Think about SC2. Ranked queue games are played on a small selection of maps (not active anymore so I don't know how many it's currently at, but when I was diamond it was about 5). Different maps allowed for different styles of gameplay. In some maps enemies spawned closer than allies (if multiplayer, or just close if single player) and on others much farther away. This led to differences in playstyles on the different maps. I don't see the harm in trying out additional 5v5 maps, even if tourney play is restricted to Summoner's Rift for a while. It will take time to balance the game on a new map, but it also leads the way for exciting new metagame shifts utilizing different facets of new terrain and map setup.

And for all you SC2 haters, it's one of the most popular games out there still, and really established esports as mainstream.

Yes, but the ideal that lots of us are asking for is to have that seasonal maps appear randomly when creating the game. So when you log you get a different skin.

To everyone QQing about Riot "abandoning" maps like TT and Dom, they got abandoned by the community first. They checked with the community, and when only a small fraction showed any interest, they moved their interest elsewhere. Most people play SR, and because of this SR is what the game is based around. I think having a 10 v 10 map would be awesome, but HOW THE HELL DO YOU BALANCE THAT? That's the real problem. You can't balance a MOBA for more than one map, really. It's why Tryndamere is not nerfed, because on SR he's balanced. Put him on TT however, and he's out of control.

You guys are making great process, I'm enjoying the new jungle, items, masteries, and runes from this season but I do think we need more maps, even reskins of SR with new jungle would be appreciated. I enjoy dominion greatly and I believe it does add greater depth to the game an actually better balance than SR even though it's shorter and less strategically satisfying.

What I Expect from Season 3:

1. Expansions or fixes of less seen items: Nashor's Tooth, Haunting Guise, Lich Bane, Sunfire Cape, Other Tenacity Items, Locket of the Iron Solari, and Madrids Bloodrazor.

2. Dominion specific mastery selections for cap points or alterations to masteries involving towers.

3. Fixes or Bot mode on TT. I really do enjoy this mode but even with the new exp scaling and balance its still really snowballs.

4. Fixes/remakes to less used champions (Katarina, Poppy, Karma, Heimerdinger)

5. New Runes: (Tenacity Quints, lifesteal/spellvamp/on hit marks or glyphs)

6.A new map or remake of old map (magma chamber SR skin with new creeps, a new mode like arena mode based on kills/assists/cs or survival tower defense mode against waves of enemies, or TT dominion map)

7. Quests being implemented in SR and TT.

8. Hard/Expert Bots

The official competitive season should begin with the release of a new 5v5 map which all of the competition games will take place on. The map should be released two weeks before the start of the new season to give teams a chance to practice on it. That gives you a year to balance the map before its released.

Now, as for how to balance maps, many of you are overthinking the issue. If a map is symmetrical, or even NEAR symmetrical then it is sufficiently balanced. You may say, "But some champions will be more powerful on it and other will be less powerful!" And you may be right, but why is this a problem? Some champions are more powerful on SR than others. That's why the same 20-30 champs are played in **** near every single game at the top of the competitive ranks. Those are the champions that are most powerful on that map.
Why is it a problem if a different 20-30 champions rise to the top on a different map?

To avoid sharding you just make the game randomly select your map BEFORE champion select. Then everyone can pick champs that go well on that map. After a few seasons you can retire a map from the ranked queue, but leave it selectable in normal games. Always keep say... 5 maps in the ranked map pool, no more.

That handles your balance issue, and your sharding issue. It also gives a built in platform for hyping the maps and adds something interesting to the competitive seasons. So, get on it.

The problem with comparing physical sports with e-sports is that they're not the same thing.

Sure, baseball, soccer, football, etc.. The fields are slightly different based on some things, but they're essentially the same still. The shape is the same, a yard is still a yard, and the objective is still the same. New maps to LoL usually implies differences in gameplay or objectives, thus changing the "sport" entirely.

There's also the team factor. The majority of sports have the same people on their team (changed only by trades, or when switching out sick/injured players for extras) and nobody has any particular specialty. The team comp is always the same. The goalie is always the goalie, and there's always only one. The defense is always defense, the offense is always offense, and the numbers of each doesn't change. There would never be 2 goalies and 4 offensive players on the ice in a hockey game, for example. Or 2 players on third base.

The thing with games like this is the team comp can change, thus changing the game. Even if the COMP stays the same (bruiser top, AP mid, AD carry and support bot plus a jungler) the champs in each position are all very different.

Don't get me wrong - I don't disagree that new maps would be fun. Just saying your comparisons aren't accurate. Besides, they not too long ago released Dominion, and more recently gave people who want ARAMs their map too. On top of that there's Twisted Treeline and the default, Summoner's Rift. Out of all of these, the vast majority of games are played on SR, thus making it hard from a company's perspective to have any reason to create a new map when the default one is still the most popular by far.

I would hate to do rune releases frequently. That'd be horrible. Can you imagine having to save for different sets of runes every couple of weeks? With a champion, you get a new playstyle, VO another character to engage in and fight.

With runes, you just get different stats. It's just not as cool as getting an entirely new champion.

Sure - when we do changes for different seasons, runes might be the right call to expand new gameplay types - but I wouldn't want players to regularly have to save up IP just for the raw statistics. Once or twice to customize your favorite characters - sure - that's a sunk cost. But regularly? Ick. I'd hate for players to constantly have to save IP and re-optimize their rune pages. That's kind of unfair entirely. At the beginning of the season - you should know what the runes are and then make smart purchases to customize your characters.

Rune should promote new builds - true - but I don't think they're very good as something that works on a regular release cadence.

I'm so, so tired of this being the default zero-thought response to anyone talking about a feature Riot hasn't yet implemented. It doesn't even make any sense - if there's a large group of people asking for for Feature X, then that's probably something that would make them money. Thankfully, Riot doesn't base its design decisions around "how much money will this make us," despite what a lot of you self-styled business analysts seem to believe.

On topic, while I agree that I would love new maps (I haven't given up on Magma Chamber yet!) and I find Morello's response from the megathread to be disheartening, I really don't think your real-world sports analogy is going to hold much water were a red to come along and post in this thread. It's just too far-removed from the actual subject matter, even though they're both technically "competitive sports." If you want to make your point a little more solidly, I recommend taking a look at other competitively-played computer and video games with multiple maps/metas - Starcraft 2 comes to mind immediately as a major e-sport with way more than one map involved.

EDIT: Either I'm an idiot, or Xypherous posted 11 times in this thread while I was writing mine. -_-

So where did they go? Why can't we still play on them?

I kinda have to agree with Morello. League's balance is entirely around 5v5. Nerfs, buffs, new content, reworks -- most of these are for the sake of improving or stabilizing summoner's rift. When certain champs excel in TT, ARAM, or Dominion and utterly suck in SR(champs like Poppy and Shaco) or vica versa, you get to see a growing trend: there's only room for one.

And see, that's a problem. A rather big one, in my opinion. One of HoN's selling points is the fact that it had... 5-6 maps. All perfectly balanced for any champ, any team, anytime. Sure, it comes with the territory of the popular flaws from dota people love to bring up(CC too long, hypercarries, etc.), but League has flaws too. And one of them is that many, MANY features are dropped for the sake of "true balance".

The game is digging itself into a hole, really. The meta works too well. Only one map is viable. Roughly a 3rd or 4th of champs available just can't be realistically used in 5v5. And as much as I want to think that new maps would magically make this game better.... they won't. It just doesn't work that way. I'm sorry folks, but if you don't think a new map would be a nightmare to "perfectly" balance then you don't know this game very well. And yeah, I suppose Riot could get by slipping something new under the table, but it'll only be as good as Dominion/ARAM/TT: an alternative to SR, but certainly not a replacement; nothing you could take a tournament.

In closing, we need to kill off this stupid-ass solo top, jungle, mage mid, adc/support bot meta before we can think of new content.