Riot seems to be interested in slowing down the pace of combat in League of Legends. The game has become well known for the speed of its gameplay, but the company appears to have taken things just a little bit too far.
The news comes from a recent thread on Reddit by Lead Gameplay Designer at Riot Bryan Salvatore, also known as Riot Axes. The developer described how the studio plans to make changes that are "intended to slow the pace of combat."
With teamfights now lasting for an average length of just over ten seconds, the gameplay in League of Legends has been getting faster and faster ever since the title was released back in 2009. Teamfights routinely lasted for multiple minutes at the time. Salvatore stopped short of giving specifics, but the developer suggested that mechanical changes might be implemented at some point in the very near future.
“I remember a time when y'all had discussed decreasing the time to kill because it was more exciting,” a user on the platform reminisced. “Do you think there was an overcorrection type of thing where there's too much damage now?” Salvatore replied that “we believe League of Legends is best when it is on average fast paced and exciting, but yeah, I think it would be fair to say it has overcorrected towards damage which is hitting away at clarity (I can tell what just killed me/ I can tell what I should have done differently) and skill expression (that assassin/ mage hit their whole kit, so they earned the kill)."
Salvatore discussed a few of the design ideas that have been floating around at Riot. "Allowing players to pick damage oriented supports and get enough gold to really scale with them was a major part of the changes that ultimately solved support autofill problems and we'd be hesitant to go back on those," Salvatore explained. "We'd prefer to tune durability around the reality that many teams swap a defensive character (support or tank) for a damage dealing one and balance the two approaches against each other."
When it comes to the implementation of these new mechanics, the developer said that League of Legends players will soon be hearing more about them. Salvatore concluded by noting that “we'll be talking about upcoming changes” within the “next few weeks.”