The 2018 midseason patch has thrown League of Legends esports into a state of disarray.
A series of disruptive changes affected every single lane. From a total rework of mage itemization to massive changes in jungle experience to the compete overhaul of ADC stats, the meta looks complete different from just a few months ago. And some professional players, analysts, and coaches—whose livelihoods depend on the game state—are not happy.
Related: How the Summer Split meta is affecting pro teams and players
This isn’t the first time such a change has upended the Worlds meta, and it certainly won’t be the last. In fact, it’s not even the worst such shift—what happened before Worlds 2015 was much, much worse.
The combination of overpowered champions and game-breaking bugs threatened to ruin the whole tournament. Here’s a flashback to what happened three years ago.
Let’s rework juggernauts!
In Patch 5.16, Riot decided to drastically change just four champions: Darius, Garen, Skarner, and Mordekaiser. They were placed into their own separate class, juggernauts. These were meant to be pure tanks with a simple gameplan: run right at the enemy team.
The reason Riot made the changes was to differentiate these champions from other sorts of tanks. But the effect of it was to make some of them—Mordekaiser in particular—extremely overpowered.
Riot went pretty revolutionary with the Mordekaiser rework. He was given a brand-new passive, the first of its kind: He’d now get bonus experience when laning with another champion. The idea was to take this melee character and turn him into a viable bot laner. Sound familiar yet?
It wasn’t long before pros figured out that he was totally busted. In 73 games played at Worlds, Mordekaiser was banned in 68 of them. He did see the light of day in four though, posting a combined 26/4/45 scoreline—that’s a 17.75 KDA.
Mordekaiser was far from the only unbalanced champion. Gangplank was banned 69 times and likewise went 4-0 in the only games he was foolishly left up. Lulu was banned in over 50 percent of games, with Elise not far behind. And Skarner was only missing from Worlds because he was hotfixed almost immediately after the patch—and because he was literally the strongest champion in League history.
But wait, there’s more!
And to make matters worse, a game-breaking bug was discovered on Gragas, one of the only meta junglers behind Elise and Rek’Sai. In the middle of the quarterfinal match between Fnatic and EDG, Fnatic jungler Kim “Reignover” Yeu-jin found he was unable to cast Gragas’ Q.
What was initially thought to be a rare bug got more out of hand in later testing. It eventually led to not only Gragas being disabled for the remainder of the tournament, but Lux and Ziggs as well. A three-for-one deal of this type wasn’t what Riot wanted to give its fans.
Still, pros have to deal with the changes to the meta all the time. Shouldn’t they have been ready for something to break like this? Well, not exactly. Riot’s timing for the changes and the bugs literally couldn’t have been worse.
The opposite of perfect timing
Patch 5.16 dropped right before the season-ending playoffs and Worlds qualifiers in regions around the world. After the qualifiers are done, League esports essentially goes silent as teams prepare for Worlds.
That year, Worlds was set to be played on Patch 5.18. The gap was ostensibly to give Riot some time to see what the 5.16 changes did to the game and allow the balance team not one, but two whole patches to adjust. It was supposed to make things better.
Instead, it was a disaster. With no professional games on 5.17 or 5.18 before Worlds, the balance team was completely in the dark as to what was going on with their game. The things that they did know—that some champions like Darius were overpowered in solo queue—didn’t lead to meaningful adjustments.
The changes on 5.17 and 5.18 were either not enough, or totally misguided. That left players and teams with not only an unhealthy meta, but one they had never before seen in action. The timing could hardly have been worse.
What does it mean now?
What happened at Worlds 2015 is a distant memory for many League fans, but it has ramifications today. First, although Riot has an entire split to balance the game before Worlds this year, dropping such big changes in the middle of the competitive season, before teams are able to test and give feedback, is simply ludicrous. Thankfully, Riot has acknowledged as much.
Players’ careers can sometimes hang on the balance of one or two patches. While it’s better for the long-term health of esports that players have diverse champion pools, it’s too much to ask for them to switch lanes in the middle of a competitive season. There’s a reason traditional sports wait until the offseason to make rule changes.
The silver lining to all of this is that, at the end of Worlds 2015, the best team—SK Telecom T1—actually did win, beating Koo Tigers. And we’re pretty sure we got the two best teams in the final. Despite all the meta craziness, the result was one we could have reasonably expected.
But that doesn’t mean there weren’t casualties. Two highly-regarded Asian teams, Flash Wolves and EDG, were swept aside in the quarterfinals. They cominbed to go 1-2 on blue side, but 0-4 on the red side of the map, which is weaker when overpowered champions are in the mix. Overall for the tournament, blue side teams won 58.9 percent of all games.
All that meant that Worlds 2015 was held on possibly the worst-ever competitive patch. This can’t happen again. This year, Riot has time to fix the meta before Worlds, and the meta itself isn’t nearly as bad as it was back then—in fact, outside of dumb things like the funnel strategy, it’s kind of fun.
But Riot better not rest on its laurels or wait until the last minute again. Everyone’s under pressure when the premier tournament in League is on the line, and that includes the Riot Games balance team. So let’s hope they don’t screw up—only the whole world is watching.
Worlds 2015 stats via Games of Legends.
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