One of League of Legends’ most iconic personalities, Yiliang “Doublelift” Peng, released a highly-detailed video last week explaining exactly what he thinks is wrong with the game.
For the most part, we agree with him, and according to a post on the official League forums from lead designer Greg “Ghostcrawler” Street, Riot may agree with Doublelift, too.
Doublelift’s video dove into several key points. The largest takeaway being the game’s state of constant change. Doublelift argued that while change is a good thing to keep the game interesting, the direction of the change needs to be honed, and the pacing needs to be slowed down. He brought up other popular games that rarely push patches at all, and mentioned that Riot could try slowing down League’s patch schedule a little bit.
One of his key defenses around this point was that other games that are rising in popularity, such as Fortnite, can do so because highly-skilled players like Tyler “Ninja” Blevins can afford to focus on content creation and community outreach rather than scrimming long hours to keep up with the meta.
In Ghostcrawler’s post, he mentions that Riot strives to only make good changes, but sometimes it misses the mark.
“Learning is fun, and as [Doublelift] says, one of the things that keeps players coming back to League,” Ghostcrawler says. “However, for this to work, you need to feel like there is a sense of forward momentum, not that you’re just running in place all the time because freaking Riot keeps resetting the game.”
He mentions that Riot is mostly proud of its work on the new runes system introduced during the most recent pre-season, but a lot of the work done outside of runes, like the mid-season patches, had more impact and inadvertent change than the company anticipated. This year, the mid-season update, which is typically one giant set of changes in one patch a year, was split into three patches.
But because of the impact of the changes to the bot lane and jungle, Ghostcrawler says that these three patches didn’t feel like one mid-season update split into three to some players, and instead it felt like three separate mid-season updates, each with its own aftermath. Next year, he says, Riot will return to one mid-season patch.
More importantly, he claims that future patches, especially those leading into Worlds and the pre-season, should be “much less disruptive.”
Patches being loaded with content is a problem, sure, but the impact of the content is a real issue, too. If patch content slows down, we also hope Riot focuses on pushing changes that genuinely benefit the game, as well as changes that are truly necessary for a better player experience.
It’s time for Riot to put the money where its mouth is, and with the next patch arriving this Wednesday, fans will probably be the first to criticize how well it holds up to Ghostcrawler’s post.
