Hey everyone! I’m Bryan “Riot Axes” Salvatore, the Director of Design for League, overseeing the overall gameplay experience, from the Summoner’s Rift Ranked experience to game modes. If it involves gameplay, it’s my job to ensure we’re making the right strategic choices. Today I’m here to share some updates to Swiftplay, so let’s get into it!
Swiftplay’s Place in League
Maybe you find yourself barely having enough time for a quick match. Or you’re looking to try out a new champion without investing time in a full game. Or you’re a new player looking to get your footing on the Rift. Swiftplay is meant to be a fast queue that still allows you to experience the full arc of what League can offer. It’s a faster paced, but still substantive, bite of what “League” is.
We believe that Swiftplay has a lot of potential to be that queue, but we haven’t quite reached that goal. So we’ve identified three pillars that we want to improve based on your feedback, testing, and surveys: pacing, laning, and jungle.
Let’s Talk Pacing
Swiftplay has been out for nearly a year now, and in that time we’ve identified some opportunities to improve its overall pacing. As we’ve studied how matches play out, a few themes have become especially clear.
To start, despite Swiftplay being shorter (by about eight minutes on average) it’s still a bit longer than we’d like. Swiftplay also inherits a lot of the slower, more methodical pacing of regular SR: a drawn-out early laning phase, long death timers and runbacks, and generally low action density. Then, on top of that, the mode compresses every single neutral objective from SR into a shorter timeline. This all leads to a game that is not only a slower pace than SR, but is strategically more dense.
The biggest “feel” impact on game pacing is objectives. While things like how minions scale or your gains of gold/experience can impact game length, objective changes can have an impact on how the pacing actually “feels” and plays out.
So we’re primarily targeting objectives to get that correct feel that we want Swiftplay to have (deep breath): Like in other queues, Atakhan and Feats of Strength are removed from the game. In addition, in Swiftplay only, Void Grubs and Rift Herald are also removed. Elemental dragons now spawn no more than twice, and you have to kill both in order to claim Dragon Soul. Baron Nashor spawns at 12:00. Elder Dragon now always spawns at exactly 15:00 and every 6 minutes thereafter, and if there’s a dragon in the pit, it’ll despawn to make room for Elder.
We’re aiming to hit a few goals with these changes: First, we want to ensure that the pacing of objectives actually promotes shorter game lengths–you should have more time to spend doing things that actively push the game forward, like hitting towers, and less overall time playing around objectives. Second, we want to ramp into game-ending power faster. And third, we want to make the jungle less stressful (more on that in a bit.)
There are a few more odds and ends worth calling out: The Elemental Rift transformation now happens after the first dragon is killed since there are only two; if none are killed by 15:00, then no Elemental Rift transformation will occur. Baron buff now persists through death, empowering you to comfortably leverage that power to progress games. And Sudden Death happens 5 minutes sooner (at 25 minutes) to ensure that we’re pulling down that upper ceiling of game length.
All of these changes as a whole will drastically cut down on the pacing issues that Swiftplay is suffering from, while also opening up a lot of space to actually engage in moment-to-moment champion combat.
Gotta Go Fast… to Lane
Another area that we’ve examined is laning. Specifically, the time it takes to get to, and advance, lane. Fundamentally, the structure of Summoner’s Rift means that killing champions doesn’t directly drive the game towards a conclusion. They indirectly advance the game because they allow you to build a lead and give you the opportunity to push turrets and win lane while they stare at a grey screen only to slowly run back.
However this is Swiftplay, and who wants to wait around forever? We want to give you more momentum in those windows to progress, as well as get you back to lane faster to contest being pushed.
In order to help push lanes in those windows, we’ve created a new mechanic: Minion Frenzy. Whenever you kill an enemy champion, your nearby minions will frenzy, gaining a large amount of movement speed, attack speed, and damage to enemy minions and turrets, and sharing any minion kill gold with nearby allied champions. (You don’t have to compete with them for last hits!) If you get a kill in the jungle, you’ll gain a buff that applies Minion Frenzy to the next group of minions you encounter.
Swiftplay will also be receiving the new Crystalline Overgrowth mechanic that we’re adding to the Rift. We covered it in the Season One Gameplay Preview, but the gist of this is that slowly over time, crystals will grow on a tower that hasn’t been hit, and when hit will consume to deal an extra burst of damage. Think “Demolish for everyone,” giving everyone the power to actually push or progress a lane when it’s in a state for pushing. If you’re a Demolish fan, don’t worry, it’s not going away. We’re just changing it to a time-honored tradition… a three-hit passive.
This means that winning lane much more readily leads to damaging enemy turrets, which in turn progresses your game state. And that means no more long grey screens and runbacks: Death Timers are significantly reduced, and Homeguards go much faster and farther in Swiftplay now, even more so than the new Homeguards in other Summoner’s Rift queues.
Besides Minion Frenzy, you’ll be able to dive right into the action at the start of each game now, starting at level 3, with 1400 gold—like ARAM—and Doran’s Blade, Shield, and Ring have been replaced with Guardian’s Horn, Orb, Blade, and Hammer. Just as with Norms and Ranked in the new Season, minions spawn at 0:30, but in Swiftplay we’re also adding a cannon minion to every wave after the third, ensuring that every wave is worth pushing (especially with Minion Frenzy!)
Welcome to the Jungle
It’s no secret that jungle is by far the least popular position in Swiftplay. There are two major causes that we want to tackle right now: First clears are just as punishing as they are in Norms and Ranked, leading jungle to be the least forgiving to off-meta champions, and the strategy game of playing for neutral epics is even more frenetic than other queues despite the goal of Swiftplay being lower stakes.
When we started this project, we set out to address first clears by tuning the jungle monsters to be more forgiving—dealing less damage, taking more damage from your pet, and so on, ensuring that the jungle would be easier to clear for more champions. We’ve since pulled back on most of those changes, however—it turns out that starting at level 3 with 1400 gold is already a massive buff to clear speed and safety, even though the first batch of jungle monsters also spawn in at level 3 now.
The only major jungle clear changes you’ll see are that most jungle camps respawn 15 seconds faster, and it takes only 15 treats for the first upgrade to your jungle pet, and 25 treats for the second. Our intent is that early clears are much more forgiving for off-meta junglers, and we’ll continue to monitor to make sure that’s actually the case.
The other major pain point we were aiming to address here was how overwhelming neutral objectives have been. Swiftplay has had almost the same number of neutral objectives, but compressed into a much shorter time, leading to the feeling that the game was just leading you around. As noted above, we’re thinning out the objective game by removing Grubs, Rift Herald, and Atakhan—you’ll only have dragons and Baron to worry about now, and you’ll have plenty of time to farm up (or, you know, gank, if that happens to be your thing…) in the meantime.
We’ll be continuing to monitor the jungle going forward, but we think that these changes, simple as they are, should make the experience of playing jungle noticeably less stressful and more forgiving, especially for off-meta picks.
Outro
That’s all we have on Swiftplay for now, so be sure to check it out when we kick off the new year. We’re looking forward to seeing you all get to try out these updates and seeing all your feedback.
