We’ve all been on the receiving end of a good old-fashioned beat down at one time or another. The other team bangs out a couple early kills and suddenly you and your teammates are stuck 3 levels down and your towers are getting steamrolled.

This situation happens frequently enough that Riot is looking at ways to change it. According to a post from Zileas, they’re trying to discourage the 5-man roam that has become so popular. Here’s his post:

Our philosophy on this issue is that individual snowballing is good, and team snowballing is bad. Right now, team snowballing occurs too much — one super carry twitch is a lot easier to handle than 5 guys who are 3 levels higher than each of you.

We are going to make some experience table tweaks to reduce team snowballing without hurting individual snowballing much. We are also going to make a new 3 lane map that is larger, has less cross-map connectivity (so that there is higher cost to 5 man roam, and less shutdown of the farming/laning phase via the first tower being down), etc.

We probably will nerf flash.

We wont be nerfing snowball items. Emotional highs from the game you super carried make this genre sticky. We removed it too much in the beta, and it cost us. Sorry, but being super carry annie or super carry corki once in a while gets a player through the 8 defeat in a row streak they hit the next day.

I’m on the fence about early gold for kills. It’s been something we have been talking about, for the reason you cite. OF course, an early kill is also harder than a late kill.

I can appreciate the thought behind this, though I worry about the pace of the game. The roaming gank squad has already taken its toll on pace. I’ve had a number of games recently where safe play from both sides led to more than 20 minutes without a death. Discouraging ganking seems like it will just make the laning phase that much longer and more painful. There are plenty of games in which I feel like losing my outer turret is the best thing that could happen because it breaks me out of the laning mentality. I realize that this is the point – to keep people from leaving lane – but that’s where the fun of the game is.

If anything, I think the best solution is the 3-lane map with less interconnectivity. That at least gives you the option to farm a lane once the tower is down with some potential for intra-lane ganking so long as there are enough hiding spots.

What do you think? Are there too many games in which snowballing is a serious problem or are you okay with the 5-man roam?

The two friends that got me interested in League of Legends weren’t Dota players. We had known each other through mutual friends and eventually through WoW and it was just something they decided to pick up. Over the past month or so we’ve been playing together more often, but it was just the other night that one had his epiphany, that moment where you realize something about the game you’ve been trying to put into words for days, even weeks: stages.

We had talked before about the importance of managing what most consider the three stages of the game: early, mid, and late. That was easy enough. The revelation had more to do with individual heroes. If you’re new to the game you may be struggling with the difference between characters – some can gank early, some take a while to farm up, some take a lot of work to be viable at every stage of the game. It’s a simple thing to conceptualize but much more difficult to put into practice.

Consider a toon like Nunu. As far as difficulty, he’s pretty low on the scale. You run in, you snowball, you hit a few times, you snowball again, you see friends, you blow Absolute Zero, you watch your team mop up your kills. Nunu is great at harassing early, largely because of his crazy health pool. Try that with Yi, though, and you’re going to get rocked by creep aggro and likely die several painful deaths early on. He requires more farm before he’s truly dangerous, and even then he’s pretty smushy.

The point is this – every hero has a different game cycle and it’s something you need to weigh heavily when strategizing against the other team. Take your time to farm properly if you’re a late gamer or a mage. Harass hard if you have the HP to do so to keep the other team underleveled. Gank heavily mid-game so your farm toon can have a solid late game. And by all means, change your strategy for each toon. The variety of playstyles is part of the beauty of this game. Play to your individual character’s strengths and you’ll be able to increase that gap between your wins and losses.