MOBAholic: The 2013 League of Legends Wishlist

Back when I wrote my League of Legends column for IGN (before GameSpy stole me back to pen MOBAholic!), I ended 2011 with a modest wish list for the upcoming year. Looking back over that list now, at the dawn of 2013, I can see that... well, a couple of my wishes have sort of come true. But -- aside from giving you some historical context for this month's topic -- I don't want to dwell on the past too much here. Rather, let's turn this into a (hopefully) annual thing: Here are seven things that I'm dying to see in League of Legends (or, perhaps, some of its competitors) in the next 12 months.

1) More Support Champions. What was that I just said about not dwelling on the past? Well, big surprise here: My biggest LoL wish of 2012 is still my biggest LoL wish of 2013. In the past year, we've gotten exactly two new support champions (Lulu in March, and Nami in December), bringing the grand total to something like 12 out of 109 champions (and I'm being charitable and counting Karma in here). I guess Zyra counts as a third 2012-bound support champion, depending on how you look at her... but my point is, the number is still a pitifully small percentage of the overall pie.

2) An Actual, Full-Featured Replay System. Riot took forever to get a spectator mode into place. I know I'm preaching to the choir at this point, but that's really only one piece of this particular puzzle. Any serious competitive game needs a robust and functional replay system -- one that allows you to record, play back, rewind, slow down, and speed up an archived match. It's a critical analytical tool that helps serious players to examine their own strengths and weaknesses, pinpoint mistakes, and learn from them. This is true in StarCraft 2, in Street Fighter 4, and even in Dota 2. Given that Riot loves to tout LoL as "the most-played video game in the world," it's somewhat embarrassing that it's come this far without such a critical feature.


3) Customizable Item-Shopping Lists. This is another holdover from last year's wish list, but it's something that would bring a lot of convenience to LoL. You know those recommended item lists that you see in the shop? The ones that are worthless half the time anyway? I'd love the option to customize it on a per-champion basis, in the interest of speeding the shopping process up just a tiny bit. Maybe it could even include a few branching buying options, so you can switch gears based on the enemy team's composition. The way I see it, this is kinda like having multiple rune or mastery pages: You don't need them, but the option to set things up ahead of time just makes life a little bit easier when it comes time to actually play a game.

4) More Competitive Modes for Twisted Treeline and Crystal Scar. Ranked queues haven't changed one bit in the past year; we still have solo and five-man team queues for Summoner's Rift, and a three-man team queue for Twisted Treeline. Why no solo Treeline queue? Why no ranked queues whatsoever for the Dominion mode's Crystal Scar map? Riot's answer is ostensibly "because we want the smaller match-ups to queue as teams," and "because we don't feel confident in this as a competitive mode," respectively. But why not just offer the options, and see how players respond? That doesn't mean it will rob the focus from Summoner's Rift (it really, really won't)... but it might give players more incentive to play those less-trafficked maps.


5) A Role-Selection Tool for Ranked Solo Queue. This is, perhaps, the thing I'm most desperate for. When you hop into the ranked solo queue, fights inevitably break out during the draft pick over who's going to take mid lane, who's going to jungle, and who gets stuck playing support (unless you luck out and get a player who enjoys and seeks that role). I don't about you, but I feel like character-select toxicity tends to dampen everyone's spirits in ranked play -- and no one enjoys playing a role they're uncomfortable with. What I'd love to see is a World of Warcraft Dungeon Finder-style role picker that attempts to group random players according to what position they'd like to play on a five-man team (mage, tank, carry, support, or jungler). Sure, it semi-shackles you into a certain sort of metagame (although not really), but I suspect that it would result in a net positive when it comes to maintaining pre-game harmony and morale.

6) Another Stab at a Stealth Overhaul. Riot certainly tried to switch up Twitch and Evelynn's painfully lopsided stealth mechanics in 2012, with mixed results. As it stands now, Twitch is still as crummy as ever (Riot crippled his stealth without un-nerfing his damage steroid), while Evelynn's continued to swing between "grossly overpowered" and "pretty OK." Twitch is obviously the real issue here, and I feel confident in saying that his remake didn't work quite as well as it should have. For one thing, I miss his one-touch, area-of-effect slow; for another, I'd like to see Riot compensate his reduced stealth duration with bigger damage output on his ultimate spell. With his slow move speed, paper-thin defensive stats, lack of a reliable escape skill, short stealth duration, and emphasis on extremely precise positioning, Twitch is a high-risk, all-in champion -- and if played supremely well, he needs to be the nigh-unstoppable hypercarry that his kit halfheartedly makes him out to be. Either that, or Twitch needs to be remade again from the ground up.


7) A Long-Term Solution for the Leaky Champion Faucet. I've made no secret about my dissatisfaction with the out-of-control champion roster. Three years on, League of Legends is up to a staggering 109 champions, which is a huge burden of knowledge to saddle new players with. I sort of hope future competitive seasons treat champions in a block format, somewhat similar to Magic: The Gathering -- rotate a certain selection out as new ones come in, and keep the "active" roster size a bit more manageable for ranked play, while leaving unranked play free-for-all as usual. It's obviously not feasible to tactically sunset champions entirely (given the fact that players pay for them individually), but a block format would result in something of an elegant compromise, given the giant roster.


And that's what I want to see out of League of Legends in 2013 -- well, in addition to healthy balance changes, stronger matchmaking, more good-behavior initiatives, graphical improvements, awesome skins, and necessary champion remakes (I'm looking at you, Karma and Kayle and Nasus). Heck, maybe one day, we'll even see the co-op Diablo 3-esque adventure mode that I keep conspiracy-theorizing about. Hey, I can dream!



Ryan Scott managed GameSpy's day-to-day editorial operations, until a bout of temporary insanity took him away. Nowadays -- when he's not yelling at someone for forgetting to call mid lane MIA, that is -- you can listen to his weekly ramblings on various podcasts over at Geekbox.net. And if you've never given these MOBA thingamajiggers a try, he thinks League of Legends is an excellent place to start.