Riot put out a new patch for League of Legends this week — an occasion that the game’s legions of fans always await with bated breath. Anticipation curdled into disappointment once players realised the developer had made some unwelcome changes that could have a profound impact on one of the competitive multiplayer game’s key team positions: the jungler.
Playing jungle is a unique position in League, so let me contextualise the role to help show why this week’s news has lead to a “complaining stampede”, as one player described the community’s reaction on Reddit. Most (if not all) League of Legends games are played on “Summoner’s Rift,” a 5-vs-5 map which is divided into three main lanes that connect each team’s base — located at the top-right and bottom-left corners of the space. Here’s an image of Summoner’s Rift from League’s tutorial:
The “jungle” refers to the space in-between the three lanes. Serious teams (especially ones playing in the game’s ranked mode) assign four people to specific lanes, with a fifth player filling in the role of jungler. This player spends the vast majority of the game inside the jungle killing a series of increasingly tough monsters that reside within, only stepping out to perform specific tactical manoeuvres like assassinating an unsuspecting opponent or helping out a teammate in need.
The jungler’s priority is to focus on killing all the computer-controlled monsters as quickly and efficiently as possible, because doing so gives earns them lots of gold, experience, and bonus power-ups that benefit the rest of the team. It’s a relatively isolating position compared to League’s other team roles, then. And since junglers don’t rack up as many kills or highly visible plays against enemy champions, they can easily be left out of the spotlight despite helping the entirety of the team in many crucial ways. This dynamic is all the more frustrating for dedicated junglers because, ironically, it’s one of the toughest positions to play well. Fighting against powerful monsters on your own basically means that you can never fuck up, because nobody’s going to be able to come and lend you a helping hand. The League community has had problems with jungling for a while now because of all these idiosyncrasies.
Ok. So what did Riot just do to the jungle? The 5.4 patch for League that went live this week implemented a few highly specific but equally important changes that, when added together, made the already-hard jungling position even harder.
For detailed breakdowns of the 5.4 jungle changes, I’d recommend checking out some of the great YouTube videos that experienced League players have been making to critique Riot’s decision over the past few days. In an interview YouTubers LolClass did with a few pro League players about the 5.4 changes, Team Liquid player I Will Dominate explained that Riot added in a new base-level cost (250 gold) to switch between the specialised items junglers purchase to beef up their character for the game. This makes it prohibitively expensive for junglers to swap between different items depending on which one will make them best-suited to take out a specific monster.
“This is, essentially, just a massive nerf to jungle power,” IWDominate explained. On top of that, the 5.4 patch also nerfed “smite”, a powerful special ability junglers (and other players) use when attacking enemy champions. Diminishing smite’s power therefore makes junglers weaker against enemy champions, which limits their ability to quickly drop in and out of the three lanes in Summoner’s Rift to assassinate targets or participate in late-game team battles.
That’s just the nitty-gritty aspect of 5.4’s jungle changes, though. What these specifics ultimately point to, in many players’ minds, is a fundamental problem with the jungle’s difficulty. YouTuber foxdropLoL argued in an insightful video published yesterday that the current problem with League’s jungle is that Riot has set such a high bar with its difficulty that “off-meta junglers have never been in a worse spot” than they are right now. “Currently, it’s not fun or productive to play them.”
By “off-meta junglers”, he means any League champion that isn’t specifically built for jungling. In his and many other players’ view, the jungle is now so difficult that only a small handful (like, 5 or 6) champions can even hope to make it through in one piece.
Why is that such a problem? Because champion diversity is critical to League. It’s what makes the game so interesting and endlessly fun to play. The game has more than 120 characters to choose from, each with wildly different characteristics and abilities. Only being able to play jungle with 5 or 6 of them makes the position seem stagnant in comparison to everything else in the game.
The bitter irony of 5.4’s apparent jungle nerfs is that Riot itself said last November that they were planning to change League, and the jungle specifically, to introduce more “strategic diversity” to the game. Now many fear, as YouTuber stonewall008 put it in a rant yesterday, that “diversity is dead.”
Many other League players chiming in on the ongoing discussion on Reddit and Twitter seem to agree:
I’m getting seriously disgusted with the riot jungle changes recently, like if they keep going there isn’t gonna be a jungle anymore lol
— Addam Saky (@SakyLoL) February 26, 2015
Pretty sad about the jungle nerfs in the last few patches. 🙁
— MonteCristo (@ggCMonteCristo) February 26, 2015
To promote jungle diversity, Riot will introduce Mega Smite in Season 6. Same as regular smite, but for $30 the Rift lady will scream MEGA.
— The eSports Writer (@FionnOnFire) February 26, 2015
Riot should just do away with the jungle and two more lanes in their place. Then give all the champions karts. Then make it a racing game.
— The eSports Writer (@FionnOnFire) February 24, 2015
@MarcelFeldkamp Always aim for balance. Except when we don’t. Which is never. Let’s nerf the jungle while we’re at it.
— Gonzo (@Bronce_Nash) February 24, 2015
Every fucking patch they nerf the jungle, it’s fucking terrible. -5 ad and smite range and now you can’t switch smites. Fucking dumb.
— Vincent (@tycosnh) February 25, 2015
Reddit user gahlo, a self-identified long-time jungle main went as far as writing an open letter to Riot that made a huge splash on the League of Legends subreddit over the past two days. It calls out the developer out for repeatedly disregarding the interests of junglers when changing up the game. Just reading the first few lines gives a good sense of how strongly some people feel about the issue:
I, as a player, am quitting jungling. I started jungling in Season 2 because all my friends either hated doing it or were much better at their other roles and know what? I loved it. I loved not being tied to a lane like I was when I dabbled in ADC and top, doing the CS two step and “will he, won’t he?” of trades. I loved being a force that gave the early game some dynamism.
You, however, have killed my fun over and over again and I’m not taking this anymore.
To Riot’s credit, the developer has never shied away from altering its much-loved game — often in substantial ways. Publicly announcing their plans to change the jungle last year was an open admission on the developer’s part that they shared many player’s dissatisfaction with it. So while 5.4 might have had the opposite effect to the one Riot was hoping for, the current state of Summoner’s Rift is, as always, subject to change.
Comments
9 responses to “Riot Just Changed League Of Legends’ Jungle And Players Are Furious”
The players will adjust in a month and come up with some new strat to exploit the changes.
This is why I love Dota and refuse to play league. Riot enforces a meta and then forces players to stick to it.. whereas Dota gives you a bunch of characters and lets you run them however the hell you want. Want to run a jungler? Sure, but you don’t have to. 4 protect 1? Have at it. 1 protect 4? OK, Good luck with that!
League just seems to restrictive. I can’t imagine being forced to run a jungler every game.
Also… is the top picture a LOL character? Seems like a rip-off of Queen of Pain…
Top pic is dragon lady shyvana, splash used to look like this
http://img1.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20140828114345/leagueoflegends/images/thumb/7/79/Shyvana_OriginalSkin_old.jpg/640x480x2-Shyvana_OriginalSkin_old.png
I do agree it does, at least in colour scheme, resemble QOP
It would be interesting to know if what Riot meant by “Strategic Diversity” was “Hey, maybe you could play without a jungler. You could do 2 dual lane or a trilane maybe?”
God forbid! Why would LoL want the equivalent of Merlini to come out and revolutionize the game?
Crash course for the uneducated – Merlini is one of the most innovative players of all time. He basically invented competitive Dota, and without him I doubt MOBAs would be what they are today. All this talk of Junglers? Merlini invented it. No shit – he was the first person to ever bust it out in a competitive game; before that, dedicated junglers were unheard of. Warding and vision over the map? Merlini invented it. Things we take for granted as obvious today (like BoTs on Tinker, for all you DOTA players out there), someone had to invent it, and that someone was Merlini. The guy is a bona-fide legend of the game.
Not that it’ll ever happen with Riot. They want to dictate how the game will be played.
Watching TheOddOne at the time the changes got announced just screamed whiny baby to me. Any other role requires you to pay to change tactics, jungle should be no exception.
Community seems to rigid. I feel these changes are to enable a meta where a dedicated jungler is not mandatory. I think having a 2v1 in a lane is now more viable because the early game advantage is not as bad a trade off against long term networth of the jungle.
Everytime I read about tweaks and changes I always feel it only really hurts the few percent of players. Except for diamond and above people just play the characters they are good at and they like, rather than the ones who have plus armor on their moves. We had a jungle riven last night and she didn’t have a single problem with the new jungle ‘nerfs’.
Idiot kids are angry because they can’t grasp change. Ignore these people, just like the ones who try suggest how to “fix” new or original MMOs and end up just listing features of WoW.
Much as I love LoL, over the years Riot’s balance team have gone from “pretty good” to “hit and miss” to “incompetent” and now they’re at the stage of “utterly retarded”. If you think the jungle was the worst thing in patch 5.4 (it was actually a pretty minor change really, mostly a reversion of REMOVING the cost of swapping Smites which was already there before) then I hope you weren’t a Veigar player because he went from “underpowered and almost useless” to “unplayable and COMPLETELY useless” thanks to Riot’s “buffs” (read: massive nerfs). It was like kicking a cripple.