Fans of this year’s lane-swapping metagame at the 2024 Mid-Season Invitational—yes, all 10 of you—will be saddened to hear Riot is stamping it out, with the developers preparing a bevy of system changes aimed at reducing how often swaps occur.
Lead League of Legends gameplay designer Matt “Phroxzon” Leung-Harrison gleamed over the details in the 14.11 preview on X (formerly Twitter) today, noting the “hot topic” that lane swapping had become. “While we think some of this was teams adapting to player matchup diffs over time, in some cases, it’s more optimal than we’d like,” Phroxzon said, pointing to the relatively quick development of overpowered double-ranged bot lanes at MSI and in high-rank matches across League ranked play.
Riot plans to adjust fortification and first turret gold values to stop the ever-growing lane swap takeover, but Phroxzon says they don’t want to make the tactic totally unviable. “While a few lane swaps every now and then is favorable for the viewer experience, every game is too far,” the League balance boss explained.
Just how far the needle will be moved in terms of these values is unknown, but we’ll likely know more when we get a look at the full 14.11 patch preview tomorrow.
Almost every single match at MSI 2024 in Chengdu featured a lane swap, where League players avoid a challenging head-to-head matchup by swapping to another lane for the opening few minion waves, allowing an ADC to secure enough gold and levels to survive an otherwise oppressive start to a match. It’s far from the first time we’ve seen lane swapping in professional League play but with it making an all-too-often appearance at the most recent Chinese event, fans and players alike are over it and want it gone.
We’ll know more about Riot’s planned methods to combat frequent lane swapping by tomorrow evening. Patch 14.11 is then set to go live on May 30.
