League of Legends developers are taking another stab at the top lane after a few preseason changes missed the mark.
League design director Andrei “Meddler” van Roon addressed issues with top lane’s popularity and impact in today’s Dev Corner post. Riot devs believe top laners in high MMR and pro play don’t significantly influence the outcome of the game, even with a lead. While preseason changes were supposed to address this issue, it appears the problem persists.
“One of our goals with preseason as a result was to give top lane increased impact, with increases to solo lane XP, Rift Herald respawning and lower jungle/duo lane XP,” Meddler said. “Those changes have now been out for a while and they haven’t had as much effect as we’d hoped.”
Riot will take “another look” at top lane’s influence, focusing on higher elos specifically. Though Meddler didn’t offer concrete details on what the future changes look like, they’ll likely ship “fairly soon.”
Meddler also provided some graphs showing the Ranked Solo/Duo position select rates by region and MMR over the course of the last month.
On the North American servers, top lane’s selection percentage drops off in higher ranks. Mid lane, on the other hand, dominates the region consistently at around 24 percent for all ranks. Jungle appears to be the least popular role over the last month. It’s unclear if this is due to the recent jungle changes that nerfed XP or because it’s simply not as popular.
The Korean and EUW servers followed a similar trend over the last month, with mid being the most popular and jungle the least.
Though top lane changes won’t be out by next patch, they’ll likely begin testing on the PBE soon.
Published: Jan 31, 2020 01:53 pm