In your opinion, then, do you think the bottom lane needs more/less bush cover?

As far as objective control, do you think that Red buff should be more powerful (since it's the only buff on the bottom half of the map) to make it more "appealing" and strategic? As far as now goes, it can be taken fairly easily at level 4 and even sooner with help.. and it goes largely unnoticed except for early on in the game.

Design-wise, I question the existence of red buff at all. If there is a single team resource, it should spawn quite a bit later to allow both teams ample time to determine superiority. Having an important resource be contestable at level 1 actually removes gameplay due to how it negatively affects champion viability.

Because level 1 team fights rule!

No offense but this isnt HoN, This is LoL and Red better stay right where its at in TT. Thank you and have a nice day!

Note that I said a single contestable resource. Important early game resources work well when there's duality, like on SR. On TT, the important of early red (and early dragon) work against champion viability.

And where exactly is this information coming from regarding Champion Viability? Is this hard statistics or is this personal opinion regarding early red (early dragon)? I'm not trying to troll, just interested in where you came to this conclusion from regarding this specific aspect of TT.

It's a bit of both. We've done some internal experimentation with various setups and how they affect player behavior at the start. It's a pretty straightforward conclusion to come to, especially when you take Dominion and SR into account.

People that jungle need to be effective at getting both asap, and those that cannot arent better picks as such. Hence viability.

Thank you for taking the time to talk about it and go into a little bit of detail. It is appreciated and it should be interesting to see what you guys come up with regarding TT and Dominion. I apologize for my earlier statement about HoN. I just had really bad experiences with the Dev's and some of the things they said and how they treated players on the forums.

Understandable Hopefully you'll feel better about it as we proceed. To explicate further on the original issue of brush, whenever you have a single objective that spawns early (especially a brush position), early game devolves into a race to see which team can reach that point first. Whether or not there's extrinsic value (such as control of a buff, or even gold) to that objective is separate from the conversation, because the intrinsic value of the objective (the ability to control another objective, or the superior positioning obtained by sitting in the brush) adds unwanted gameplay by creating that initial rush. Players don't have the time to buy their items, it heavily punishes players who connect to the game a bit late, and worst of all, it means that if you are unable to reach the objective fast enough, you're probably going to feed.