Updated on January 22, 10:22 a.m. (GMT+8): Added an update from Riot Phroxzon.
League of Legends items play a crucial role in the multiplayer online battle arena (MOBA) game, influencing strategic decisions that can turn the tide of a match.
In recent updates, however, developers have stripped certain items of their stat trackers. This change has introduced a challenge for players, as they now find it more difficult to assess the effectiveness of these items in the heat of the game.
Riot Games addresses this issue in a Reddit Ask Me Anything (AMA) thread on the League of Legends subreddit, shedding light on this dilemma.
Some League of Legends items no longer have stat trackers — here’s why according to Riot Phroxzon
Statikk Shiv, Sunfire Aegis, and Abyssal Mask, among other legendary items, have undergone a noticeable change — they no longer feature stat trackers.
Riot Games stated that they “focused on clarity this season” as the reason behind the removal of this quality of life (QOL) feature.
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“For tenured League players, it’s easy to overlook how difficult and confronting it is to look at tooltips in the first place, so we wanted to reduce this burden by some amount,” Lead Gameplay Designer Matt “Riot Phroxzon” Leung-Harrison said in the Reddit AMA thread. “We want to strike the balance of having good experiential and statistical ways to determine whether things are good.”
He also admitted to internal miscommunication within the team, leading to inconsistency in determining which items should retain the stat tracker.
“It got lost in the general chaos of releasing a big season,” he added.
Assuring the player base, Riot Phroxzon promised that Riot plans to bring back more stat trackers in the future.
This explanation, however, sparked confusion and frustration among players in the Reddit thread, evident in Riot Phroxzon’s comment receiving 400 downvotes at the time of writing.
Some players expressed the importance of stat trackers for League of Legends items.
Others crafted their theories on the true motive behind Riot’s decision.
The response also became a target for humor and criticism.
For a detailed look at the Riot Games Reddit AMA on the League of Legends subreddit, you can view the complete discussion here.
In patch 14.2, Riot plans to reintroduce stat trackers for approximately half of the items that had them but were removed in the pre-patch phase. More items will have their stat trackers back in patch 14.3, Riot Phroxzon promised in a post on X (formerly Twitter).
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