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Revising and Rebalancing Summoners Rifts' problems

So it's long been known that the Blue side team has a slight advantage over the red team due to the camera behavior in combination with map shape and UI position, essentially meaning blue team is able to see a more meaningful portion of the map than the red team as demonstrated here: https://imgur.com/a/UbEff5A

 

However upon further exploration we see further imperfections that cause slight imbalances between teams which many are likely not aware of. Through this section I'll be referring to this map which highlights the areas of interest: https://imgur.com/a/uH64SCH to demonstrate the differences. For a majority of the dash tests for wall thickness, I used Kindred as she can get in the tight spots allowing me to highlight subtle differences, which wouldn't be picked up if I used say Zac XD. In addition for some of the mechanical testing, I primarily used the 2 champs I already knew to be problematic so am keen to hear about others.

  1. Here we see a larger gap between the wall opposite the wolf camp, and the wolf camp itself. This makes champions like elise and gragas unable to use their gap-closers as effectively on red team as on the blue team. Gragas' E hits the wolfs on blue team, but not red and elise can rapel on blue team, but can't on red team.

  2. Here, the red teams blue buff wall has a larger portion, this could mean the difference between an invader or invadee escaping or catching their target.

  3. We see a similar but far less significant wall portion around the blue teams wolf camp, in which the apex (pointy ends) of the walls have less thing space than the red teams, but only slightly. More skeptical here as it may be more down to subtle angle changes.

  4. A difference in bush placement that's power neutral, as they can be abused by both teams. The top side circle bush is more centred to the river, making it better for ambush/approaching baron as it's further from tower (more room to chase) and closer to baron pit.

  5. This one hits me where it hurts most as a Nunu player. This portion of baron pit wall, on the red team base's side has a point at which it suddenly juts out a few mm. This is demonstrated herehttps://imgur.com/a/7gKxyjS . These points cause nunu to break his snowball and players, who would otherwise walk in a straight arc to potentially shuffle into an oncoming spell. We then see this issue repeated with the tri bushes near river as depicted in these images https://imgur.com/a/ALyHT2g

  6. And finally, the blue buff exit into river for both teams. The blue team's exit is larger than red teams. This provides a tight choke point if red team contests a dragon, and a wide choke point if blue team contests a baron. This favors blue team in both cases. The rest of the jungle exits into river are equal to both teams.

 

These are just the obvious ones I found in around 40 minutes of hugging walls and testing the same walls on opposite sides of the map. There are possibly even more subtle differences and champion unique interactions.

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