devtrackers.gg
"Hi everyone,
You may have seen the anti-lane swap changes that made their way to PBE today.
Changes
The changes (as of today) are as follows:
Lane Swap Detection
2 enemy champions, both of whom don’t have jungle item, are in the offending lane or surrounding area
Timer is 1:30 - 3:30 for top lane and 1:30 - 2:15 for mid lane
If the team has no junglers, this rule is disabled
If the team has two or more junglers, junglers are included in the check
While Detected
Defending turret has 95% damage reduction
Defending turret one shots minions
Defending turret and minions give gold and XP from their kills to the nearest allied champion in the lane
Offending champions gain 50% less gold and XP from minions.
This lingers for 25 seconds in top lane, 6 seconds in mid lane..
Top only:
Defending turret one shots champions
Defending champion has 50% damage reduction under their turret (~300u range)
Temporary Nature
These changes are temporary and, by extension, heavy handed by necessity. We intend to work on longer term solutions (similar to how we addressed funnel, double support items, etc.) but 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.
Many viewers and Pros alike have expressed that lane swaps undermine something that makes League awesome; that the best top laners can fight the best top laners and the best bot lanes can fight the best bot lanes. As a result, we feel like it is necessary to make these changes at this time.
These rules are intended to address the most expectation breaking versions of lane swaps starting from level 1, but they are not intended to affect the time periods significantly after that, as swaps at that point provide lower benefits and more closely resemble “normal League of Legends”.
We want League of Legends played in Pro to look as close as possible to the League of Legends we all play. Due to lane swaps, this is not true for many Pro games right now. While Fearless Draft and Tournament Draft pick/ban might have different rules for regular players and Pros, the actions in game are governed by the same rules.
Feedback so far
We’ve also seen the comments about this affecting regular play and potential griefers.
We are trying to strike the best balance between minimizing impact to regular play and maximizing effectiveness in reducing lane swaps in pro play.
We put a lot of thought into ways that this might manifest in regular play and hit innocent players like level 2 ganking mid, a Twitch or Teemo level 1 ganking with stealth. 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 midlane and linger durations so players incidentally pathing through these lanes don’t grief their teammates. As mentioned above, we don’t want this to be the reality forever.
Finally, we know that bad actors may attempt to use these changes as a testbed for griefing. Simply put, if you engage in this behavior to grief your teammates, we will detect it and punish you."
Edit: Additional context from Phroxzon:
External link →"An addition to this I forgot to mention: * There will be very clear messaging if you're identified as lane swapping. "Lane swap detected: please leave the area!", we might have cooked with how noisy it is * We considered referees enforcing it but what if you have a failed invade top side then Keria walks slightly too close to top on his way out, does the ref pause the game and threaten a yellow card - "don't take one more step or it's a violation!". The more we thought about all the edge cases and needing to define them the more impractical it became, as amusing as it'd be to watch"