Jungle is free!
League of Legends: Riot Devs Happy With Current State of Jungle
Lead Designer of the League Balance Team Matt "Phroxzon" Leung-Harrison has written out his thoughts on the biggest changes from the 2023 preseason and how the adjustments have landed with players and where he sees improvements can still be made.
One of the issues Riot wanted to look into was making jungle a more beginner-friendly role since often junglers were lacking in lower elo brackets. So, how has the jungle turned out and has the player satisfaction gone up?
LoL: Jungle Became More Approachable In Season 13
According to data from Riot, the jungle position has always been a more exclusive role with fewer people choosing to play it. Because of this there seemed to be a large player base missing in lower elo and often players were auto-filled to the jungle role.
A good jungler has to know where enemy wards could be hiding:
That's why the balance team went to work this off season to try and combat the issue to make the jungle more approachable to beginners. Did their changes work? Well, accoridng to Leung-Harrison the jungle mechanics have become more intuitive with the changes and the addition of jungle pets.
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He also stated that queue rates for the jungle have gone up as well, especially in lower skill brackets as well, but the team continues to monitor the situation to truly have enough data to make a final decision on the changes.
Internal surveys also show that new junglers have found the changes to be very positive and longer time players also find the changes positive, especially on eastern League of Legends servers.
The team will not stop adjusting the jungle just yet, as they continue to monitor the power of the jungle role. Therefore, they've made changes in both LoL Patch 13.3 and LoL Patch 13.4, while also adjusting the experience junglers get.
So while the initial changes are positive, there is still some fine-tuning to be done for the jungle, but it seems that the goal of making the jungle more accessible has been reached and more players now feel they can try the jungle role.