Riot Removed Certain LoL Items Over Gameplay Diversity Concerns

Riot’s League of Legends team has released a blog post outlining their reasoning for removing and repurposing some items in the game’s 11^th season. While removing certain over-or-underpowered items is not an uncommon practice in the world of competitive online games, it has always been up to developers whether they decide to walk players through their decision-making process. With games such as League of Legends, which now has a massive player base of around 115 million, the act of keeping the game balanced can understandably become quite difficult. During this particular preseason, Riot had its work cut out for it.

Fortunately, balancing League generally comes down to tweaking certain items. In other games, such as Call of Duty: Warzone, these changes must often be addressed and fixed immediately because they involve actual glitches in the gameplay. For example, Warzone players recently saw the removal of the Armored Royale game mode entirely after players found a way to turn their characters invisible while using Cargo Trucks. Because these vehicles are integral to Armored Royale mode, they could not be removed entirely, and so Armored Royale has been taken out of rotation until the glitch is fixed.

According to League of Legends, the items removed from the game for Season 11 were taken out because they go against their principles of how the game should function. For example, the Statikk Shiv, which granted players extra critical hit chance, attack speed, and movement speed, was too similar to Runaan’s Hurricane. Other items, such as Rod of Ages and Hextech Gunblade, were deemed too “mandatory” for certain champions and useless for others.

Riot’s team also specified that it tries not to remove items that players like, lest it incur the wrath of its massively engaged player base, but that at times it is the best option. Once again in the case of Rod of Ages, the team found that when they attempted to balance it, the item wound up being irrelevant for too long, violating “two of the principles for Mythic items that we were aiming for–satisfaction and choice.” Other items that will not be returning for Season 11 include Frozen Mallet, Spellbinder, Twin Shadows, Jaurim’s Fist, and a handful of others. Other items, such as Iceborne Gauntlet, Trinity Force, and Righteous Glory have been either repurposed, renamed, or transitioned into Mythic items.

The post also briefly discusses other questions the team has received, such as whether the ladder system will be made more transparent and what goals Riot has for individual roles during gameplay. Regarding the former, the Lead Competitive Gameplay Designer wrote that the game’s matchmaking system is still working as intended and that players should not allow losses to make them feel as though they are getting worse. Recently, League of Legends designers have been more focused on decreasing in-game toxicity.

Concerning the team’s goals for individual roles, the Senior Game Designer explained that the team is constantly trying to find ways for all champions to feel equally useful throughout the game. Where this has proven difficult is when players in roles such as Support end up facing up against a Midlaner, which is generally a poor position for the Support to be in. However, the team continues to search for ways to tweak the game so that any player can shape the outcome of the match. The recent removal of certain items is just another step to making that more achievable.

Source: League of Legends

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Johann Hamilton
(106 Articles Published)

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Johann Hamilton is a Screen Rant freelance contributor based in New York City. When he isn’t combing the internet for the latest developments in nerd culture, he can usually be found scouring the PlayStation Store for the best deals or enjoying some old school Super Nintendo. He is also a proud NYU graduate, completing his Master’s degree in Professional Writing at New York University. Johann’s favorite gaming genres are RPGs, hack n’ slashes, and (overly challenging) platformers.

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