Yesterday, there was a massive update to the Twisted Treeline map on the public beta environment on League of Legends.

If you tuned in to my stream yesterday early morning, you might have seen me showing a preview of the update. The stream was about five hours long and took place over night, so I was extremely sleepy and didn’t really have much brain processing power to be able to even think about what I was doing.

Now that a day has passed and I managed to get some sleep, I took a look back at the replay of the stream last night to come up with some well-thought-out reflections and opinions about the update.

I don’t think I really mentioned this yesterday because I was still in the thrill of trying out something completely new, but my overall feelings about the update is that I strongly dislike them.

I preferred Twisted Treeline over Summoner’s Rift before the update because I felt Twisted Treeline was a more high-action and fun map while still maintaining all of the fundamentals of Summoner’s Rift. The premise of the entire game was basically the same, but it took place with fewer players on a smaller map.

If you know my history as a gamer, you know that I have pretty good micro, but terrible macro. In the sense of League of Legends, that means that I’m great at fighting, but bad at keeping track of everything going on in the game and setting goals to push to achieve victory. I liked Twisted Treeline because there were fights breaking out all the time, and that was what I liked; there were also much fewer things to worry about because you only have to keep track of three enemies and a smaller map space with fewer objectives.

Basically, the old Twisted Treeline was just like a smaller Summoner’s Rift.

I unfortunately have to say that I feel the new Twisted Treeline is closer to a combination of Dominion and Summoner’s Rift, rather than just a smaller version of Summoner’s Rift.

When Riot wanted Twisted Treeline to have tons of action all the time, they reached an optimal level with the old map. When they tried to bump this up some more with the new map, it went over the edge, and now the fighting and action is in excess. The best way for me to describe it is that it’s basically mass chaos, now. If you truly want to secure a victory on the new map, you have to fight over and defend so many things that the entire game is basically constant fighting all over the map.

The laning phase has essentially been removed, because if you stay in lane for too long, the enemies will go and acquire global objectives that not only will put them ahead, but will also directly put you behind. An example of this is the new altars implemented into the map. Normally, both teams have one altar close to their base (which both teams will most likely secure soon after they activate early in the game). If the enemies notice that you are staying in lane a lot, they will just go and capture the altar on the other side. This will not only give the enemies an additional bonus, but it makes you lose the bonus you initially had from having that altar.

This also brings me to my next point, which is that the Twisted Treeline encourages death with these altars. Dealing damage to someone capturing an altar does not stop the capture, and the person capturing is able to freely attack while capturing, as long as they are standing on top of the altar. Basically, this encourages someone to suicide and capture the enemy altar to gain benefits for his team and put the enemy team at a disadvantage. This also forces the enemy team out of lane to make a frail attempt to defend the altar (which is most likely going to be captured by the enemy team anyway if they are persistent). If they choose to stay in lane, the enemy who captures the altar gets away freely, which sort of puts an obligatory duty on a team to go kill the captor.

Overall, because of the lack of structure of the game, and the tendency for the game to be a blood bath while people throw their bodies at objectives to try and snowball the game, makes the game unpleasing for someone who wants to apply strategy towards winning.

Mentioning snowballing, that brings me to my next point – the entire map is built to essentially give an advantage to whichever team is strongest at lower levels, then endlessly supporting this team by helping them constantly increase their lead. Now, because Riot made it so turtling is basically impossible, the map makes it next to impossible to make a comeback from an early game disadvantage.

Overall, I am very disappointed in the new Twisted Treeline update. I’m sure more people are going to play Twisted Treeline simply because it is new, but I don’t think it is going to have much of a better player base than the old Twisted Treeline. I’m also sure that, because of this update, many loyal Twisted Treeline players (like myself) will be moving on to Summoner’s Rift in disappointment and discouragement.

It seems like I am not the only one who is disappointed in the update, as there are many threads on the forums indicating that people want both the old and the new Twisted Treeline maps to be available for play.

I’m not sure how Riot is going to react to this, and I’m also not sure how many people actually do like this update, but I can say that if Riot pursues pushing this update to the main server, you will probably never see me on Twisted Treeline again.