This is the story of a fix that all League of Legends players have been waiting for – and that Riot Games finally forgot to include in the patch associated with it.
Without knowing when exactly, Riot August indeed says on Twitter that the studio would have made a small mistake one day : integrate into the game a modification of Vladimir on which they had communicated beforehand. In other words, although they had announced a change, the most famous vampire of Runeterra had not budged an eyelash then…
And yet, his winrate was still affected, as if the nerf had really passed.
A kind of placebo effect
If we do not believe the conversations between the two developers who commented on this situation, the adjustments corresponded to patch 1.0.0.111, almost 10 years ago. It was season one then, and the hotfix included several nerfs to the champion. Among them was one whose introduction should or should not have been easy to spot: the removed movement speed bonus when using his W.
Luckily, these types of issues can no longer have as big of an impact as they did in the early years of the game. Riot Games’ tools and community responsiveness to these sorts of things have grown a lot. Even if someone in the studio forgot to schedule a change announced in the patch notes, it it would only take a few hours before a player noticed and alerted the companywhich would surely answer with a hotfix
However, it is curious to see how the most of the community fell for the placebo effect (or rather nocebo). Even with no change in reality, his appearance in patch notes and word of mouth led players to have a slightly worse perception of Vladimir, leading to a drop in his win rate…
Original content by MGG Spain