[2023] Auto-assigning Smite to junglers was a great idea, I think its a good idea to un-assign it to Laners as well

First two lines here really, we do actually have a design for this because it is a good idea but the team's working on getting Quick Play out to y'all right now.

The team's not just working on one thing, Quick Play is just the biggest most public facing thing they're working on which is why I mention it, but for something like this we're in the realm of "is this the 10th most important thing? The 20th most important thing?"

There's a balance to strike between being reactive and staying focused, because if we pick up every good small scope idea that comes through we'll never get stuff like Arena/Preseason done, but I also do strongly believe we've leaned too much in that "focus on the big thing" direction over the last few years and am interested in putting out more of these types of experience upgrade changes - stuff like the recent surrender work you can look forward to seeing come through more consistently in the coming months.

There's lots of stuff to consider when prioritizing but a simple framework is value vs. cost. How valuable is it to do a thing (there's a lot to unpack there) vs. how expensive is it and what else could we be doing with those people/resources at any time. This was a lower value (not low, value is all relative) lower cost type of change, which often sit under higher value / medium cost types of changes, but then the game gets dusty if we don't make an intentional effort to sweep the floor every once and a while with stuff like this.

For the examples you mentioned, one factor is what people with what specialties are actually available at any given time. On my team (Summoner's Rift Team, we do the balance / preseason changes) we had capacity from a gameplay engineer and a game designer. The game designer is very familiar with the gameplay experience and provided better rules for the surrender system, and the gameplay engineer was able to implement them. That game designer isn't a systems designer, so isn't the best person suited to do work on the hextech/event systems, and the gameplay engineer isn't a league client engineer so can't fix league client issues. The extreme example is something like "why are you updating ability icons when the client has X bug" - we can't reallocate artists to start doing software engineering, they can only do art stuff.