En el último Ask Riot, Ghostcrawler (Game Design Director) ha comentado que no están contentos con el estado actual de las runas, y que en un futuro, no demasiado cercano (comenta explicitamente que NO será en la preseason de 2017) sufrirán cambios.
What was your vision for runes and masteries when you first created them and how might you change the system?
The original intentions behind runes and masteries were two-fold. First, they gave players some ability to customize their champion’s power and abilities above and beyond Summoner Spell and item choices. Second, they served as a form of progression system for level 1-30. As you obtained levels, you earned new mastery points and rune slots.
In terms of runes and masteries providing meaningful customization today, the experience is only average at best in my opinion. The update to keystone masteries we did last season helped to provide more choices for players, but we still have a long way to go. (Working in Adobe Air also proved to be pretty brittle to work with technically, which makes ongoing adjustments painful to players and developers because they tend to cause bugs, but we do have plans to rewrite this code.) Because rune benefits are passive stats, which can be easily solved by the community, it’s hard for them to ever be interesting decisions. In their current form, runes will probably always be something you just look up on the internet and copy from a guide, and that’s not awesome.
In terms of runes and masteries providing meaningful progression today, we’re just not hitting the mark. I’d argue that for players who are truly new to League, it’s hard for them to appreciate whether buying a new Lesser Quintessence of Mana is really noticeable when they’re still mastering the basics of the game. But even worse, a power delta between a lower level and higher level player exists because of runes and masteries. It’s the worst of both worlds: a system that doesn’t feel meaningful but in reality is really meaningful, in a bad way. This power disparity makes learning things like last hitting harder for the players who needs help the most, as well as making them weaker when compared to bots, or allied or enemy human players.
When League launched, the Summoner leveling system was pretty much the only progression in the game. At this point in the game’s life cycle, most League players have been level 30 for some time, and they have other progression systems that they can focus on, such as ranked progression or champion mastery, and we have long-term plans to offer additional progression systems as well. We recently reduced the time it takes to reach level 30, but we have acknowledged before that League’s onboarding experience needs much more attention. When we do that work (which is a priority, just not as high as many other priorities), we think we can offer a more compelling experience for truly new players that isn’t based around earning small passive bonuses (for example, Hextech Crafting is arguably a better system for delivering incremental rewards to players).
So if we don’t think runes and masteries have aged well, what are we going to do about it? We need to make changes. I will be frank that they won’t be coming in the 2017 preseason. These are complicated systems for developers to work on, and they affect everything from game balance to League’s IP economy. We don’t have details to share yet, but I didn’t want to confess that we aren’t happy with the current system without offering some commitment that we are going to change it. We think we can deliver on a system that offers some amount of customization without the current power delta that occurs while leveling. While there are champions that are underpowered or overpowered at any moment in time, overall we think most players would agree that they have a lot of champions that they can choose to play. In the same way, we think we can offer that level of choice in runes and masteries, or whatever the system that replaces them turns out to be.
