Bounties are a good idea, but they need to fall off

League needs comeback mechanics because it has snowballing. Getting an early lead makes it easier for you to bully your opponent and get a bigger lead; without shutdowns, getting a kill when behind is not only harder, but also less rewarding (than the initial kill), because the enemy still has the advantages they built with their lead.

Example 1: Imagine if you were playing football (soccer), but there's a new rule: every time you score a goal, Your team gets to have one more player on the field. Whoever gets the first goal can likely take advantage of their extra player to score more goals. Even if the losing team gets a goal (which is now harder), they're still behind from the goals gained using that initial advantage, and it's really unlikely they'll ever come back.

Example 2: Now let's look at a game with snowballing: capture the flag. When your teammate gets caught, it gives the enemy a numbers advantage, making things harder for you to capture the flag and harder to free your teammates from jail. However, the more of your team is captured (the more behind you are), the bigger the reward is for setting people free from jail. (Some variants have an additional comeback mechanic of allowing prisoners to link arms and extend out of jail, making a jailbreak from behind easier.)

Bounties in League are the same thing. We can argue about whether they're tuned correctly, but without them, comebacks would be incredibly difficult and most games would feel over in 5-10 minutes. However, there's a problem: the point of bounties is to make it easier to come back from behind, but if you come back in a different way, bounties persist even though you're no longer behind.

Say your team got an early lead, and got a few bounties. But then, the enemy team sneaks Herald, gets a bunch of turret plates with it, and picks up a non-shutdown kill or two along the way, bringing the gold back to near-even. At this point, the game isn't actually even, it's enemy-favored, because you still have bounties to lose.

I can see the replies already:

It's your team's fault for not using your advantage to get vision on Herald and avoid the dive.

You're right. My team screwed up, and the enemy deserves their comeback. However, my team doesn't deserve to have the enemy team's comeback mechanic turned into a snowball mechanic against us.

League had this exact problem before (proxy Singed). There's another anti-snowball mechanic in the other end of bounties: When you die repeatedly, you become worth less gold, so the enemy can't get an insurmountable advantage from chain killing you. To ensure this mechanic only works for comebacks, your worth is reset when you get a kill. Proxy Singed abused this: when he died a lot, he'd take advantage of the catchup mechanic (reduced bounty), but he wouldn't actually be behind, since he was still getting plenty of gold from cs and you were giving up cs in order to kill him.

Riot solved the catchup mechanic abuse by making reduced bounty protection smarter: now, csing will gradually bring your bounty back up to 300. We can fix the bounty problem the same way, by making bounties fall off when you're no longer in the lead.

There's multiple ways to make bounties fall off. Here's two ideas; I'm sure we'll refine them or think of better ones in the comments. Also, they are not mutually exclusive; it might make sense to do both, with adjusted numbers. Speaking of which, as always, numbers are rough estimates, subject to change.

• When you have a bounty, it is reduced by 50 every 5 minutes. This timer resets each time the bounty increases. Bounty reduction cannot happen in combat.
• When you get a shutdown on an enemy, reduce each other enemy bounty by 50. Gain 25 additional gold for each bounty reduced this way.