League of Legends takes heavy swing at lane swaps, community erupts

Riot Games is taking heavy action against lane swaps in League of Legends. See the massive countermeasures being added to counter lane swaps in LoL, and how the community reacted.

It's worth noting that these changes to battle lane swaps are on the LoL PBE (Public Beta Environment) server. Meaning, this is the first look we have of this system and is a work in progress. Moreover, League of Legends lead gameplay designer Matt "Riot Phroxzon" Leung-Harrison stressed that these changes are temporary and heavy-handed "by necessity."

Lane Swap Detection will be added. This will activate when two champions of the same team, neither of whom has a jungle item, are in either the top or mid-lane or surrounding areas.

The detection will occur:

There are also caveats regarding unconventional jungler (champions with Smite) counts:

The goal of lane swaps is to avoid a bad side lane matchup and survive laning phase, to put a specific enemy laner behind, or to put your own laner (usually the bot laner) ahead. Thus, the changes target these motivations.

When a lane swap is detected, the defending turret:

The defending top-lane turret specifically is getting even more countermeasures:

Additionally, the offending champions will gain 50% less gold and XP from minions. These effects last for 25 seconds in top and 6 seconds in mid.

These changes are expected to ship on LoL Patch 25.05, scheduled for March 5, 2025.

Again, Riot Phroxzon says that these changes are temporary until they find a long-term solution, like how they dealt with the funnel and double support item strategies of old. "An elegant solution that solves the problem without adding excess long term rules to the game will take time and we’ll keep these rules in the game until that solution is ready."

These changes are aimed at bringing pro games closer to the average LoL game. Riot Phroxzon says that targeting lane swaps that start from level 1 is the intent since lane swaps after that provide less benefit and more closely resemble "normal League of Legends."

Obviously, these changes open the door for griefers. Bad actors on your team may simply sit in your lane, proc-ing the lane swap detector, and putting you behind with the penalty. "Simply put, if you engage in this behavior to grief your teammates, we will detect it and punish you," Riot Phroxzon says.

Another collateral effect of the lane swap detection in LoL is some cheese strats. Maybe a level 1 gank by a stealthed Twitch or Teemo would have been beneficial, but will instead activate the lane swap penalty after this change. "Ultimately, we didn’t feel like we could effectively eliminate lane swaps without some amount of collateral damage to these strategies, but we are trying to mitigate with things like a shorter duration for these rules in mid lane and linger durations so players incidentally pathing through these lanes don’t grief their teammates," Riot Phroxzon said, before reiterating that these changes are temporary.

Nick "LS" De Cesare, League of Legends personality, previously a coach and analyst, shared his thoughts on X. He says that these changes will not remove lane swaps in LoL and will instead just alter how it happens. "The entire philosophy behind why it exists isn't addressed in these changes, and thus all that needs happen is people understand the new variables and recalculate accordingly," says LS.

Cloud9 bot laner Jesper "Zven" Svenningsen had a less serious response: "Why dont they just shoot bot laners in the head irl if they go top?"

Content creator and ex-pro Christian "IWDominate" Rivera also took to X to discuss what this may mean for the future of LoL Esports. "If this goes through AND fearless is removed, league will be insanely boring when it comes to champion diversity of Spring," says IWD. "Remember, the main reason people even started experimenting with lane swaps were because of how insanely unplayable certain botlane matchups were in the first few levels."

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