League of Legends is first and foremost a strategy game. While each player’s skill is essential to victory, there’s no point in being the best at pressing keys if you don’t have a good strategy. However, this great strength of the game has caused Riot Games more than one problem. We saw this in Season 12 when the devs had to put an end to the strategy of destroying turrets at all costs with Sion or using supports equipped with the Smite on the top lane.. However, these threats were nothing compared to the first major challenge the company had to face: the dreaded swap lane.
The most problematic strategy in the early days of League of Legends
The Swap lane as we currently design it is not at all problematic. Once the minutes are up, teams can change the distribution of champions on the different lanes. However, before Riot Games made a major change, this was done the minute matches started.. As a result, many teams would send their bot lane to the top lane in order to gain a numerical superiority, which they took advantage of to take the first turret and make the first few minutes as boring to watch as they were to play.
This strategy was already used in League of Legends Season 2 almost exclusively by competitive teams.. At the time, the studio didn’t really find this problematic and weren’t willing to make big changes for something that only happened in a few games played by pros. However, there were two big problems. The first, and easiest to explain, is that over the years this strategy has become popular in ranked. It wasn’t the most common thing to do, but when a bot lane decided to do it, the result was usually very positive.
In any case, the major problem is that the strategy has evolved badly and has created concerns in the competitive environment. In the beginning, changing lanes was very simple and the result was that you ended up two against one. However, as the games progressed and practice helped, variations began to be introduced, including assaults under the turret against outnumbered enemies. It was something everyone hated, but players did it because the move almost always won.
But it was when all the teams started using ‘four on one’ type strategies that things got out of hand.. Lane changes became a starting approach when teams decided not to play against each other. This resulted in more MMO-like encounters, in which players tried to annihilate minions and destroy structures before their opponents, in a mad dash that repeated over and over again. The main consequence is that, regardless of the teams playing, the first 20 minutes of the games were always the same.
Riot Games has taken this issue very seriously, lane switching being one of the few strategies she removed from League of Legends permanently and without exception. To do this, the developer made a very simple change that has remained in the game ever since. This is Fortify, an exclusive bonus (not the old Summoner Spell removed in 2010) to the top and mid turns for the first few minutes of play that reduces the damage they take from the spell by 50%. from champions for the first five minutes of a game.
Over the patches, this effect has varied, but it is intact since patch 6.15 released at the end of 2016. This is why most players who have recently joined League of Legends may not understand why the turrets in the upper half of the map are a little tougher in the early game. However, the entire community agreed at the time that Riot Games needed to do something. In a way, it’s only natural that the developers acted so aggressively, the competitive scene was just getting started and had ambitions to become a show with a lot of fans. Attending such boring games was therefore a huge obstacle in the developer’s plan.
While Riot Games has long strived to make new League of Legends champions balanced, they have become increasingly controversial. However, the reason for this phenomenon is not as obvious as many players would like to believe.