So, you want a new Map? Read this first.
This is a subject that comes up a lot. I've re-hashed a lot of these points in separate posts over the years, and after typing this up for yet another comment that will likely get buried in a few days and never seen, I decided it was worth it's own post. If nothing else it may be a handy reference to link to in further discussions. Who knows, it might even be the starting point for someone to come up with a really solid idea for a map! Here's some things to consider when asking for or trying to design a new map for League of Legends.
For a map to feel like a League of Legends map, it will focus on Lanes (with Towers, Inhibitors and finally a Nexus), with some Jungle in between those lanes. Here's a short breakdown of that layout for the current full time maps:
| Map | Lanes | Jungle |
|---|---|---|
| Howling Abyss | 1 | 0 |
| Twisted Treeline | 2 | 1 |
| Summoners Rift | 3 | 2 |
You could make a new 2 lane map, but in general it would feel like Twisted Treeline with __, because at it's core it's still a 2 lane map.
One way to make a map feel distinctly different from another map with similar lanes is to change the focus of what you're doing on the map. The Crystal Scar was also a map with two lanes (that just so happened to form a perfect circle, with a long top lane and short bot lane), with most of it's "jungle" in the center and a little bit on the edges. In order to not feel too much like Twisted Treeline, Riot changed the objectives away from Towers/Inhibitors/Nexus to a point system influenced by capture points. It's safe to say that Crystal Scar felt nothing like Twisted Treeline, but... well, it didn't feel enough like League of Legends either. When they shut down Dominion there were fewer players actively playing it than there were in Challenger. One could argue that Twisted Treeline doesn't a lot like League of Legends either, with how important Alter control is on that map, and that might explain why it generally isn't popular. In contrast, ARAM is very popular, focusing on the core objectives of Summoners Rift (Towers/Inhibitors/Nexus) without other objectives to distract from the your poke wars/team fighting.
In contrast, a game like HotS heavily objective focused. They could take one of their existing maps, change the neutral objective, and have a new experience that still feels like it belongs in HotS. While neutral objectives are important on Summoners Rift, you don't play Summoners Rift because you like Baron Nashor more than Vilemaw.
Summary So Far:
- NEW: Too focused on Neutral Objectives and it won't feel like League of Legends.
- NEW: League maps follow a X Lanes, X - 1 Jungles between the lanes format, with Towers/Inhibitors/Nexus as the core focus.
Another variable to consider is how many people you want on your map. A team experience is core to League of Legends, regardless of if you love them or hate them, which rules out a 1v1 or 2v2 map being use for a core map (still fine for a Featured Game Mode though). That leaves us 3v3, 4v4, 5v5, or 6v6.
You could maybe add more people to a map than the 6v6, but we've seen pretty drastic loading time increases when going from 5v5 to 6v6 for Hexakill. I don't think that's from any issue on the Server side, I think that's a problem with the game client or a minimum requirements for League limitation. Either way, with Hexakill as my benchmark I'm going to assume 6v6 is about the maximum League can support without some drastic changes to the engine/client, and once you get into that territory it's significantly harder to sell the idea that the map needs to be made.
You could maybe make a 4v4 map work, but if the map is 3 lanes, 2 jungles it'll feel like an empty Summoners Rift (with a Top, Jung, Mid, and Bot. No Support). A 2 lanes, 1 jungle map isn't much better either, since it'll either feel too similar to Twisted Treeline or like a Summoners Rift Lite, with a Top, Jung, Bot and Support.
Trying to have a 6v6 players per team into the X Lanes, X - 1 Jungles style of map, without objectives being a crazy focus that's likely to sink the map (a la Dominion/TT), and without being too crazy (Hexakill TT/ARAM) or too similar to existing modes (Hexakill SR suffered with this) the only new format left for you is 4 Lanes, 3 Jungles. You'd for certain have a Top-Top, Top-Mid, Bot-Mid, and Bot-Bot. I recall hearing something about Summoners Rift being designed around 4 sources of income/XP split between 5 players (can't remember if that was a Rioter or someone else), so if you take the same Player Count - 1 approach to this new map you'd have 1 Jungler covering all 3 Jungle slices to get the same gold/XP as a laner, and 1 Support to split XP with a laner and get limited gold from an item.
Adding an extra Solo laner (6v6) does more to create interest than removing a Solo laner (4v4) does, since you can have the 4v4 team fight scenario reasonably frequently on Summoners Rift. Additionally, there's a potential that teams will opt to not have a single Jung or a single Sup, but have two players as Sup/Jung hybrids, splitting the Jungle resources while also utilizing the Support items and roaming. That said, the only way to force that is to design the Jungle in such a way it's not enough on it's own.
Summary So Far:
- Too focused on Neutral Objectives and it won't feel like League of Legends.
- League maps follow a X Lanes, X - 1 Jungles between the lanes format, with Towers/Inhibitors/Nexus as the core focus.
- NEW: 3-6 players per team is likely the max, with 6v6 most likely ideal.
- NEW: Consideration of income sources (particularly Jungle) to shape how/what roles do on the map.
OK, so you've got your template for a map. Now how's it going to feel meaningfully different than Summoner's Rift? Right now you've just added an extra Solo Laner. I mean, that's great for people clambering for Mid, they're twice as likely to get it, but what else?
Seriously, what else? Without an answer to what makes it different there's no reason to start making a new map. You can't just say "Do the work to make a new map" without a thought towards why you'd make a new map. "For variety's sake" isn't a goal for a new map, that's a side effect of having a new map.
When designing the map, you've got a lot of champions that will interact with the design of the map more than others. There are champions that get special effects from Bushes (
) or have special interactions with Walls (
), as well as those that love space to maneuver (or prefer choke points) (
and many more). You get the idea. Are these groups going to be operating about the same as on Summoners Rift? Will they have more freedom? Less? How will that impact the overall feel of the new map?
#TL;DR:
- Too focused on Neutral Objectives and it won't feel like League of Legends.
- League maps follow a X Lanes, X - 1 Jungles between the lanes format, with Towers/Inhibitors/Nexus as the core focus.
- 3-6 players per team is likely the max, with 6v6 most likely ideal.
- Consideration of income sources (particularly Jungle) to shape how/what roles do on the map.
- Different map layouts will effect different champions differently.
- AND MOST IMPORTANTLY: Map variety is a side effect of having another map worth playing, not a reason to create a new map.
Hopefully this helps answer "why don't we have more maps?" as well as giving people a jumping off point for trying to design a new map.
