Severely cracking down on early-stage lane-swapping tactics, League of Legends launches a new penalty mechanism

On March 5, local time, League of Legends officially released version 25.5. This version made adjustments to many contents, including the introduction of the reverse lane swap mechanism.

In League of Legends, lane swapping usually refers to the bottom lane duo (support and ADC) swapping lanes with the top laner, forming a 2v1 asymmetric laning. This tactic aims to avoid disadvantageous laning, quickly knock down defensive towers, and optimize resource allocation, but it also often leads to unbalanced games. For this reason, the official statement severely criticized the lane swap tactic, pointing out that lane swapping not only weakens the survivability of some heroes and reduces the viewing value of traditional laning duels, but also affects the combat experience of professional players.

The official League of Legends has tried to weaken the lane-swapping tactic many times before, such as making the outer towers in the top and middle lanes take less damage in the early stages of the game. In this adjustment, the official introduced a strict early penalty mechanism for the lane-swapping tactic, aiming to further weaken the feasibility of the lane-swapping tactic in the early stages of professional games. However, the above rules do not apply to teams that do not carry jungle characters.

According to the official statement, the detection mechanism introduced by League of Legends will trigger a lane swap penalty when two non-jungle heroes appear in the top or mid lane at the same time. The specific penalty measures include: the defending tower will receive 95% damage reduction and cause 1000% damage to minions. At the same time, the gold and experience points obtained from killing the defending tower and minions will be directly distributed to the closest hero in the lane.

As for the lane swapping team, the gold and experience they receive from minions will be reduced by 50% (the effect lasts for 20 seconds in the top lane and 6 seconds in the middle lane). In addition, the defending team's defense tower will cause 1000% damage to the top lane hero, and the damage received by the defending hero under the tower will also be reduced by 50%.