Home Gaming Riot discuss preseason progress – their early 2016 goals for League of Legends

Riot discuss preseason progress – their early 2016 goals for League of Legends

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Lol Season header

MOBAs are forever changing. Granted, the same old core formula of “defend the giant building at your base, destroy the enemy’s” remains true, but the way each game takes place is forever shifting, thanks largely to consistent balance changes. Riot in particular are really good at tweaking their title, League of Legends. It gets regular updates, with rather big (and subtle) changes, which keeps everything exciting, and the overall experience fresh.

2016 will be no different. Riot will continue to balance and such as they see fit. They’ve now shed some light on what some of their first focuses for the preseason will be in a new experimental blog called ‘State of the Season’.

Preseason’s a time where we focus more on revising systems and challenging established parts of the game than usual. We do this in order to make long-term improvements that just aren’t possible to do bit by bit. That means game balance will be a lot more variable than usual toward the end of each year – which is also why ranked play takes a break and competitive play’s much quieter than usual. At the start of the new year, however, we’ll shift back to more standard balance patches, particularly from 6.2 onwards.

Beyond wanting to adjust game pacing, Riot also want to place focus on certain key objectives. Dragon for example, offers some neat buffs, but they don’t seem to be significant enough for players to really care. They place a much higher focus on securing turrets instead. Riot want to fix this, and will look at ways to make Dragon more appealing.

Keystone masteries will also receive a whole lot of attention. Here’s why according to Riot…

We don’t think the trees are delivering enough choice, both because some masteries are too dominant or weak, and because many don’t have real choices at some tiers. To improve that, we’re planning both new masteries and balance adjustments throughout the season.

Riot will also be making some changes to vision in-game. Apparently Blue Trinket is too strong, while Yellow Trinket in mid to late game is too weak. Both will be receiving appropriate changes.

Lastly, the various roles (Junglers, Marskmen, and Mages) are also discussed in the blog. Marksmen for the most part, seem to be in a good place. Riot will be doing some adjustments to the other two however, particularly Mages.

For our next class update we’ll probably be looking at some immobile mages. This will definitely be a long-term project, so a very rough guess is they won’t be out before the middle of the season.

And that’s it for preseason discussion!  I’d recommend seeing the blog yourself if you’d like more detail on all of the above.

Last Updated: January 6, 2016

No Comments

  1. tl;dr 😛

    Reply

    • hairyknees

      January 6, 2016 at 10:34

      Bah! 😛

      Reply

      • VampyreSquirrel

        January 6, 2016 at 10:44

        At least you got a comment 😛

        Reply

  2. Frik van der Hewerskink

    January 6, 2016 at 10:58

    Really can’t wait for season 6 to start with the new champion select in ranked. It is going to be awesome 🙂

    Reply

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