There probably won’t be a dedicated Control Ward slot anytime soon

In Thursday’s edition of Ask Riot, senior designer of game systems, Riot Fearless, answered a question that’s been on a lot of players’ minds over the last year or so: will Control Wards get their own item slot?

At first pass this question may not seem like much, after all it’s just one item slot. But when players get to the endgame, and pressure mounts between building a sixth item as a support, and keeping your team’s vision in check, this question starts to make a whole lot of sense.

It turns out, according to Fearless, that the answer to this question is both very simple and extremely complicated. So, let’s tackle the simple part first — Riot wants meaningful decisions to be made as a part of League of Legends’ late game. One of those decisions is whether a player finishes off their build with another item, or leaves the spot open for control wards. In other words, the system is working exactly the way it should be right now, even though it’s frustrating it’s an important part of the design of the vision system.

Speaking of the vision system, Fearless’s more complicated answer gets down to the idea of how vision works in League as a mechanic. As it turns out, Riot isn’t very happy with the fact that vision is currently tied so closely to the item system. As Fearless puts it, “It requires significant amounts of gold, and for most players, it gets strongly position bound.”

He goes on to put a fine point on the issue and let everyone know that something new might be in store for the vision system in the future, “I’d personally be much more excited to start fixing the fundamental problems of the visions system rather than making small improvements to what we have.”