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Riot Games and the Future End of League of Legends

EyesOfTheFox·9/13/2018, 7:08:32 PM·2 votes·1,761 views

All good things must eventually come to an end. Scratch that. All things eventually come to an end.

With nearly 10 years of development, 141 (currently) playable characters and 3 maps in which to use them, when does enough become too much?

The game is getting progressively harder for Riot themselves to balance with every new addition to the game. At what point will the game have too much content for them to handle? There has to be an end game for Riot when it comes to League of Legends as that is the only thing that will allow them to pursue worthwhile content that ISN'T League of Legends itself. While I never foresee a future in my lifetime where they just turn the switch off on the League servers, I can see a time when they stop producing certain types of content for the game.

But what needs to happen for them to be able to say to themselves, "GG everyone, GG." and move on?

For starters Riot would need to have a finite goal in mind when it comes to champions. Whether that's 150 champions or 200, there has to be a stopping point. Without a stopping point, the risk of over saturation can have detrimental effects on the gameplay and balance. It took over 130 champions before they realized that 3 bans per side were not enough (nor fair for every player). Now that there are 5 bans per side, that almost doesn't feel like enough anymore either. What happens at 200 champions? Will bans even matter at that point? I say no. The more content you have, the less impact removing some of said content will have.

Riot will also have to eventually come to terms with the state of the gameplay itself. That means, no more massive overhauls of gameplay content, i.e. massive rune system changes, complete champion class overhauls, no more new clients, no more changing the balance of the game for the sake of just wanting to see something different in pro play (the NBA doesn't give LeBron a -1 point nerf just because he scores a lot), no more minion and tower rebalancing to affect the way people play. One day Riot will have to create something they are happy with leaving as is. Understanding that no matter how many patches or updates exist, people WILL find a way to break the game. People will find strong picks. Balancing to constantly change which picks are strong just to have new strong picks is a never ending cycle that Riot can never and will never break, so coming to terms with that would be a huge step for the balance team. Currently there are too many issues with bugs/balance for me to think they would be happy leaving the game in its current state, so they would need to catch up everything they have already created to a standard they are happy with never touching again.

Shifting focus of the type of in game content they do update. Reaching a finite number of champions means no more new champions they have to balance around, allowing focus to be placed elsewhere. However, if you aren't introducing new champions to entice players to keep playing what are you doing? Well for starters, updating previously released content. There are a ton of reworks Riot is considering and this would free them up to do that. Thus making something old feel new. More cosmetic options (skins, chromas, icons, etc.). More rotating game modes (capture the flag or team deathmatch modes would be awesome). While all of these things would require some balancing the effect on the Rift should be minimal and much easier to balance than all new abilities and items. That means no more of Riot saying, "Well last week this was stronger than that, so this week we're making that stronger than this." It also means more cool and pretty stuff to look at.

Riot would also need to become comfortable with player habits. Humans are creatures of habit and as such find comfort in those habits. Changing the balance of the game to disrupt those habits (marksmen being deleted from bot lane, when marksmen players can't play anywhere else and don't want to play non marksmen) isn't the right way to balance the game. The game should not be balanced because Riot doesn't like the way people are playing it. The game should be balanced to fix things that are not working, or do not perform to the standard of their counterparts (wether that's too strong or too weak relative to the average), be it items or champions. Again this would require Riot to be happy with the state of the game at that point in time to be able to actually stop changing things. Two people being bot lane became an unchangeable habit that people still cite as being for dragon control, even though in olden days this was a viable excuse for keeping two bot as there were no dragon spawn timers for the world to see and less mobility, keeping two people bot currently is out of habit. Everyone can see the timer now and know and prepare for the dragon ahead of time, yet out of habit two still go bot (even though it technically isn't necessary to do so) and players are fine with it.

There will come a point in time when Riot steps away from having so many hands in the cookie jar of League of Legends. Let's hope they learn from this experience moving forward toward their next project, whatever that may be.

Until then, GLHF~

12 Comments

Totally Not Jinx9/13/2018, 7:34:55 PM3 votes

One thing I've noticed between Star Guardians; Invasion and Oddysey; Extraction is that co-op modes can be just as fun as PvP. At least, for me. And Ascension was a fascinating PvP mode with an added element of WOAH to it too, that made it fresh and exciting.

Scaling difficulties for these modes would also be neat to have. I think there's a lot of change happening right now, and nobody is really comfortable with the instability that brings about, so it's hard on people no matter what. I'm hoping, at least, that some kind of groove gets found so that things can be enjoyable again.

I think your idea of rotating game modes, even including recycling them, is fantastic. The added bonus to the event style RGMs is the skin unlocks that can come with them, enabling people to play a skin for free, even if temporarily.

Linna Excel9/14/2018, 10:52:44 PM1 votes

Realistically I could see riot starting work on LoL2 someday and relegating league to maintenance work and maybe the rare balance patch.

I think that League's biggest looming issue is that its fanbase is growing up and will keep doing so and at a point they are probably going to have to rebalance the game for player base that over 25-30.

Nik Nikerson9/15/2018, 8:54:38 PM1 votes

Interesting. You seem to think that they actually aim for real balance. It's not what they're trying to do. When they buff and nerf champions, it's less to create a balanced game state, and more to do with changing the meta. They are simply trying to keep players exploring the game, and trying new things.

BearExperiment9/15/2018, 11:23:58 PM1 votes

Add All random summoners rift so people who don't care about rank and want to play a game for fun have an option to achieve a good time while playing LoL.