“We’ll be introducing several new defensive items in the 5.16 patch and the existence of these high-powered items create a world where any new item has to be almost equally high-powered to compete,” Riot Games explained. “This necessitates a rebalancing of power across the board such that it can be acceptable of new items being introduced.”
And while that patch may go by without much controversy, not so for a recent dev blog in which Riot soundly rejected player requests for a sandbox test mode in League of Legends, saying that the community should be playing the game and not “grinding” in sandbox mode to learn it.
The reaction from said community has been swift and harsh. “[Sandbox mode] raises the barrier to entry? If anything it lowers it drastically,” one Redditor posted. “The lack of a training or sandbox mode of some kind has been a huge failure for LoL, and a positive point for the competition,” posted another.
