- League is currently receiving many mid-scope updates
- Riot promised to field mid-season updates more “proactively” in the future
- They will focus on rebalancing and adjusting champions
League of Legends’ champion design team announced it will release more mid-seasonal updates to champions that desperately need reworks.
More Patches Incoming
The 12th season of League of Legends is in its full swing and players have been enjoying many mid-scope updates. Now fans have more reasons to be happy, as Riot Games has announced the company will be “more proactive” about shipping the mini-reworks in future seasons.
In a recent development blogpost, League’s champion design team explained that in order to more quickly modernize the game’s roster, there will be more mid-seasonal updates. The blogpost explains that this year’s mid-scope updates have been a major success behind the scenes in regards to balance.
These updates are often needed to re-balance the champion’s abilities and adjust animations, visual effects, or sound effects. These patches often require a lot more time and planning than regular patch balance changes to get right, this being the reason they are normally not released very often.
What Are the Goals of These Changes?
Riot’s champion dev team said that it will focus more on champions who “have lost a bit of their shine over the years or have become problematic for the game.” The blogpost gives an example with Olaf – a champion that’s been difficult to balance in pro play – oftentimes being overpowered in pro and underpowered in regular play. Because of the difficulty with which he was used, only pros ever played with him. This resulted in his player base shrinking, signaling to the dev team that he needs a rework.
“Our goals with mid-scopes are to polish up how these champions feel, better define their strategic place in the game, and most importantly cater to players that love them,” the blogpost reads. “This could mean players who are already playing these champs (Ahri), players who used to play them but no longer do (Swain mid), or people who WANT to play them but can’t due to things like pro play balance issues (Olaf).”
The champion dev team also wants to focus more on strengthening the champions’ lore and theme and states that it cannot do that without the players’ feedback.
“Historically we made mid-scope level changes as the need arose, but by defining what a mid-scope is and setting goals for what good looks like, we can start doing these updates more proactively,” the dev team said.
The team promises to ship more and more of these updates as time goes by and it becomes more comfortable with these types of updates.
