Game times have gone down slightly over the years, but we’re not actively trying to increase the pace of the game. In fact, the goal of preseason this year was to keep game times largely unchanged while making comebacks more possible, which is why we increased bounties overall and increased Baron’s health to make it more contestable. We also added Turret Plating as a way to extend laning phase and regulate the game’s pace.

Statistically speaking, comebacks—which we calculate using a combination of gold lead, epic monsters taken, XP difference, and more—are more frequent in 2019 than in 2018.

That said, it is true that Summoner’s Rift games are shorter nowadays than they used to be in the earlier seasons of League, and comebacks are less likely. This is partially because we’re trying to reduce “decided games,” where it’s pretty clear one team is going to win but the game stalls out (Rift Herald is one way we’ve tried to reduce these games). Decreasing the number of decided games can also mean decreasing the likelihood of comebacks, which is why we’ve added ways to reward players who fight their way back into a game, such as by shutting down fed opponents and collecting their kill streak bounties.

One of the other reasons game times have slowly decreased over the years is because players back in the day hadn’t mastered the map’s mechanics as well as they have today. It was much more common for teams to squander leads or be unable to close out games when they were ahead, leading to drawn-out game times. In other words—players today are better at League strategy overall than they were in earlier seasons, which consequently leads to lower game times across the board.



In conclusion, we aren’t trying to reduce the duration of games, and if game times go down much further, we might even try to increase game length.