Requiring Teamwork to Contain Snowballing is Only a Partial Solution

(I have thought my arguments and mean what I say. I hope it comes across as, rather than a salt or rage post, as calm and clear as I meant it to. Enjoy, and tell me what you think!)

A while ago, a fed fighter or slayer could almost literally solo-carry a game by stat-checking their opponents. I would know. I was there—on the receiving end as an ADC in 2017.

Riot understood that this was not fun, so they created a solution, which was to enable teamwork to stop said melee carry reliably. When teams work together to do this, it feels like an amazing raidboss fight whether you win or lose.

The buffs to supports and tanks were part of this decision, and they were part of the reason that the 2017 Summer and Worlds drafts were dominated by supertanks, hypercarries, and enchanters. The most effective tactic available was to stonewall every lane and outscale your opponent.

But Riot has come understand that this was not fun, either. Fighter and slayer players felt irrelevant, and so Riot did what they could. Mage mid and late-game waveclear was nerfed to enable sieges to end in dives. Marksman items were reworked to focus their power on tanks rather than just obliterate everyone, fighters and slayers included.

Here’s the new problem—and why it feels like one player can solo lose the game. The more basic problem of champions snowballing into unstoppable stat-checks was only partly solved by the addition of team-level counterplay. If one player feeds, creating a snowball, and refuses to work with their teammates to stop it, then the snowball generally wins agaisnt the four remaining cooperative players at each turning point in the game, only growing as it does.

The recent focusing of rewards on objectives, promoting the pursuit of them over champion kills, indirectly and unintentionally aggravated this problem. Once the ‘feeder’ completely loses their lane, they lose their turret, too, putting their lane opponents further ahead. They can then push the wave and rotate to other objectives, getting their whole team ahead with turret gold, dragon buffs, and a Rift Herald charge, not to mention map control.

The available counter-snowball mechanics—faster rotations and backs due to a smaller map, shutdown gold, and death timers—are designed to be used by five players working together to out-macro their opponents during the mid or late game. When they are used, again, they are exciting and feel fair for both parties. But they can’t be used by anything less.

Hence the problem of the ‘feeder’. Their usual gameplay pattern is to die several times, fall behind in farm, and then lose their turret. Their opponents emerge with an ‘unearned’ advantage that can then be used to brute-force other lanes. At this juncture, the correct course for the team would be to lose the minimum across the bird while seeking a devastating mid-game turnaround. But for the ‘feeder,’ whose mentality is often compromised by tilt or the knowledge that this account is not their main, the play-pattern is to ragesplit or run around the map taking desperate fights.

Without their help, their team lacks the map pressure to deny their opponent ‘free’ objectives that they could not otherwise have taken. Now the snowball gains momentum. One turret after another falls. Arguments break out. Players mute each other. Baron spawns, and, thousands of gold behind and with compromised teamwork, the team with the ‘feeder’ loses. The game ends in frustration for the losers and short-lived joy for the winners—the ‘feeder’ may be on their team next match.

What were those unfortunate four supposed to do? Well, there’s the rub. The game is balanced around two teams of five players working together, with the outcome depending on their individual performance and team macro. That’s a reasonable expectation in 5v5 Ranked Flex and the competitive scene, but not in solo-queue. Competitive mentality cannot be guaranteed for every player on both teams every game.

If we want to improve game quality on the ranked ladder, then the expectations around which the game is balanced must change. Toxic behavior must be expected in such an emotionally charged environment as a League of Legends game, whose state will have to be robust enough to handle it when it appears rather than devolve into a stomp. That will mean two things in particular.

First, the gold and experience advantages of individual players needs to matter so much as to affect macro decisions about map presence. Since it’s generally gained and kept by good play rather than merely collecting a couple free kills during laning phase, and since shutdown mechanics keep it from becoming permanent or team-wide, this form of snowballing is healthy. An overextended splitpusher, say, can be stopped by two or three people rather than requiring all five.

Second, the marginal value of teamwork must decrease outside competitive League. The difference between 4 players working together and 5 players working together is so large, because teamwork is supposed to counter snowball, that the above might not matter much if done alone. A tilted player should not be an anchor that drags a team to defeat. It should be alright if one or both teams is dragging one around the Rift. Winning a game by steamrolling over your opponents with the lead one of them gifted you is not admirable or fun and only leads to disappointment once your luck ends and you face harder opponents. Then you might even become the ‘feeder’.

I can’t say exactly how to make these changes, but Riot has fixed similar ones in the past. They brought Taliyah’s waveclear into line with other mages because her roaming was coming at the expense of other lanes. We can make early rotations not do so, either. For example, perhaps, we could reduce the gold for repeated champion kills to reduce the reward of killing your opponent over and over.

Taken together, these changes would put leads in the hands of the players who most deserve and could best use them, while keeping them from automatically putting their team ahead and thus requiring those fed players to exploit and press their advantage, say by splitpushing an Inhibitor. This would return the ability to ‘solo-carry,’ only now by killing objectives around the map with yourself or one or two others.