conversation. I will do my best to respond to comments. To make it a little easier to read, I have broken it up into sections as follows:
- Champions/Roles
- Items
- Ranked Changes
- Punishment Changes
- New/Reworked Champions
- Other Random Changes
As a disclaimer, this is my opinion, I do my best to explain why I feel the way I do, but I kept a lot of specific examples and details out to shorten the post as much as possible. I give a lot of numbers as examples but those are more or less arbitrary and used to help illustrate my point. I am trying to communicate ideas not specific changes. If you have questions, comments or want me to expand further please comment and I will do my best to get to anyone that does.
Introduction
I have been playing League of Legends for 6 years and the game has changed and evolved a lot. Right now, the game feels like it is in a weird spot for what I think can be broken down into several reasons. Firstly, I think that role identity has been jaded in the last couple years, meaning that how each position is supposed to be played inside of a game has become less divided allowing for multiple positions to do the same thing. Secondly, the new champions/reworks have included unhealthy abilities that are weird to play with or against that are completely reliant on the champions identity. Back in seasons 4-6, the role identity was pretty clear. There were tanks that would sit in the front and either engage or peel the carry, bruisers that were a good mix between tankiness and damage, mages/assassins that would dive the backline, ADCs or “Marksman” that would sit back and fight front to back and supports that could buff up the team or mitigate damage. Since I have only played ADC it’s hard for me to speak to the specific details of other roles but based on research and talking to mains of other roles I have come up with some ideas on how to make the game more enjoyable for everyone.
Champions/Roles
Riot’s approach to tanks now I agree with, while playing with or against tanks can be fun as an ADC, when there is a tank meta it’s because the tanks do disgusting amounts of damage (looking at you Poppy, Nautilus, Leona and old Sejuani). The only reason I can think of why Riot would want to do this is because tanks are inherently unfun to play. Since Riot is a business and will try to make as much money as possible, tanks are also boring to watch in LCS so on top of being unfun to play, there is no monetary value from having tanks be strong.
Recently, I have been role swapping to top where I have started playing a lot of bruisers, what I have found is that the kits on these champions are extremely strong compared to what ADCs have (yes, I’m choosing to ignore some abilities on certain new ranged champs as I will get into this later in the post). I have also noticed that the counterpicks in top are a lot stronger than they seem to be in other positions.
Now, let’s talk about mages. I feel like Riot really really likes mages. For starters, the items both offensive and defensive are much better than the ad counter parts. I believe that items of equal value (gold) should give roughly equal stats. Let’s look at a 1300 gold item as an example, B.F. Sword vs Lost Chapter. B.F. Sword gives 40 attack damage and Lost Chapter gives 40 ability power, 300 mana, 10% cool down reduction and 20% of mana on level up. Now I know all the haters are going to bring up the fact that Needlessly Large Rod is 1250 gold and gives 60 ability power and you would be correct, but Needlessly Large Rod is not an item mages get first while B.F. Sword is an item ad champions, especially ADCs get first. Due to how the game is played and you get items much faster later in the game, since more gold is earned, half items (like B.F. Sword, Lost Chapter, and Needlessly Large Rod) are much more impactful early especially when there is a huge stat difference for the same price. For defensive items, Mages have Banshee’s Veil , Zhonya's Hourglass, Rod of Ages, and Abyssal Mask and the items that can be used offensively and defensively like Hextech GLP-800 and Twin Shadows, did I mention Zhonya’s? Other items mages have are Mejai’s Soulstealer and an item with 75 ability power, 45 armor, 10% cool down reduction, and invulnerable and untargetable on a 90 second cool down (oh wait, that’s Zhonya’s). If Sword of the Occult was unhealthy for the game, how is Mejai’s not???? This is compared to the items AD champs have with Phantom Dancer/Maw of Malmortius and Guardian Angel.
Now for ADCs, for which I have the most experience playing. It feels really bad to play ADC right now in my opinion. The main reason I feel this way is because I feel that ADC has lost a lot of agency in the game. I don’t think that ADCs are particularly weak, some ADCs are even strong (looking at you Kai’sa and a little Xayah). But every game feels more or less played the same outside of hard winning your lane where you can just roll over the game (unless another lane got equally fed and you don’t play around it properly) or you hard lose lane where the game feels impossible to play. ADC feels especially bad when you only slightly win lane, like having a kill or two and being up 15-20 cs and the 0-4 mid lane comes down and one shots you which results in your lead disappearing and the laning becoming much much harder. Now, I am not saying that mid lane or jungle assassins or burst mages shouldn’t one shot ADCs if they are fed, but if I am 2-0 on an ADC, it would be nice to not get blown up by a mid laner that lost lane. An idea I have to fix this is by giving ADCs more power early and taking away the power late to prevent the role from being too broken. The way I would go about it if I was on Riot balance team would be to give ADCs more base movement speed and remove the bonus movement speed from Zeal items. Infinity Edge should give less stats and be cheaper as well as higher starting stats and less scaling where the breakpoint was around level 11. I don’t know how this would change with the role but this is the direction I would like to see Riot go with ADCs. If this happened I feel that it would also help with the other major problem with ADCs and that is the supports.
The role that has seen some major power creep over the past few seasons is support. Boy are they doing a lot of damage right now. I feel that the majority of the lane is decided by who the better support is, unless the ADC is head and shoulders better than the other ADC and support. I think that supports and ADCs should be on the same level during laning phase, which would tie into my ideas about ADCs being stronger earlier. One of the I have a love-hate relationship with is champions that dramatically change how you can play the game. Such examples are Blitzcrank, Brand and other mage supports. Being required to play differently against other champions is good for the game, it keeps it interesting, but that’s true to a point for me. It is fun to play differently when you’re vs a thresh support or a soraka. But if I am against a Blitzcrank where I can out trade and kill the other ADC several times and then make one mistake and it doesn’t matter because what Blitzcrank can do as a champion, is unhealthy. Same can be said for Brand’s ability to 1v2 with his AoE damage. This can also be applied to the reverse, if you have a bad Blitzcrank or Brand the game becomes 4v5. I don’t have specific ideas for this but it would be nice to see mage supports, specifically Brand, and Blitzcrank get evened out so they aren’t as oppressive or useless. The last group of champions I want to talk about are AD assassins. Lethality has exacerbated the problems of making the squishy champions squishier and the tanky champions tankier. Going back to flat armor penetration would be a great way to help this. Allow AD assassins to build 6 armor penetration items (including armor penetration boots) to get the same benefit as full lethality now, or allow them to build a balance of penetration and other stats such as lifesteal or percentage penetration depending on the situation. Lethality is a pretty convoluted stat and I think that just plain flat armor penetration is clearer when playing as or against. This can be balanced by having the items give a smallish amount per item so AD assassins do not take over the game early, but the items give AD penetration buffs as you build more items. For example 1 item gives 10 armor penetration, but when you build two you get an extra 5 for a total of 25 armor penetration, three items you get a bonus 10 for a total of 40 armor penetration and so on.
Since I’ve already touched ADC, support and a little mid, next I’d like to talk about the remaining positions (I think mid lane right now is in a pretty good spot and I think the other roles should be balanced around mid). The word “agency” is used a lot to determine how a role effectively feels to play. I think the best way to break up a role’s agency is to look at the “power” and the “impact” (I don’t know if Riot or anyone else has something like this but this is what I have come up with). The power is how strong the role is, how much damage the champions in that role do, how quickly and the ability to take objectives, how tanky the champions are, how much crowd control they have and how much they can mitigate team damage (shielding and healing). Impact is how much the role has on the other roles. I rate the roles in power and impact as follows.
Power:
- Top
- Support
- Mid
- ADC
- Jungle
Impact:
- Jungle
- Mid/Support
- ADC
- Top
Obviously this is my opinion and you might disagree. I know that the list changes depending on champion (as some are stronger than others) and game time. I tried to find a general balance between all states in the game and the snowball potential of the lane. For top lane, the biggest issue I see is a lack of impact. It’s hard to feel like you’ve gotten into the game and have a large control over the outcome. For top lane I see the way to do this is through split pushing. There are a lot of different ways that you can split push, either by constantly just sitting in a lane shoving waves, pushing and roaming to your team, pushing and dirty farming (clearing jungle camps). I think this kind of identity for top lane is fine “this is the split pushing role” so I don’t think Riot should change that aspect, top lane’s impact should be through split pushing. However I think they could make it easier to split push and defend from split pushing. My idea for this would be to create either an item, boot enchantment, summoner spell, trinket, something that makes it easier to dive, like what Ohmwrecker used to do, but give 10 different options for what stats you want with that passive (assuming its an item, I go into more detail about this idea in the items section). But instead of completely disabling the tower, it could reduce the damage and/or attack speed of the tower. This would make it easier to dive so the enemy top laner couldn’t just safely sit under tower and farm to catch up in power. To balance this out, it could have restrictions that it only works when there is 0 or 1 ally champion with you in the tower range or something similar to keep the item from being strong in team fight dives. The defensive options for preventing this could be that it makes the tower you are standing under hit 5 minions at a time but give you gold for minions that die to tower shots or something that increases the damage the tower does to a champion. The defensive options like the offensive options could have restrictions on how many champions can be around for it to be in full effect. These options can be balanced around duration, strength of effect, cooldown, etc. I think this would make top lane more fun to play since it would allow for towers to be taken easier creating more pressure causing top lane to have more impact. However, there is always going to be the “my team just died 4v5, what am I supposed to do”. My response to that is, well you have an item that makes it easier to kill towers, if it does less damage it will take the tower longer to kill the minion wave and if that isn’t enough then I just say it’s unlucky and you can’t win every game.
The last role I want to talk about is jungle. I think jungle is in a super awkward position, it has crazy high impact, but is super weak right now (kinda the opposite of top in my opinion). To reduce the impact junglers have I think Riot should add some more jungle camps (1 on each side of the map). To do this the map will need to be changed a little bit but I think that could be fun and interesting to have something new. Then the gold and experience would be about what is used to be when jungle was a much stronger role (thinking season 6-7) and the camps would be slightly easier to take (do less damage, but probably keep same tankiness). This would cause the junglers to have to spend a lot more time clearing their camps, but in exchange they get more gold and experience than they do right now. To desensitize heavy ganking/camping a lane, the split between minion experience when a jungler ganks a lane is 80% laner 20% jungler so laners are too heavily punished by a jungler sitting in their lane if the jungler isn’t doing anything and the jungler is punished for sitting in lanes. In addition, if a jungler takes experience from a lane more than once every 5 minutes, the experience split goes to 90% laner 10% jungler and the minion gold gets split 60% laner 40% jungler when the jungler takes cs. I think this would disensentize junglers heavy ganking lanes as they would fall extremely far behind, but would have some ability to not fall too far behind with the catch-up experience from camps. The point of ganks should be to help your lanes win by themselves not win it for them, if you gank them and get them ahead and they still lose, it’s just unfortunate and feels bad, but hopefully you can do more carrying yourself with more gold and experience from jungle camps. I have the least experience playing the jungle role so the numbers might not be right, I am just trying to put my ideas out there.
Items
I have hinted at what I think riot should do with items above when I’ve talked about items changes I would like to see in the game but I will go further into detail about it. The change I want to see comes down to a simple idea, I want Riot to add a ton of items to the game and make them even across the roles (see the section where I talk about mages for more details). I think there should be something like 10 Zeal items that give more things, maybe lifesteal, grevious wounds, health, a lot of attack speed (something like +60%) attack damage, or even armor penetration, both percentage and flat. There should be 10 Tiamat items that can give similar stats. Riot should add a bunch of Last Whisper items, crit items, Executioner's Calling items, Jaurim’s Fist items, Catalyst of Aeons items, Giant’s Belt items, Oblivion Orb items, Glacial Shroud items, Phage items, etc. There should be like 10+ full items these components can build into each. This would add a lot more dynamic to the game where champions would not be building the same items or very similar game after game. This would make the game harder to play and I think that would be good. People will eventually figure out what the best options are for different scenarios and I think it would be nice if there was not just one build or a couple items that were extremely broken (Zhonya’s Hourglass, Ninja Tabis, and sort of Phantom Dancer). I think Riot should also not hesitate to make items melee or ranged only. That way it’s way easier to balance around champions like Yassuo, Tryndamere and ADCs.
I know that the idea of stacking some of these stats into single items sounds pretty broken, but I am confident that there is a balance where the item is useful and broken. It would just take a little bit of time to find where that is. Riot has shown a willingness to hotfix problems in the game and I know that if a major change like the items I’m proposing would take some hot fixing. Another option Riot could look at to balance is even decreasing the stat number when you combine an item. For example, one “broken” combination could be Executioner’s Calling on a Zeal item. This could be balanced by making the healing reduction 30% when the item is completed, instead of the normal 40%.
Ranked Changes
First off, remove autofill from ranked. I haven’t heard of anyone that enjoys autofill. No one likes playing as autofill, no one likes playing with autofills, I mean playing against an autofill isn’t even fun all the time as the competition usually isn’t there. As an ADC player, it really sucks constantly having autofill supports. Making it so each team has the same number of autofills that Riot implemented this year is just them trying to fix a problem that shouldn’t exist in the first place. The main reason Riot has said for the existence of autofill is to reduce queue times, while I appreciate the effort, I will wait an addition 5,10 or even 15 minutes if it means that every game I will have people playing their roles. All of the people I have talked to are in agreement with this idea. I also think that Riot should give people the option to queue up for only one role. When I go into ranked I want to play a specific role and I don’t see a reason to not give it to me, even if it means I have to wait longer to get into the game. Doing this will also reduce the number of dodges as many people dodge whenever they have been autofilled, which will reduce the irritation of waiting for a game. I said option to select one role because I feel that player should have the option to queue up for more than one position to reduce the queue time knowing that there is a chance they don’t get their primary role. This would have to be balanced out, and maybe if people don’t like the extended queue times Riot goes back to a system like what exists today but it would be nice to see if the grass is greener on the other side. Obviously for high elo (D2+) the wait time might end up being extremely long so autofill might need to be a thing just to avoid waiting an hour or more for a game. For Normal queue, I don’t see a reason to change anything since its casual and for fun and the idea of waiting longer for that style of game mode doesn’t sound appealing to me.
The second change I’d like to see has to do with matchmaking. I understand the reason that Riot moved away from the MMR system and went to the tier system but I think that using hidden MMR and promotional series makes climbing feel weird. I propose that Riot get rid of MMR completely and match people solely based on their rank. People should be matched with other players that are no higher or lower than 2 tiers from theirs (IE if you are gold 2 then you will play with gold 4 - platinum 4, but never both in the same game). With the average as close as possible to their rank. Obviously I know that this will be easier in silver/gold where most of the player base is but I think it would be doable and help with match integrity, especially at the top of the ladder where you have 1000 LP players in game with diamonds.
The third change to ranked is the LP gains and losses. Since it’s tied to your hidden MMR right now getting rid of that MMR, LP gains and losses would need to change. I think that it should be a fixed amount solely based on your current win/loss streak. The gain/loss should default to + - 20. If you win 5 games in a row, it goes to +25 -15. If you win 10 games in a row, it goes to +35 - 5. At 15 wins in a row it becomes +50 -0, at 20 wins in a row +75 -0, 20 wins in a row +100 -0. Your LP gains should be maintained as long as you have an 80% win rate or higher in your last 5 games, otherwise it drops to the tier corresponding to how many games you’ve lost after the 1 loss. So if you lose 2 games, you drop 1 tier, if you lose 3 games you drop 2 tiers, etc. For loss streaks it would be the same, but you would need to maintain a 20% win rate to maintain your LP losses. So after 5 losses in a row its +15 -25, 10 losses in a row its +10 -30, etc. Also as far as skipping tiers, if you are getting +35 - 5 you skip 1 tier, and the +50 or higher tier is skipping 2 tiers. This should help smurfs climb quickly but not overshoot the tier they belong in. My reasoning for the LP gain/loss change is to require players to need to have greater than a 50% win rate to climb. There shouldn’t be players with a 48% that climb from gold to diamond 4 every season because they gain more than they lose and just play 1200 games every year. For placement games, I think you should just earn a flat 50 LP for each win (lose nothing for losses just like it is now) and your starting rank is 6 tiers below your rank at the reset (not the rank you ended the season on, but right before the reset). I also think that decay should be moved down to gold so if you don’t play ranked you demote down to silver 1, where you don’t get the end of season rewards. I think decay in diamond and below should start after 2 weeks and you lose 50 LP per week. Finally, on this topic I don’t think that there should be an LP penalty for dodging, but the time penalty should increase to 15 minutes starting and doubles every time you dodge, resetting every week. This way if something happens and you dodge unintentionally, your rank doesn’t suffer from it and if you get a troll on your team, in champion select, again your rank doesn’t get impacted by the fact you got unlucky matchmaking.
The final change I would like to see to ranked is the removed of promotional games. Basically just make the ladder like the TFT one (I assume it’s still the same as when it was first released, but I haven’t played so I don’t know for a fact). This change is because promotional games feel really bad to play, my favorite part of smurfing is skipping the promotional games. Especially since I can’t dodge or I just take a free loss. I don’t think I need to explain much more, they are unfun and unneeded.
Punishment Changes
I think Riot should focus more on toxic play instead of toxic chat. There are features built into the game to allow players to not deal with someone who is toxic in chat. YOU CAN MUTE THEM. Amazing, I know. Also, you can just turn off chat so you don’t have to see anything to begin with. However, there is nothing that can be done about someone who is griefing your game with how they play. You can’t block it out. And I have an idea on how to fix it. The only way to remove that type of play is to have punishments that make it not worth it and make it enforceable. Since a Riot employee cannot watch every single game of league there has to be some metrics a computer can use to decide which players to punish. I think that there should be a way to vote a punishment on a player. I can see it being hard for a computer to detect intentional feeding vs having a bad game, unless of course it’s intentional feeding to an extreme, so let the players in the game detect it. At the end of the game, give players the opportunity to mark a player as needed to get punished and if they get 4 marks from any of the 9 other players and the got a C- or lower rating, they lose 5 times the amount of LP they would have regardless of a win or lose. If they get 8 marks, they lose 10 times the amount of LP. So if someone is intentionally griefing, and 4 players mark them at the end of the game, even if their team won if they got a C- or less they would lose 100 LP instead of 20 (if they were losing 20 LP anyways, if they were losing 25 they would lose 125 etc). They also get placed in low priority queue for 15 minutes for the next 20 games. If this happens to a player more than once a month or 5 times a season, they get a 14 day ban, at twice a month or 10 times a season or back to back games, permanent suspension. To be fair, if they get a C- rating they should be able to appeal the punishment where they submit a VOD of the game with their voiceover of their thought process during the events of the game and what was causing them to have such a bad game. Since there is no reason to ever ever have lower than a C- rating, there would be no chance to appeal. This would also promote a chat where if they were positive and helpful to the team, despite having an extremely poor game, the chances of the punishment would be significantly reduced since it requires the in game players to submit the request of punishment. For toxicity in chat, the same punishments could result but it would require a minimum of 3 players on the same team to mark the toxic player for the punishments. Finally, for players that leave the game more than 30 seconds before the game ends, their account should automatically get placed in 15 minute low priority queue and lose 5 times the LP.
Since I just talked about ranked and players obviously grief and are super toxic in normal games too, but you can’t lose LP in normal games, I think the same system should be in place but instead of LP you just get placed in a 45 minute low priority queue at 4 marks and a 90 minute low priority queue at 8 marks. To prevent queues of 4 from trolling the 1 random and getting away with it, to punish players that are in a 4 queue, all it would take would be the 1 random and 1 player on the other team.
Finally, I think there should be a way for League Partner Program members to report players to Riot. It happens so often where these content creators (especially streamers) constantly get griefed on stream and nothing ever seems to happen. This obviously would be a privilege given to them that could be taken away if it is abused or used as a threat. It should be something behind the scenes where the LPP member can communicate with Riot about problematic players, but if an LPP member starts abusing it, saying stuff like “I’m going to get you banned since I’m LPP” they should lose their LPP status.
New/Reworked Champion Kits
I’m honestly at a loss for what Riot is doing with these. They are incredibly overloaded and insanely strong. I really like simple champions, my favorites are and probably always will be vayne, twitch and Jhin. I really don’t find it fun to play as, with or against the new overturned champions. My biggest complaint is the parts of these kits I find extremely toxic for the game, examples include Zoe doing 8000 damage from 100000 miles away (yes I know this is an exaggeration) every 4 seconds, oh yea and you also can’t use summoner spells against her cause she can use them against you. Qyiana being an assassin and having two AoE stuns (need I say more). Tryndamere having a passive that gives him critical strike chance (I would rather it gives attack speed and attack damage even though there are already several champions that do this). Rengar one shotting squishies with 0 chance to outplay (sure he can do damage and one shot, but I would like to be able to do something about it if I’m really good). Kai’sa being able to build Zhonyas, Phantom Dancer, and Guardian Angel in the same game while still doing crazy damage. Akali’s shroud. This is far more of a complaint section than I would have liked, but I wanted to include it. I think that if Riot has all these really cool ideas for champions they should spread them out more, a marksman like Senna or Aphelios shouldn’t have everything in her kit, neither should Sett. In my opinion it just makes the game less fun to play because there is too much and it gives the balance team a nightmare of a champion, let’s not create more Kalistas, Azirs, Quinns (insert every other champion that has been “forgotten about” by the Riot balance team because balancing them is a nightmare). I would really really enjoy another simple yet mechanical champion like vayne or twitch to be released. I think that would be fun, as long as it’s not another Yuumi (I did say mechanical).
Other Random Changes
This section will cover some brief things I would like Riot to do that won’t all be on the same topic as the above sections. Firstly, I think Riot should sell accounts. It’s already super prevalent and people do it a bunch anyways and I think Riot could make money doing it. If they really wanted to they could require you to have a certain honor level like what they do for PBE and the bought account(s) get tied to your “main” account where the honor level is the same across all accounts so if one gets permabanned, you can’t just by another, but if you have multiple you can still play and get your honor back up and show that you have reformed and earn the right to buy another account. This is basically what happens anyway with people buying accounts. It would also be nice for Riot to allow you to select the 20-max champions you want and the rating you want up to your highest account. So if I wanted to play with my gold 4 friend, I could go to Riot and buy a gold 4 account (I ended platinum 4). But say I couldn’t go and get a diamond account. Riot could then use IP tracking and compare to where the linked accounts are being played to prevent higher elo players from buying and selling accounts. So if they see an account owned by a player being played in California and New York at basically the same time, they could ban both, or better yet if they are in game at the same time, both get banned. Obviously the price would be totally up to Riot but I would recommend somewhere between $5-$10 for 20 champions scaling up to $50 for all of them. Also, LPP members should get free accounts will all the skins and champions on it.
