Following the start of the new LoL 2025 season, Riot Games’ league designer Phroxzon has shared some of the initial data taken from ranked.
Image Credit: Riot Games
Riot Phroxzon – “We don’t think snowballing is much higher than the previous season”
The game designer shared in a post on X some of the key data between the last patch of season 14 and the newest patch, signaling that the win rates of several metrics have stayed somewhat similar, despite the introduction of new mechanics such as Feats of Strength and the new epic monster, Atakhan.
“Each of the other major objectives like Inner Turret, Dragon, Rift Herald, etc. are also ~the same as the previous patch,” said Phroxzon. “Objective winrates are also related to how far ahead the team is by just playing and getting ahead normally through kills/farming, etc. so winrates need to be interpreted with that in mind.”
According to Riot, snowballing isn’t much higher than the previous season, stating that the dev team implemented “preventative measures to reduce snowballing in the new season like early homeguards, increased XP range, removing gold from FB, First Turret, etc”.
The perception of snowballing is higher due to the implementation of Feats of Strength
Phroxzon explained that the new mechanic had given a much stronger impression to players about the importance of early-game objectives, causing them to be more mentally impacted. He also stated that the new Tier 3 boots won’t be nerfed given that they are not worth the 750g cost.
“Regardless of whether it changes perception, I wanted to present what we’re seeing and explain why we’re making the decisions that we are. If you’re a player who feels like we should FF if the opponent got FB and now has 57% chance to win, we don’t agree with or encourage that. Even if a team wins Feats of Strength, there is a fighting chance to win at that point, despite playing from the backfoot. It would be inappropriate for games to still be 50-60% chance to win at the 15-20min mark or game time would get too long,” he added.
First Blood to be immediately changed in LoL 2025 season
While Riot has been satisfied about the numbers, they think that some changes have created too much friction such as the First Blood Feat. As a result, Phroxzon confirmed it will be changed in the next patch Patch 25.s1.2, or Patch 25.s1.3.
“Candidly, we messed up here and it should have been changed pre-release, but we’re going to own that mistake, learn from it, and do better next time. By the time we identified we wanted to change it, it was just not possible to change on that timeline,” he explained.