League Of Legends Finally Listens To Fans And Changes The Game
League of Legends finally makes tings right!
After weeks of complaints from its audience, game developing studio Riot Games has officially announced removing one of the most controversial additions to their long-running multiplayer online battle arena game League of Legends. Riot Games had previously added two new dragons at the beginning of League of Legends’ Season 12 — the Hextech Drake and the Chemtech Drake. Unfortunately, according to the gamers, the buff granted by the Chemtech Drake’s Soul proved to be too powerful, especially in the eyes of the losing team. See Riot’s tweet below:
According to ComicBook, Riot Games has agreed with gamers and champions of Arcane by removing the Chemtech Drake from League of Legends entirely. The studio elaborated that their vision for this particular dragon and the corresponding terrain were meant to significantly impact League of Legends. Still, the dragon seems too powerful considering the current state of the game and the massive disruption of power balance its buff causes in-game. Under normal circumstances, gaming developers create buffs that put players on equal footing, at least theoretically. If both gaming teams collect their respective buffs, the balance of power shouldn’t be disrupted, and the game would still boil down to the gamers’ skills.
But theory doesn’t always match the practice, and sometimes features such as buffs or debuffs are simply way too powerful. Furthermore, though such things create gameplay problems, online gaming developers usually tweak and resolve such issues within a matter of hours, rarely days. So, it’s entirely understandable as to why Riot’s decision, though welcomed by the gamers, also comes off as surprising — especially considering that the Drakes were supposed to be a massive new gameplay element. But then again, Riot Games hasn’t shot down the notion that the Chemtech Drake could return in the future. Quite the opposite, actually.
League of Legends studio stated that the Drake is going straight back to the drawing board. This would allow the development teams and other creatives to revise the ideas for content and gaming mechanics implementations associated with the aforementioned Drake and possibly return it to the game one day. We believe that this wasn’t an easy call for Riot Games, but the fans have been very vocal about the overwhelming power of the Chemtech Drake Soul’s buff for quite some time now. It’s quite possible that the company took a page from Activision Blizzard’s book regarding the declining number of World of Warcraft players and their response to the fandom’s request.
Basically, Activision Blizzard rarely listened to the players’ requests regarding World of Warcraft; until DFEH’s lawsuit exploded in the company’s face, players massively quit the game not for the game’s features but in solidarity with the ABK’s employees. In response to the overwhelming plummet in player count, Blizzard suddenly decided to implement changes that previously fell on deaf ears to increase players. And though the tactic has been somewhat effective, the damage has been done, and a large portion of players decided never to return to Azeroth. Supposedly, Riot Games didn’t want to anger their League of Legends players like Activision Blizzard angered theirs. As we already know, gamers tend to be a tough and often unforgiving audience, so it’s always best not to “rattle their cages.”
