2017 HYPE

The new year is only a few months away and it is already looking to be a great one for Riot and League of Legends. Riot is making many changes to League in and out of game that some may say are far overdue. These changes will supposedly help performance, improve the game visually and help take the League eSports scene to the next level.

The New Client

It is finally here. The new client Riot has been teasing us with for over a year is almost in open beta. Producing the new client has slowed down Riot’s progress on out of game functions drastically, as anything new they produce they would have to produce twice for our current client and the new one. Once the new client is in full swing, I expect many features to be added that will improve the League experience drastically. They have already teased at some features, but importantly they are reprogramming the game to be more hardware friendly. League is already a well optimized game, able to run on some very low end machines, but Riot claims with their new coding the games performance will be even better and load times should decrease by 20%.

Replay System

Perhaps the most exciting feature of the new client is the addition of replays. A highly desired feature, the replay system will allow players to download their matches in the postgame lobby. The replay will have marked time stamps of objectives and kills preloaded so there will no longer be any need to remember the time of when an exciting moment happened. The reason behind the delay of replays is Riot’s problem with back-patching, or showing a replay file from a previous patch. With the new client, it seems they have finally solved this problem and are ready to roll it out. Riot has only shown us a small teaser of replays, but it already looks polished and well put together. With replays being introduced, the next question is what about a sandbox mode? Recent talks on the League of Legends subreddit have shown rioters saying it is not currently in the works, but with the new programming and client it is now a definite possibility.

Solo Queue Returns

After an entire year of negative reactions from the community, Riot has reintroduced solo queue. It happened slowly, starting from challenger and slowly working its way down to diamond. It has been brought back as its own separate queue. Dynamic queue, renamed to Flex queue, will still exist, but both queues will have separate rewards for the end of season. The new champion select will still be available in both queues as well. Ranked fives will be a part of the Flex queue, so will also be available 24/7. Some have expressed that there is still no way for a team of varying ELO to queue together, such as the old ranked fives queue from a year ago, but Riot has expressed it is very difficult to find a balanced match when diamond and bronze players queue together, so they have drawn the line there and said the best way for those players to queue together would be in normal games.

Admitting Mistakes

At times, Riot can be a pretty innovative company. As the game gets older, champions updates and newly released champions are becoming more and more unique (ignoring the glorious three hit passives). However, not all of their ideas worked as well as hoped. As demonstrated with Kalista and Azir, it sometimes takes them some time to figure out what they want to do. Recently, Riot has reverted the changes they made to Kog’Maw and as mentioned before, announced the return of solo queue. This is a huge step in the right direction for the company. With Kog’Maw, Riot went out on a limb and made a change they thought would be unique and introduce an exciting new mechanic. While that is a great thing to do to keep League of Legends fresh, it proved in the long run to be a nightmare to balance around. When most Marksmen play similarly, it is tough to balance around them all when Kog’Maw existed and acted so differently. Instead of nerfing him until he was barely worth playing because of balance issues, they admitted their mistakes and instead reverted their changes. This is a side of Riot we haven’t seen before and it can only mean good things for us as players and for the game itself.

Pre-Season

As with every pre-season, it sounds like Riot already has big plans. From what they’ve expressed, they want every game to be unique. In a game where the meta can sometimes take over and a single champion seems to be seen every game, I think that is great. They have big plans to change the jungle, changing up smite rewards and possibly new jungle camps. To quote them;

“Jungle optimization is an interesting skill, but right now one of the strongest routes is just straight through the jungle in order. We want to introduce more variance between the camps, so players can have stronger preferences about which camps to prioritize, rather than merely clearing whatever is nearby and available.”

Along with the jungle, Riot also plans to add additional masteries. Nothing is mentioned specifically yet, but they want players to have choices when selecting which masteries to take, not just running the optimal route. With more unique champions being added and more unique play styles to come, the new year is sounding more exciting than ever.

Monetizing eSports

Without going into the numbers too heavily, several League of Legends team owners have expressed that playing in the LCS (not to mention the Challenger scene) is not very profitable. This is especially true for teams at the lower end of the standings. While long-term plans aren’t released, Riot has finally said that something will be done on their end. They have kicked off their plans by adding a source of team revenue to the shop in the form of individual team summoner icons, where a portion of that money goes directly to that team. Along with taking a portion of sales from Championship Zed and the Championship Ward skin, they have increased the 2016 World Championship prize pool by 2 million dollars. Riot has also starting playing commercials on the worlds broadcast. For the 2017 season, they plan to increase the minimum salary of pro players. This is an incredibly healthy step that has been needed for a long time. With more money coming to teams from Riot, teams can afford better staff and provide better living arrangements, two commodities that have proven to be essential in the past few years.

Team Dignitas in the LCS!

Most importantly, Team Dignitas is back in the LCS! Make sure to support our guys in the 2017 season.

Get your own AKRacing Chair here and support our players, all profit goes towards the teams!