League of Legends’ Objective Bounties May Be Tuned Back, Riot Says

Preseason 2022 has arrived on Summoner’s Rift, and already League of Legends developer Riot Games is monitoring some of its projected changes for the upcoming season twelve, with the possibility of objective bounties being tuned back. The 2021 League of Legends World Championship has ended, signaling the end of the season for both professionals and casual players. With the ranked season concluding on November 15, the preseason followed shortly after the November 17 patch. It is an exciting time for League of Legends players of all skill levels, as major changes are made to the game.

Past preseasons in League of Legends have often targeted specific aspects of the game that Riot has wanted to overhaul, from the Marksman update of 2016 to the major item rework before season 11. This year Riot has taken a different approach, making broad changes to the game overall but not targeting any specific area too heavily. Preseason 2022 will feature two new dragon souls, new items and runes, visual effects updates to Vi, Jayce, and Jinx, characters prominent in Riot’s new animated series Arcane, and a new system known as objective bounties.

According to Dexerto, a problem has arisen where the objective bounties kick in earlier than may be appropriate, potentially granting bonus income to a team that isn’t meaningfully behind. The intended function of objective bounties is to grant teams that have fallen behind an additional tool to claw back into losing games. As a comeback mechanic, objective bounties seem fairly innocuous on paper, granting bonus gold split evenly across the entire team when the losing side takes an objective. The exact amount of bonus gold varies depending on the specific objective and on how behind the team taking it was, but starts at 100 gold per player for most major objectives and scales from there. Matt Leung-Harrison, a League of Legends senior game designer, has already addressed the issue on Twitter, saying the balance team has their eye on it and asking players to reply to the thread with examples of “games that feel off.”

See the comments on Twitter here.

Preseason 20202 is not LoL‘s first introduction to a bounty system. Kill bounties have been in League of Legends for years, rewarding players for “shutting down” a member of the enemy team that has gotten multiple kills successively without dying themselves. These bounties start off quite modest and gradually scale (based on how far ahead the opponent exactly is) to be worth the equivalent of more than three full kills, capping at 1000 bonus gold. The community is, as with all things, split on whether or not kill bounties are good or bad for the game, especially after Riot introduced farm bounties last year, so that champions could accrue a bounty without ever harming an enemy champion if they got far enough ahead in gold through last-hitting. While there have been bumps along the road for kill bounties in their various iterations, they have never encountered the same level of animosity from the community as objective bounties have in their first day on the scene.

Preseason has only been out for a day at this point, and there is too little data to be confident one way or the other as to whether objective bounties are good for the game or not. However, a comeback mechanic that snowballs a game out of control is clearly not doing what it was designed to do. The strength of the community sentiment against objective bounties even amongst highly rated players is a good indicator that even if the idea is overall a good one, the system probably needs to undergo some tweaking before League of  Legends season twelve begins.

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League of Legends is available on PC and Mac.

Sources: Twitter/Matt Leung-Harrison (via Dexerto)