I love the idea of alters, Riot. I just don't like the way they're implemented.

If a team manages to aquire both alters, that team has a massive advantage; 10% AD and AP and 4 bonus gold on a kill. This lets them clear minion waves and jungles faster, and therefore earn more gold, much faster.

The advantaged team gets items faster, and can afford to take a risk in defending both alters, since they deal more damage and have more of whatever they're buying than the other team.

Because of this, most of my TT games are deciced within the first 10 minutes.

So, I have a few ideas of solutions to try to remedy this.

Solution 1 - Make the 4 gold per kill a map-wide buff, like in Dominion.
I like the '4 gold per kill' thing. Makes jungling more worth-while, and laning much more lucrative. And I think everyone should have it, at all times. It'll still make games go faster, but the fight would be fairer.

Solution 2 - Make alters temporary.
Alters returning to neutral after 90 seconds would, I theorize, do several things.
1. Alters would be fought over more fiercely, taking attention away from the lanes and turning most of the action into a hectic fight inside the jungle. This may give 'laner' champions a chance to exploit this and collect some sweet minion kills, and possibly push a turret uninhibited.
2. Because they don't last forever, any one team can't theoretically have a permanent advantage over the other team. In addition to directing the action towards the jungle, it'll break up the lane pushing a bit - teams may prefer to wait until they have a strength boost to push. (...This may or may not be a good thing.)

Solution 3 - Remove the AD/AP boost from Alters.
If you haven't noticed, capturing an alter gives you gold and XP. This would lessen their importance somewhat, but if all Alters gave was a gold and XP boost, it would make losing one less on a huge issue.

You could mix and match these however you want, and if anybody else has some interesting ideas of how to change Alters for the better, I'm all ears.

I don't want to see Alters go - as I said at the start, I like them. They're there to make the game go faster and to mix up the 'lane/push/jungle ambush' playstyle. But the way it makes the game go faster - giving one team a potential massive adavantage - ruins the fun of the game for the other team.

I kinda agree, the main thing I do in ranked is pick three high damage champs quickly grab both altars and just push bot. It pretty much ends the game if we get the turret which, (since I usually play GP) we almost always do. Generally a Darius, GP, and Diana will mean game over. Once both altars have been taken and level 6 is hit by the winning team, the endless cycle of loss begins.

I strongly agree. I think they should try some options like these out on the beta and see what the people think. I would love having them neutralize instead of just unlocking, like you said. I am also all for making the game faster by giving everyone gold per kill or even passive xp.

bump

There are some changes coming in 1.71 that will reduce the impact of early altar gold swing (which is the biggest factor in the snowballiness) and push back their unlock time. The actual AD/AP boost isn't very strong early, and late game is much more beneficial to players that go heavy on bonus AD/AP (casters, ADC generally).

Great, thanks for that RiotNome. Looking forward to the changes.

I beg the differ. Most players already stack early game damage. The 10% make a big difference. for example:

start boots dorans blade
15 ad from runes
3 + 1.5% damage from masteries

Specific heros with high base damage, wukong sion olaf ect, can always out duel with this build. They have over 100 ad lvl 1 without both altars, that would have been over 110 with the buff. Characters with high base AD just use this build and they can get 10-15 flat attack damage early levels from the 10% increased ad from having both altars, and this only increases over time.
Its already hard to duel early levels not using the flat ad rune builds, ie 15 ad 13 armor 12 mr, but adding the extra 10-15 from the altar makes it impossible.

I proposed switching the Vilemaw buff with the two altar buff in a previous post. This solution would give that extra boost from having both altars but make dueling and outplaying still possible. It would also make killing the Vilemaw, which is the best addition to the new map, much more rewarding and beneficial to the team.

please consider it nome, also bring back old TT you rascally dog