Preseason 2015: Increasing Strategic Diversity
By Riot Ypherion
With the 2014 season winding down, we’re once again just around the corner from the time of chaos that is preseason! Rest assured this isn’t chaos for the sake of chaos or disruption for the sake of disruption; the preseason is an important period of downtime between ranked and professional play to set the foundation for the next year of League’s evolution. Over the coming days we’ll publish a series of dev blogs going in-depth with our preseason changes, including the jungle (again!), objectives, and items. While these won’t cover 100% of what’s coming, we wanted to cover the big topics before getting to the fun. For now, let’s kick things off on a higher level.
Preseason: Just the Beginning
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.
While we’ve been testing preseason internally for months, no matter what we do, players will have put hundreds or thousands (nearly millions?) of times more hours into these changes in the first week than we ever could. We’re looking forward to seeing what you’re all able to do with this slew of new mechanics and content, and we’ll be looking for your feedback.
On to the good stuff!
Strategic Diversity
The Path Less Traveled
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.
Some Nitty-Gritty
Another major focus is on deepening the demands on players and champions so that there are more ways for a champion to express strength and power. This will be most apparent in the jungle where we want demands to be greater than “can you gank super hard?” 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.
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Source: leagueoflegends
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