The creators commented on the recently introduced function, which was rewards for objectives.
A new feature in League of Legends, called “objective bounties,” was intended to help losing teams make a comeback in a match. In theory, everything sounded quite good, but in practice, nothing went as it should.
Soon after the introduction of the aforementioned bounties, players reported various bugs en masse. Everything was awarded too quickly, gave too much gold, and even completely disrupted the game, which quickly became wildly annoying (see: Opposing teams in LoL win and get 3,000 gold. Something went wrong, Riot is asking for help).
The creators tried to ease the situation and modified the new function to calm down the community a bit. Even so, many players still felt that objective bounties were simply a mistake and should be removed.
Some time has passed, so it is time to evaluate the introduced feature. What does Riot have to say about this?
Objective bounties
Riot Phroxzon, the lead game designer on the Summoner’s Rift team, commented on the topic. He listed the most common bugs that affected this feature and admitted that the community’s feedback helped the developers a lot in eliminating the biggest bugs.
On launch, we agreed they were turning on too early when the game was still relatively close, and falling off too late after the losing team had already clawed back some of the deficit. They also had deactivation timers that would reset anytime an objective with an active bounty was engaged, which led to some pretty extreme gold swings when teams chain-secured objectives without letting the bounty status reset. Thanks to all your feedback and game data, we were able to stabilize the system relatively quickly. (The first hour that the feature went live gave us more information than we could produce with internal testing in 200 years!)
Many players told the developers that adding objective bounties for the losing team was not fair to the one winning. According to Phroxzon, this is not quite the case. Rioter noted that allowing additional gold to be gained does not always result in the result of the match being reversed.
We’ve also received feedback that Objective Bounties can feel like they punish a team for winning. While winning teams are, by definition, disfavored by comeback mechanics, we don’t believe it’s guaranteed that a losing team will claim an objective bounty
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What’s more, Rioter claims that after introducing appropriate corrections and balancing the functions, this one fares much better than its original. The creators are optimistic about this novelty and hope that it will only get better.
With post-launch balancing in place, the current dynamic seems appropriate: If the winning team plays better, they keep bounty claims to a minimum, and If the losing team plays better, they claim the bounties and use them as a springboard to get back into the game. While we’re still fine tuning the balance here, we’re optimistic about this feature for the long term: It increases the number of available strategies when behind, rewards creativity with macro movements, and encourages the losing team to rally around a plan rather than give up.