The infamous League of Legends elevation issue isn’t going anywhere, Riot Games has confirmed, despite the Summoner’s Rift map undergoing a series of huge, game-altering changes heading into the 2024 preseason.
The elevation issue revolves around how League’s river was designed; it secretly sits lower than the terrain around it. This means any abilities fired into or out of the river area may actually be aimed in the wrong spot because of the misaligned levels, and fans have campaigned for its removal for years.
The problem, League balance boss Matt “Phroxzon” Leung-Harrison said today, is the technical changes required to remove the elevation problem are just too much work for the developers. On top of that, the changes fans want—which mostly revolve around taking the height imbalance away from the river—would take up too much time that could be used on other projects.
The biggest stumbling block the League devs found when they investigated smoothing the elevation issue (pun intended) was the entire game code would need “re-architecting” to allow a change on that level. While the Riot team was interested in investing that time, the devs soon found it would be quite the grind; somewhere in the realm of a preseason’s worth of work. “It is way harder than it seems to remove the height,” Leung-Harrison admitted today.
The devs ended up making the big call: instead of losing a full season of progress for the game, they would simply “design within the current constraints of the map.” This has been Riot’s practice since the Rift was remade in 2014—the last time anything on this preseason’s scale happened.
League players were, unsurprisingly, disappointed to hear Riot won’t be looking into changes for the elevation, with some suggesting it is a “mistake” to ignore fan demands any longer. Others suggested quality-of-life updates to at least make the existence of the elevation easier, including better skillshot indicators.
Whether Riot takes that feedback onboard remains to be seen, with the devs extremely busy preparing League for some of the biggest changes it has seen since it went live more than a decade ago.
These include a mega number of map changes across all three lanes and in the jungle as well as a sweeping Baron Nashor rework and the addition of Voidgrubs and Voidmites to replace the earliest Rift Herald (which you can now ride, by the way). There’s also a new Infernal Rift design and a Void-themed coasting landing across the map, alongside heaps of interesting item updates.
Just don’t expect elevation changes with League’s 2024 update.
