With the end of Season 8 expected to come some time in November, Riot has released the first of the Preseason Updates. Lead Gameplay Designer of League of Legends Mark ‘Scruffy’ Yetter posted on 1 September 2018 on the North American forums the first of a series of changes that players can expect to see come late this year and the effects that the developer expects them to have on the general gameplay.
The first and arguably the most major change mentioned in the post is that the Laning Phase is getting an extension and potentially an increase in quality. The way the developer wants to achieve this is by increasing the health that turrets have for the first moments of a match. All outer turrets will receive a health buff, increasing the longevity of said turrets. The increase in health is represented by five barricade icons placed above the health bar of a turret and when players destroy a piece of barricade, participating players will receive gold as a reward. Any barricades left will disappear 10 minutes into the match. Furthermore, Riot is also considering slightly increasing the damage that turrets do. With these two changes, the developer hopes to slow down the early game and prevent turret rushes. However, they also incentivize the same activity for particular champion combinations, as indicated by the gold reward for taking down barricades.
Riot is interested in maintaining the Laning Phase for a while longer, since early tower pushes usually lead to multiple ganks, with the success of the winning team snowballing well into the late game. To this end, Riot is also thinking about reducing the amount of gold that tower kills reward and also looking for a different means of increasing champion Bounties, rather than simply scaling them off of their kill-streak count.
Other significant changes include the scaling of mid- and late-game minions to be much higher than it currently is. This, Riot hopes, would make the flow of the game much more natural and lead to easier resolutions of already decided games. Additionally, they are also implementing initial spawn times about 30 to 40 seconds sooner so that players do not sit around for two minutes waiting for the game to begin. On a similar note, the developer is also considering adding a chat window to the loading screens in order for players to be able to communicate with each other while waiting for the match to start.
Finally, we can also expect to see a change in the Rune paths system so that it affects stats and the appropriate bonuses differently. This change is still in early testing so we should expect more detailed information down the line.
