Riot has confirmed nerfs to the Double Jungle and Funneling strategies, citing a “niche abuse case” that was ignored during testing
Riot revamped League of Legends’ jungle once more in Season 13, introducing new jungle pets and a slew of role simplifications.
And, as expected, players have developed systems to exploit the new mechanisms. The Double Jungle strategy, which was initially found in China and Korea, saw mid laners and junglers shift roles at random throughout the game to optimize stacks from the new items. Because of the arrival of pets, both of these champions may bring Smite and melt through camps early on, leaving the opponent with few to no camps to farm.
Riot Ray Yonggi revealed in a recent Reddit post on the issue that funneling was something Riot overlooked in their early testing phase, but they’re not ignoring the problem: improvements will be delivered as part of LoL patch 12.23. It’s a simple adjustment that they couldn’t have predicted without the vast data of active servers.
“No, we didn’t test funnel extensively,”
“We spend a majority of the preseason dev time on tuning the game for the 99.9%, and when a niche abuse case pops up (like funnel) we ensure we have the levers to fix it when it does.”
“Rather than spend time inefficiently anticipating, testing, and mitigating these strategies pre-ship, we instead observe preseason and make adjustments at 5% the cost.”
Riot Ray Yonggi stated that preventing players who did not buy a jungle item from feeding their pets treats, which would ultimately prohibit them from developing their Smite, may be a possible answer to this emerging tactic.
This year’s preseason brought a slew of new features, many of which revolved on the jungle. More improvements to the preseason features are anticipated before the actual start of season 2023 next year.