Disclaimer: This is not an exhaustive list. Not all of these ideas are mine, not all of these ideas are good, not all of these ideas are as fleshed out as I would like, not all of these ideas are possible; but all of these ideas (or a variation of) would be what I would like to see change for 2017.

Competitive Changes:

Change the Elemental Dragon System

Tl;dr — less rng, more information upfront

Re-Balance the dragons so Mountain and Infernal are worse

I don’t think you can make the movement speed or the regen much better than it already is without making them imbalanced if you stack them, so honestly I would just make the Infernal and the Mountain worse to try and even it out a bit.

Don’t give me this crap about how the dragons are good and how air or ocean dragons have won games for people. Even if that’s true, the best way I can describe how overpowered Mountain and Infernal is: If you gave each team a choice when they took the dragon as to which buff they would get — I would bet a year of my TSM salary that over 75% of the time they would choose either an Infernal or Mountain buff.

Change how the dragons spawn:

One system is that if you had a dragon stay alive unkilled after a set period of time (maybe 2 and a half minutes), it would “respawn” into another element. This would work for a few reasons:

If a team is ahead and a shitty dragon spawns, they can ignore it and wait for the next dragon to spawn. This rewards them for maintaining control and does not punish them for having control but getting no useful reward.

It punishes teams with poor dragon control where they can potentially lose access to a strong dragon, having it spawn into a weaker one if they don’t find a way to take it within a smaller timeframe.

This also gives the losing team a way to deny potential resources by forcing the winning team to focus on areas that are not the dragon and potentially forcing them to give up the “good” dragon.

It also creates another point of tension meaning that you don’t get long downtimes between dragon spawns where people can actually group up and fight that’s not around towers.

Whether or not the dragon “respawning” system gets put in place, I would still like to see a system where people can see the “next dragon spawning” icon even if the current dragon is alive. More information is always better, but this would be especially useful in the dragon respawn system so teams can make informed choices about whether or not to take this dragon or wait til it respawns.

I think it would be a good idea to showcase the dragon spawn order during the draft so teams can (maybe) adjust their draft to the situation. I don’t think this would be possible and it would not likely change many drafts at all, but it could and I think teams should be given the opportunity to use that information.

No 2 same elements should spawn consecutively.

Too many times we have seen a bo5 series where a team is winning and gets nothing but ocean and air dragons, only to be losing the next game and the other team who is equally good get nothing but mountain dragons. This is not fair for one team to get an OBJECTIVELY easier route to victory than another through no other factor than sheer luck.

easier route to victory than another through no other factor than sheer luck. This system would reward good teams who control dragon properly as it would give a higher chance to get a more balanced coverage of dragon spawns over a shorter period of time (like a bo3/bo5 series).

It allows teams who are behind to not get completely run over, purely because the enemy team managed to pick up 2 infernal drakes and because of it snowballed beyond control.

Rift Herald

Tl;dr — Change it to a short but high-impact buff to offset the long-term buffs of dragon

Currently Herald is pretty useless outside of fringe situations. I have a change idea that might be interesting, crazy, retarded or all of the above. Alternatively Riot could just remove it from the map and turn the game back into fully dragon focused. Either way, the Herald needs updating to fit inside the new standard lane meta.

Perhaps make it a short-duration buff that can be taken multiple times a game

Would need to be much easier to kill and on a short respawn timer

Perhaps have it give you a temporary tower-taking buff (more powerful than mountain) so you can trade enemy taking a dragon for top/mid tower or something

Would provide interesting lane swap strategies where teams go top, take the herald and then use the buff to train down towers over the time period

Make the current bonuses (extra dmg, dmg reduction) stronger but last a much shorter period of time (like 60s) to give the player a chance to utilise the buff there and then to make something happen.

Having a very short but high-impact buff creates an interesting dynamic where teams looking to play the long-term can focus on dragons, but the teams looking to take advantages immediately and snowball can look to Herald. This also gives lane bullies in top more of an identity than just “I’m here to keep the tank under the tower and hope to take my tower or I get outscaled).

Recognise Team Analysts More

They’re an integral part of teams too Riot. No real solution to the problem, I do also think that teams could give more exposure to the analysts but honestly they get shit on.

It’s a thankless job.

They’re underpaid across the board by a HUGE amount compared to the hours they put in.

Get them on the analyst desk or something. A lot of analysts would be able to break down the game a lot better than some players. It’s literally their job to do that. Which leads me onto my next major point:

Do a Better Job of Educating the Playerbase

Tl;dr — less teamfight analysis, more macro analysis. Make videos explaining macro concepts

I hear a lot of talk from Rioters about trying to make competitive look more like soloQ so players can understand what’s going on better. I honestly think this is fine but there should also be a bigger effort in trying to educate the player-base to make soloQ more like competitive. This will also mean you may have to do fewer stupid balance changes (RIP laneswaps) if the majority of the playerbase understood what was going on and was therefore invested in it. LEAGUE OF LEGENDS IS A STRATEGY GAME — EMBRACE THE STRATEGY ELEMENTS AND STOP TRYING TO MAKE IT BLOODLINE CHAMPIONS.

Analysis Desk

Right now the Analysis Desk feels very much like “let’s make some broad statements about the game which we just trust people will understand and then break down a teamfight, skirmish or baron steal”.

There’s not much looking at the setup.

There’s very few break-downs about what macro concepts were involved and how to implement them.

I would like to see more discussion of macro play. You can get a 2–3 minute segment of gameplay and speed it up to look at several things:

Wave manipulation (Like looking at how a team set up slow pushes to force the team to choose between contesting an objective or losing a wave)

Jungle pathing

Teamfight setup (looking at wave setup, back timings, vision)

Baron/Dragon setup (looking at how they denied vision, managed the waves, made the play on a powerspike)

There are content creators out there already covering this (MarkZ’s macro breakdowns, War Room Daily Debriefs’ Rift Reports (shameless plug I know)) so I know that it’d be possible to pull off on an analysis desk segment given the sheer level of game knowledge you have on staff.

Do macro-concept breakdown videos that you can play during downtime, typically between games or instead of hype-videos or teaser videos.

You can easily break down some of the concepts (how to tower dive, what is wave manipulation, good methods for vision control) in 2–3 minute videos. I know because people do them already.

Give Access to the Competitive Game Data

I simply don’t understand why all the data from the professional scene isn’t already public. We have access to a limited amount of information but the shit talented data analysts could do with information (and the usefulness of that information for teams) is off the charts. This is just selfish Rito, stop keeping all the goodies to yourself. Ritopls

Change the Format of the Competitive Year

Right now it’s fair to say that the introduction of the points system has made Spring Split feel more impactful, but a lot of people are still unhappy with how there’s the chance that the 3 best teams AT THE TIME aren’t being sent to worlds from each region. There has to be a way to balance rewarding consistency over the year, but also making sure the representatives at Worlds are the best candidates. I have some ideas but I don’t think these are super amazing, they’re just a start to a potential solution to a potential issue.

Remove the Spring Split Regular Season altogether and replace it with an open circuit, but make the duration longer. Then make the Summer split shorter, reduce the number of teams and have everyone who didn’t make it play in “Challenger Series”.

Pros:

More international competition (unless you wanna region lock, idk)

Gives teams a chance to test players and staff in bo5 settings

Can make the Summer Split shorter

Literally nobody remembers or cares about what happens in the Spring Regular Season (playoffs matters kinda) and this can actually make it exciting

Makes more storylines and rivalries

Allows teams to come into the scene at any point, without waiting for one of the 2 moments a year to do anything (between spring/summer and during offseason).

Cons:

Makes Summer Split feel kinda underwhelming when you go from this cool open circuit into a boring league structure

Less player and team security (players could get kicked after 2–3 bad tournament showings)

Feels kinda weird to do a league structure if it’s only for seeding.

Too tired at this point to think of more cons. Industry stuff I’m not very good at ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Change the Format of Worlds

Tl;dr — More games. More Korea. Best-of-series only. Make sure the better teams get further.

Give Korea another seed

Worlds in my opinion should be the celebration of the best teams in the world and right now Korea has probably close to half of the top 16 teams in the world. We should have more representation of Korea and still not have issues with regional representation from the rest of the world. Some of us just wanna see good games and don’t care about where players are from.

Could potentially take the seed spot from IWC since only 1 team ever shows up at worlds per year anyway.

Make groups best of 3

Bo1 is gone from anywhere that matters now and the most prestigious tournament should not be plagued with this crap.

Every team should be given the chance to adapt to their opponent mid-series, especially since there’s such a large time between summer and worlds, people should not be relying on scouting and luck.

Every team should be given the chance to adapt to a loss. This means no bo2 since that only gives one team a chance to adapt to a loss. This also means that teams don’t just take a huge hit from fucking up 1 draft (SSG) when they’re overall a sick team.

More games = better. It’s worlds, there should be more games.

Make bracket stage double elimination.

This means we don’t get the bullshit where our semis should be our finals.

It ends all discussions about whether or not a semis even should have been our finals or not.

2 best teams guaranteed to make it to finals.

Prize pool matters now since Riot is doing crowdfunding so 3rd place actually matters for something.

More games = better.

IMAGINE THE EPIC REMATCH STORYLINE IF SKT AND ROX MET IN THE FINALS FOR A SECOND TIME BECAUSE ROX MADE A SICK LOSERS RUN?????? Would be next-level of hype. Riotpls

Stop with the random changes halfway through seasons

The game was the healthiest it had been for probably over 2 years pre-Summer 2016 Playoffs (6.17). We had multiple styles of champions in every position and laneswaps it turns out was actually healthy for champion diversity. These large changes always have unforseen circumstances so when you get a healthy balance I think you should just decide that it’s good and start fine-tuning. You can argue that standard lanes meta was cool, but that change could easily have come in the post-season

Let’s say you have 3 teams: Team 1 is an A specialist, but weak at B. Team 2 is equally strong at A and B but is not a specialist at either. Team 3 is weak at A but a specialist at B. When you change the system and suddenly only A is a viable strategy you punish the teams who learned to be good at the game through different but equally viable strategic methods and arbitrarily reward the teams who happened to only be good at one aspect. Additionally, radically changing the game is unnecessarily stressful for the teams who already have a pretty stressful time as it is. Riotpls.

SoloQ Changes

Disclaimer: I do not give a shit about soloQ. These are mostly just shower thoughts that happen when I play soloQ every now and then. Also the statistics I cite are purely anecdotal. I’m sure some Rioter could school me with stats about why I’m horribly wrong.

Autofill changes

Allow support mains to have an offrole

Right now if you main support, you are forced to only play support because when you pick Support/X, you are like 70–80% likely to just get support meaning you have to choose your OFFrole as your main role. This is just a broken system, especially since have the following issue:

Going X/Support is pointless since you’ll still get support like 60% of the time. This means that nobody can offrole support. Imagine a Midlaner who plays support as his second role — no way he ever gets midlane going Mid/Support. He has to choose to be a support player OR a midlane player since under the current system he can’t have both.

Accumulate autofill immunity.