If you watched the Dreamhack qualifiers, you may have noticed just how passive the early game is. It didn’t take Dreamhack to reveal that fact, though. Think of the last game in which a player died before the five minute mark and wasn’t called a noob. Yeah, I can’t think of one either. The early game in League of Legends has become extremely passive, a fifteen minute race to 100-minion counts with the occasional dragon. There’s a great thread on the forums discussing the issue, which I’ll leave you to read at your leisure. I think the poster, ParoX, makes some great points about contributing factors, but I think there’s another system in play that adds to the passive early game. Early game deaths are just too penalizing.

A couple months ago, Riot adjusted death timers in the early game to make deaths less punishing, but I’m still seeing towers drop before the five minute mark fairly regularly. When an early death means the loss of early lane protection, players tend to be much more conservative in what they will attempt.

A big chunk of the penalty can be attributed to the strength of junglers. Early ganks often happen when a jungler makes a move, turning a lane fight into a 3v2. If a kill succeeds, three champions are now pushing a turret that is often not well protected. If the tower drops, the game shifts dramatically, especially for the team that lost the tower. Because junglers rely on jungle creeps for XP, those players get territorial, leaving few places for the beaten lane to farm. This also opens the winning lane combo up for roaming, increasing the passivity of other lanes by presenting more threats from the brush near each lane.

I think one thing Riot should seriously consider is a nerf to early game jungling, at least at the rate jungling can currently be accomplished. The fact that junglers can keep pace and in some cases outlevel lanes, all in the cover of fog of war is kinda silly. What I would really like to see is a move toward roaming instead of jungling. Unlike jungling, at least for many junglers, roaming has some serious risk. The roamer loses XP or leeches from his lanes, can miss kills, can botch tower dives, and certainly loses quite a bit of farm by leaving a lane. As it stands, junglers suffer very few of the consequences without a concerted effort by their opponents, and even then jungle fights are fairly risky for invaders.

I’m glad to see RiotStatikk paying close attention to the current thread on the forums, but I’m worried by the caveat he placed at the end of his call for help: “I will be reading this thread. Identify what you see as the root problem and offer solutions on how to solve it with the least game-shaking changes possible.” I think it might be time for the game to get a decent shake. In fact, this is the perfect time to make some big changes. Season Two is forthcoming, hopefully giving people a chance to tune up their game and make some positive movement on the ladder. I can hardly imagine a better time to make some significant changes to prevalent player strategy and game mechanics.

I have a couple good friends that I frequently join up with to play Twisted Treeline. It’s not a perfect experience by any means, but it allows us to play a draft mode together and the games are relatively short. The best part about TT is definitely game length, but the map leaves an awful lot to be desired in terms of balance.

The time issue actually carries over to Summoner’s Rift for me. I rarely queue for 5v5 unless I know I have an hour to spend and even 3s can take 40 minutes if the game goes long. That’s a pretty long chunk of time to commit to a game, especially if it ends up being a loss. I’m sure we’ve all had games that are going so poorly that there’s no hope of victory but teammates hang on and refuse to surrender. Those types of games make me long for a quicker experience.

DotA had an “easy mode” toggle that could be used with each gametype, granting bonus gold per second and I believe extra gold for towers. It increased the pace of the game by allowing players to passively reach a level of farm more quickly, similar to the way Twisted Treeline generates per-second gold faster than Summoner’s Rift. I actually think it would be cool to have an “easy mode” playlist in League of Legends, a mode in which the XP and gold rewards were tuned so that 30 minutes looked like 70 minutes does now.

That mode wouldn’t work very well on Twisted Treeline. The 3v3 map just snowballs out of hand far too quickly. Games would likely be decided by the first fight (and in some cases, they still are). For Summoner’s Rift, though, I think it would give casual players more opportunity to fire up a game while the baby’s napping, in between classes, or just before heading to bed. Speaking of which…