Each start of the season brings its share of upheavals to League of Legends. This year, we will not escape it with in particular the arrival of themes for the seasons (three in number), a new epic monster: Atakhan, herald of Ruin, changes in the gameplay, like the turrets of the Nexus, which can now reappear after being destroyed, or even the arrival of a new game mode, Swiftplay. In short, players will have plenty to do in the coming weeks.
But the developers aren’t making changes until the beginning of the year, and it’s a minor one that the community is still praising, more than two years after its integration into the game.
A little change
If you’re a young player of Riot Games’ MOBA, you probably don’t remember this, but for the longest time, the names of the summoners who started a game were not hidden during champion selection. Everything changed in Season 12, more than two years ago, with the arrival of patch 12.22, and the removal of player names from champion selection. If the system had some flaws when it was launched (it was still possible to find the name of the summoners via the source code), the developers quickly corrected the problem. Since then, you can no longer know the names of your mates, or at least not until the loading screen of your game.
This change had several ambitions, the main one of which was to prevent players from searching for information about their mates using third-party sites before the game even begins. Some had gotten into the bad habit of systematically “inspecting” the history of their teammates as well as their statistics, and could go so far as to flame them for certain reasons when the game had not even started yet.
For Riot Games, having this kind of information could also push certain players to require their mates to play a specific champion, to favor so-called “meta” choices. The team wanted players to focus on teamwork, without being distracted by details, and thus have a better gaming experience. At first, this new feature received a mixed reception, but, two years later, the opinion of the community has radically changed.
One of Riot Games’ best decisions for players
Now we don’t really pay attention to it when we start our games, and that’s a very good thing. And that’s exactly what the community thinks, which, in hindsight, believes that this is now one of the studio’s best decisions, as evidenced by this Reddit post from January 2.
Seriously, I always get frustrated with people who dodge ranked queues at the last second because someone took the lobby hostage or got outdrafted in a horrible way. However, I do NOT miss the days when everyone pretended to be Sherlock Holmes on sites like op.gg to look at everyone’s stats and cried, took the lobby hostage or dodged just because someone didn’t. he hadn’t locked down his absolute best champion or the one he thought he should play.
Overall, the comments are in support of the publication. Of course, some criticisms are expressed, such as the lack of transparency when a legitimate doubt is expressed about a player (whether it is a troll account, or even a smurf), but most players agree that this change promotes a healthier and more inclusive environment.
Of course, this didn’t solve all of the game’s problems, especially toxicity, but it’s definitely a step in the right direction.
