Fans Outraged at League of Legends Blog Post

League of Legends recently debuted its “experimental” blog posting called Riot Pls, where game developers explain the thought processes and “values” behind certain game related changes.

The title of the blog pays homage to a popular reddit inside joke, where fans of the game write “Rito, plz” as a sign of their exasperation towards certain changes in dynamics that affect the game.

Well, in its first post, Riot decided to kick things off by announcing that it had no plans of developing the ever so coveted “sandbox mode.” Rito, plz.

So what exactly is “sandbox mode”? And what’s all this uproar and confusion being made about it?

League of Legends is a game that requires immense amounts of patience. Each character being played has a certain cooldown timer on their individual abilities. Some abilities only require ten seconds of wait time to be used again. Some abilities require almost five minutes.

In a game so reliant on well-timed mechanics and careful micro play, practicing certain abilities through only regular gameplay makes it difficult to actually master them.

Sure, players can try out Riot’s custom games where they can focus on mastering certain character combos. But what about the abilities that have three minute cooldowns? What about the abilities that have five minute cooldowns? Players would only be able to practice the latter 12 times in one hour.

Sandbox mode would remove all these kinds of constraints. Players could customize their own game modes, which means they can say goodbye to cooldowns.

Messed up a certain combo? No worries–players can just spam their abilities over and over until they feel comfortable enough to use it in a normal or ranked game.

Riot’s response? Nope–not going to happen.

Our stance is that sandbox mode is not the way to go. We want to make sure we’re clear: playing games of League of Legends should be the unequivocal best way for a player to improve.

So what exactly does this mean? Basically, Riot thinks full-length games are the way to improve. The response would probably make more sense, if winning a game wasn’t so dependent on mastering mechanics and micro play.

Their reasoning behind the decision is all the more perplexing:

We never want to see a day when a player wants to improve at League and their first obligation is to hop into a Sandbox. We do want to support your ability to grow in mastery, and there may be other avenues to do so, but not this.

The biggest problem is how this decision affects professional players. For them, hitting every ability counts; hitting and missing an ability can be the difference between winning a team fight–and winning a game. Dota 2 already has a version of a sandbox mode available for their players. So it’s almost inexplicable that Riot has decided to go against the trend.

A design representative from Riot went on to further elaborate:

I’d imagine everyone’s had games already where someone’s told them to quit playing ranked and to go play normals. If an additional layer of sandbox got added underneath, that’s what we’re talking about.

So in the end, it’s not just a difference in philosophy. Riot actually believes that having a sandbox mode would increase toxicity in-game. They afraid of players telling each other: “Get back to the sandbox and learn how to hit your combos!”

Here are some reactions from some professional players and coaches of the game.

And so far, fans of the game haven’t been happy with the response either. Here are some more reactions from the /r/LeagueofLegends subreddit community.