If there’s one thing I’ve learned about Riot Games over the years, it’s that they don’t like to leave anything alone. Even outside of major changes like, you know, completely overhauling the rune system a few years ago, they’re always tweaking items and champions to prevent any one thing from becoming too powerful.
With the 2024 season starting up, though, they clearly weren’t content with tweaks and went for probably the biggest overhaul of the game we’ve seen since the graphics update in 2014.
Now that I’ve had a few days to play around with the new system, new map, new everything, here’s a quick look at what I think of the changes so far!
Welcome to the (new) rift
One of the streamers Sekan likes to watch made a comment about the new map for Summoner’s Rift the day it came out, and it’s been stuck in my head ever since. She was playing ADC in bottom lane and someone made a comment about the change, to which she just said: “Yes, don’t you see how long this lane is? Look at it.”
It’s true; the changes ended up making top and bottom lanes a lot longer, because essentially, what Riot did was move the towers around. In all lanes, but most notably in the two outside lanes.
My theory is that it all started with the one match in last year’s spring split where a jungler managed to surprise a midlaner with a gank that saw him squeezing into the tight space that wasn’t covered by the two towers’ attack range. It sent the commentators into an absolute freakout, and if I can remember which game it was, I’ll share it here because it was a great moment.
But I think that was something Riot wanted to fix with this map change, because if you look closely at the attack ranges in towers, they’re much closer—so now, junglers will have a much harder time getting in there without drawing the ire of both towers down upon themselves.
Tower spacing was also an issue that affected side lanes, especially top—where a savvy tank player could get in between towers and take out minion waves before they reached the front lines. It might not sound like a big deal, but when minion waves get to towers, players depend on their friendly minions to help defend—and without that backup, they’re pretty much left out to dry.
Of course, there are some other fun changes to the map, including new places to hide in the jungle and easier access points for, say, a support player to get up and help their jungler with a dragon without the enemy team seeing. It’s also interesting to note that for maybe the first time, the maps aren’t mirrors of each other; the top-lane access points are completely different and look more like each other, where they once mirrored the access points in bottom lane.
And let’s not even get into the changes around the types of Baron Nashors that spawn! Not least because well, I haven’t seen them all and how they affect the game yet. So I might have to update this when I see those a little more.
So long, mythics
I’ll be honest, I don’t much remember a time when mythic items weren’t a thing. Though they were added in 2021, a few years after I started playing, I really didn’t know enough about items at first to understand what they changed.
And well, we did take a break from the game after the runes update in late 2017 because of the massive change it introduced from the way Sekan had always known League, so I didn’t get to know them much more before mythics came out.
The one thing I did understand about mythics when we started playing again was that their purpose was to prevent some players and champions from being able to absolutely roll every game they played. At a certain level, they were supposed to control how long and out of control the games themselves got, too, and that’s when we started to see the 20-minute meta that dominated Worlds events—you wanted a game to be over by 20 minutes, or you risked losing. It’s a hallmark of how Cloud 9 plays, actually, if you watch their LCS matches.
The new update removed mythics as a concept, though some of the items themselves have stuck around. A few, including my favourite Everfrost for Lux, have disappeared completely, likely because without mythic status, they’d be a tad too broken. And with that change, honestly, I think we’re starting to see exactly what mythics were first introduced to stop: Players learning cheesy ways to combine items with champion abilities and roll games.
I’ll be interested to see which items end up getting nerfed in the coming patches as Riot starts to see which combinations are too potent, especially with the high power that mages seem to have right now. But ultimately, I like the change, because it frees us all up to have a little more fun with what we’re building—and it solves a lot of the issues I often run into where I just get bored building what a champion is supposed to have.
Hello, anti-cheat
Back in 2020, when Riot introduced us all to their tactical shooter game Valorant, they also introduced us to software called Vanguard: an anti-cheat system that never stops running and that you need to have installed to be able to play.
Obviously, this met with a ton of criticism at the time, and is still a point of contention in the community given the sheer power Vanguard has over someone’s PC to be able to see and identify programs running in the background that might be considered cheats. I’ll be honest, I don’t love the idea of it, primarily because I’m pretty conscious of online security stuff, and it seems unnecessarily invasive.
With the new update, Riot announced that Vanguard would now be coming to League of Legends as well, to help them identify and prevent things like players creating smurf accounts—something that I learned means a skilled player creating a low-level account so they can just win against less experienced players.
I won’t lie—I do not love the idea of this change.
I am not a fan of how invasive Vanguard is, and I generally do not believe in punishing everyone for the actions of a few, though I understand that in the online world, that’s sometimes what you have to do. That said, I’m open to Riot changing my mind, which to me, would look like Vanguard actually making the game more enjoyable in all its modes, especially ranked.
YOUR TURN
