The damage is too high, the death timers are too short, the bounty system rewards stupid behavior, and the punishment system for players who soft-int or otherwise give up is far too lenient. In these ways, League of Legends is pretending to be an arcade game.
Arcade games tend to be a bit wild, unmeasured, and intentionally chaotic and cheesy. League of Legends should not be trying to design itself around this philosophy.
League of Legends is a traditional MOBA with intricate macro strategies and a mechanically intensive micro-game. It should take itself more seriously than it does in its current iteration, which sees itself appealing to a nearly non-existent playerbase of hyper-active children while forsaking the majority of its fandom which, realistically speaking, is probably made up of adults in their twenties and thirties.
The bad news is this is the trend most multiplayer games are leaning into and there isn’t much hope of it going away. The good news is that, if Riot Games does feel like experimenting with a more mature design philosophy, there are some really easy steps they could take to get there.
Reduce the DAMAGE Players Have Access to
No, this does not mean to improve the durability players have access to. The durability update was a change that had its mindset pushed in the right direction, but only just missed the mark because of one simple reason: Riot Games was targeting the reduction of given damage as opposed to targeting the source of said damage.
Moving forward, Riot Games should be looking to trim down the damage each champion has access to: base AD, associated rune damage, AD/AP scaling and, eventually, a reduction in damage afforded to champions through item stats and actives/passives.
The primary objective in reducing in-game damage should be to make wave management and good trades the main key to gaining a lead against your opponent instead of relying on kills. As it stands, Summoner’s Rift is small enough to encourage tons of skirmishing between laners and junglers. This is absolutely fine in a world where a lost duel means losing CS or a teleport, but right now the skirmishes are decided by the team that lands CC first.
This means that if you get CC’d, you die to overwhelming burst, regardless of what kind of champions you’re playing against. And since that’s the relationship junglers share with laners, laners who know what they’re doing choose to not interact with their opponent whenever there may be an enemy jungler on their half of the map. Given the small size of the Rift, this means that laners who are not directly working with their jungle are encouraged to not skirmish, resulting in a counter-intuitive effect where the small size of the Rift actually creates less action instead of more.
Once the game has a relatively consistent, smooth level of damage across the board for all champions and roles, players will begin to lean more into the strengths of wave management and chunking opponents out instead coin flipping all ins in the hope that the enemy jungler isn’t waiting them out.
This only happens if the reduction in damage is met with another change:
Increase Death Timers
In a world where dying is far more difficult and CS is far more important, a high death timer needs to be in place to ensure players who make enough mistakes to warrant dying are punished adequately.
Early skirmishes over objectives in modern League can often end with one team slowly winning the fight, turning to the objective, and before said objective is taken, being forced to take another fight with the now respawned opponents who have back advantage over them.
Needless to say, this is silly. A won skirmish, even an extended skirmish, should end with the winning team securing an objective with no hope for the opponents to contest.
Dying in lane should not reward the losing player with a potential bounty placed on their opponent’s head and increased movement speed back into lane. It should punish the losing player with an opponent who now has a great gold and level advantage and a loss in tempo.
The fact that dying provides laners with a homeguards effect means that Riot actually thinks dying is too punitive in modern League, but this is a problem they themselves have created in giving players access to so much damage so early.
Reduce damage, increase death timers, and stop killing players for getting CC locked with no counterplay and players will not need to be given bonuses for losing.
Remove Bounties
This is the big one: The bounty system.
Most League players like the bounty system, and that is because most players think they benefit from the bounty system (because they’re bad).
The simple fact is this: in a world without bounties, the good players will earn LP, the bad players will earn less LP. In a world with bounties, that’s still true, except that good players lose more than they otherwise would have by virtue of the bad players being bailed out by the bounty system.
The bounty system rewards the losing team, which means that bounties steal a not insignificant percentage of LP from the better players over the course of a season. It’s that simple. Don’t read any more into it. It’s that simple, don’t read any more into it.
Remove the bounty system.
Punish the Soft Inters
I realize this is probably impossible to do even well, but the fact is that there are too many games with players who feel entitled to a team that picks all meta champs is astounding. As soon as these players are in champ select you can identify them because they will begin complaining to no end.
If they can’t dodge, they end up playing the game in the fountain, typing away until they need to walk into lane to avoid getting auto-banned, letting the enemy team kill them after a few minutes, and repeating.
Just because a League of Legends player is right clicking every so often and dying only once every 5 minutes does not mean they aren’t inting. If this kind of behavior is consistent, smack the player with a temp-ban. Get them off the rift, please.
TLDR; League of Legends is too arcadey. To fix this, Riot games should increase death timers, lower damage in-game, remove the bounty system, and punish players who soft-int with more extreme verdicts.
