A week after Doublelift released a fantastic video on his viewpoints concerning the state of League of Legends, Riot Ghostcrawler has responded with a statement of his own. Unlike most big developers, Ghostcrawler doesn’t refute everything that Doublelift had said in the video, he actually agrees with a lot of what Doublelift had to say.
One of the main points that Doublelift makes during his video is that change is good. In order to prevent the game from coming stale changes have to be made so that the meta remains interesting. However, Doublelift says that patches need to be less frequent and less impactful on the game.
Ghostcrawler agrees with the sentiment that patches keep the game interesting but says that missed the mark recently. “Learning is fun, and as DL says, one of the things that keeps players coming back to League. However, for this to work, you need to feel like there is a sense of forward momentum, not that you’re just running in place all the time because freaking Riot keeps resetting the game.”
He says that the two recent big changes to League were the runes reforged patch and the mid-season patches. Ghostcrawler says that they are very happy with how the runes came out and that the game is in a better place than where it was before. However, he agrees that the mid-season updates definitely missed their mark.
This year, Riot tried to divide the mid-season patch into 3 parts. They would release a patch every 2 weeks, first a big patch and then a small patch to balance things out. However, this approach didn’t make players feel like there was a single big mid-season patch. Instead, it made them feel like there were 3 mid-season patches that all brought along their own meta and problems. A lot of players have expressed their concern with this approach in the past since many of them are unable to learn new meta after new meta. Fortunately, he says that they will go back to the old system starting next season.
Ghostcrawler also argues that Riot wants patches to be less disruptive, especially before Worlds or other international tournaments. They don’t specifically make patches that will have a huge impact on the game, but sometimes they affect them in ways that Riot didn’t expect. He says that they never meant to remove ADCs from the game entirely but just wanted to take a little bit of power away from them.
As a League of Legends fan, I am happy to see that Riot can own up to their mistakes. Seeing Riot apologize to their fans for the way they handled balancing this season makes me only respect them that much more.
