What is Riot going to do to make standard lanes a viable thing again (in competitive LoL)? Laneswap towertrades are so boring to watch and kill champion diversity to a certain extend and i wanted to hear the opinion of a designer on that matter. How do you tackle that problem as a game designer?
It's actually pretty challenging. The best tool in our toolbox is something like totally arbitrary tower stat changes in different lanes. We tried that once before, but it felt like a clumsy solution, and it had an impact on a lot of players, while lane swaps is pretty much a pro thing.
A more salient question might be why pros lane swap, and that's a pretty interesting thing to dig into, because as far as we can tell, they almost do it on the basis of a "gentleman's agreement." When we ask pros why they do it, they often answer "I don't know. It's just how we play now."
It's also worth pointing out that players in different regions, particularly Asia, don't lane swap and still have an aggressive first 10 minutes (which generally makes for a more interesting viewing experience). That's another data point that it may just be a play style and not necessarily a tuning point in the game numbers that is pushing players that way. If so, things should get interesting when we see more cross-regional play.
But the TLDR is we agree lane swapping is kind of boring to watch, and we'd like to discourage it.
A more salient question might be why pros lane swap, and that's a pretty interesting thing to dig into, because as far as we can tell, they almost do it on the basis of a "gentleman's agreement." When we ask pros why they do it, they often answer "I don't know. It's just how we play now."
It's also worth pointing out that players in different regions, particularly Asia, don't lane swap and still have an aggressive first 10 minutes (which generally makes for a more interesting viewing experience). That's another data point that it may just be a play style and not necessarily a tuning point in the game numbers that is pushing players that way. If so, things should get interesting when we see more cross-regional play.
But the TLDR is we agree lane swapping is kind of boring to watch, and we'd like to discourage it.
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