Winter is coming, which means it's almost time for the League of Legends preseason. With the 2014 season winding down, developer Riot Games is preparing players for the influx of changes that'll set the foundation for "the next year of League's evolution."
"There will be a lot of changes to League over a short period of time and, with so many variables at play, we’re expecting the game to be disrupted, imperfect, and require a lot of tweaking over time. In other words, while we’re confident we’re taking the game in the right general direction, we’ll correct course as needed as we see the changes unfold," Riot said. Although Riot has been testing preseason internally for months, they expect to gather most of their feedback from players. And one thing they are looking to support this preseason is "strategic diversity."
"When we talk about strategic diversity, it’s a conversation about the ways you look to win – the different paths to victory your team can take," Riot explained. "Mechanical skill (insane Lee Sin ward kicks) and tactical decision making (funneling through the jungle to set up a perfect Orianna ult) are important elements of skill in League. We’ve focused a lot in the past at ensuring that tactical and mechanical mastery are powerful and, while we don’t want to change that, we do want to enhance the impact and variety of strategic gameplay."
"Through the years, players have discovered a bunch of viable strategies like teamfight-focused (deathball) strats, split pushing, siege / poke comps, objective control, and more. In the past, when one of the aforementioned strategies was so dominant it crowded out all others we didn’t have a whole lot of options to bring it back in line other than nerfing the champions that were critical to its success. Think Shen back in his split push heyday or, more recently, Ziggs and stall comps. Since we believe that League is at it’s best when multiple strategies are battling it out on the Rift, we had to target champions to bring strategies in line to allow others to emerge. We’re hoping the path being set by the 2015 pre-season will allow us to create an ecosystem where multiple strategies can prosper… and kill each other."
One particular theme they'll be focusing on this preseason is "specialized offense but generalized defense." Basically, your offensive strategy will be strengthened by specializing into it — picking a team comp and purchasing items that allow you to achieve a specific strategy. For defending against a specialized offense, they'll provide tools needed to make counter-strategies available against nearly any team comp.
"For example, an item that will let you engage on an elusive poke champ," Riot said. "This is the intent of many of the changes to objectives or items; they are available to most comps most of the time and can be leveraged as needed. This allows us to add more power to strategic decisions without games just being decided in champion select."
Another focus for the preseason is "deepening the demands on players and champions." Riot explains this will be most apparent in the jungle where demands will be greater than being able to gank. "We're looking to re-introduce value to junglers who can clear quickly or safely (think Season 2) as well as keeping the value of junglers who hit lanes hard, fast, and early."
Throughout preseason, Riot will look into changes to objectives (towers, dragon, and baron), the jungle (a new camp, spawn times, difficulty, items, rewards, etc.), items (more situationally powerful actives) and some core systems (stats per level, death timers, how health / mana regen works). Although today was just a general overview of their plans, more in-depth blogs will be posted in the coming days.
