Changes to bounty gold distribution are coming

In his Quick Gameplay Thoughts post for March 21, Andrei “Meddler” van Roon announced that shutdown gold should be shifting soon. The gameplay team originally shifted shutdown gold away from an individual and over to a team in order to help the poorer roles (jungle and support specifically). Since these two roles no longer need the help, there are problems with the current system.

Right now, a snowballing team is just that: an entire team of people that can kill you with no problem. This can really hurt your ability to get back in the game once you’re out. So the balance team is going to start shifting snowball gold back to individuals. This is bad news if you’re playing against an Akali or Katarina, but it does mean that you’ll only have one fed enemy to deal with, not five.

Not only will it make playing well feel like it directly benefits you, it’ll make that lucky kill on a fed member that much more useful to you personally. This change should bring some agency back into League and create less of an all or nothing type of snowballing. Once these changes go through, the team will continue to monitor global gold versus solo gold to help determine if this should be a wider change around League.