The updated bounty system will also take minions and monsters killed into account

The bounty system in League of Legends is one of the game’s primary comeback mechanics.

The basic premise goes something like this: if one player is ahead, that makes them harder to kill because they have more gold, but if they die the enemy player gets more gold for killing them. Up until now, these bounties were just earned by players who got several kills in a row. The more kills you got, the higher your bounty. But, as a part of this year’s preseason — according to an announcement made in the game client — Riot is shifting the way bounties are earned by including minions killed in the bounties as well.

This means that players who have farmed a lot, but not gotten many kills will also be worth while targets for a team to hit in their quest to get back into a game.

Now, according to Riot, the math behind this change is a little complicated, because they don’t want minion kills to be the exclusive way that bounties are collected — after all, a lot more minions die in a game than champions. So, in games that are fairly close in farm, champion kills will still reward nearly 100 percent of bounties and minions killed will barely count toward the bounty on a player’s head. But, in games where there’s a massive farm discrepancy, when one team has killed way more minions than the other, minions killed will start to count for more and more of a player’s bounty, up to around 30 percent.

Ideally, this change should end up being almost invisible to most players. Rather than a huge shift in how games work, it should just mean that teams that are behind and actively working on coming back by playing intelligently and picking up kills where they can, are going to have an easier time getting back into games and making things close again. As for how the actual numbers will turn out, we’ll have to wait until the preseason patch is released to know for sure.