League of Legends’ bounty system is under scrutiny again. Players are pulling the latest competitive LEC matches to showcase how the system is making it worse for the teams falling behind in the matches.
In a Feb. 17 Reddit thread, a League player shared an example of the bounty system not working as intended by referring to a screenshot of the match between Karmine Corp and Vitality in the LEC Winter Split playoffs. The picture shows K’Sante had a bounty of 153g despite not being ahead of his opponent in gold. His team was also down by 4k gold, two turrets, and even six void grubs roughly 17 minutes into the match.
He was the only one with a champion bounty at the time while multiple champions on the enemy team like Vi, Azir, and Braum had a few kills and no deaths—but no champion bounty. This defeats the point of having champion bounties in the game, and it feels like it’s doing the opposite of its intended purpose. If the winning team gets to claim champion bounties, they can snowball the matches and completely stop any comebacks, making the matches more one-sided.
Former League esports player and streamer Tim “Nemesis” Lipovšek has also called the champion bounty system flawed, showing his champion had a bounty on its head despite his team losing the match by a 10k gold disadvantage.
League’s Bounty system in the early days worked simply—champions who secured three or more kills would have a bounty on their head, and players who killed them would get some gold to come back into the matches. However, in 2018, Riot included the gold earned by the player by farming minions and jungle monsters in the equation to make the system better.
They did a major overhaul to the system in patch 14.21, where they made the bounty calculations based purely on total gold earned and given away, rather than kill/death streaks or relative farms. This change aimed to make bounty assignments more predictable and reflective of a player’s actual impact in the matches. However, it seems the overhaul might need some fixes and is not working as intended.
Gameplay designer on League, David “Phreak” Turley, responded to the thread, suggesting the values displayed were incorrect and enemy champions also had bounties on their head. “Something is weird here. By this point bounty deprecation should be affecting K’Sante and even though two of Vi’s kills are low value (0-1 and 0-2 Rell) she should have accrued enough by this point,” the gameplay designer commented. He promised the players that he’ll “try to investigate” the issue and solve the fundamental issue.
Many players are also calling it a “visual bug” with the game’s spectator mode, but others claim they still face the same problem in their own matches. Until Riot finds a concrete solution to the problem, players may still be looking at a few matches with incorrect bounty values, which could potentially worsen their odds of winning from a deficit.
Published: Feb 17, 2025 03:47 pm