[2021] Why is Riot trying to introduce non-jungle champions into the jungle in a meta where a huge cast of champions designed to be junglers feel unplayable?

This sentiment is mostly correct, in general we are looking to increase the popularity of jungle across the board by introducing traditionally popular champions, especially in lower elos.

I like the idea, and personally I could see value in us doing this. I think a concern here is how fast it would be depricated because of how often the jungle changes. Putting a lot of time and effort into a high-quality guide and then having it be outdated a year later would feel pretty bad in my opinion.

I do wanna say that first those numbers pushed to PBE were clearly overtuned and have been adjusted and likely will be adjusted further. I think making jungle as a role more appealing rather than adding appealing champions is a good goal to have, though it is decisively harder to accomplish from a goals standpoint as well as workload. Any change we make to the jungle will always have big ripple effects so the rammifications will always be hard to foresee. This change would also likely cause a massive shift in pro so it would have to be reserved for mid-season or pre-season. All that being said I wouldn't count it out as a possibility at some point.

Haha that could be fun, I wanted Yasuo jungle but no luck :(

Yeah its something that we have considered for sure, I think that jungling might be something a tad too complex for first-time players, but its something thats not off the table.

I agree honestly, I think its something that will likely be worth doing in the not so distant future.

I think you are just missing a lot of context here is all. Jungle isn't nearly as unpopular a role in skilled/elite levels of play, in low elo it is by far the most popular out of all elo brakcets. And bringing proven popular champions into an unpopular role isn't that bizzare to me at all. The buffs are also done in such a way so that they will have a low impact on those champions' pre-existing roles as possible, so they aren't buffed as a whole so much as they are buffed specifically only for jungle. All this is also not to say that we think this is the one and only solution to solving the many problems that exist with the jungle, this is simply one change that is currently being made.

I think overloading players with a lot of things to learn is a fast way to overwhelm and potentially scare them off. Slowly trickling new mechanics in is a much safer way of doing it, which I believe is the approach here.

I agree the exp system is likely a good place to look, exp is a super super fickle mechanic so I think finding the right balance there is tough, but worth looking into.

Agreed that I am no coding expert and don't know the workload involved, but that does sound like something that would be cool to add. I think its not necessarily something that is requested a lot so for that reason probably isn't high on our list of priorities.

Yeah in the end I think the boring answer here is that differing opinions aside, there are likely statistics and metrics that can be used to determine these things that will likely drive a lot of decision-making.

Yeah, I think something you could likely expect to see in the future is a borrowing of certain ideas from Wild Rift based on the success of them. I don't have anything in mind saying this, but it does just seem to make the most sense to convert what works for them into our game if it helps with things like player value.

I just think jungle just has a lot of naunced complexity that isn't immediately obvious honestly. Things like pathing, clears, etc are all so insanely complex while generally laning is much, much more straightforward.