The new bounty system has been live in League of Legends for a couple of months now, and players are still pretty upset about one specific part of it. If you farm well enough, even if you’re super behind your enemy, a bounty can be placed on your head, and that makes it much harder to mount a comeback.
Fortunately, Riot knows this, and a fix is on the way, according to a post on the official game forums today. The balance team will be pushing refinements to the system to stop you from getting a CS-based bounty while behind, as explained in a tweet from lead designer Andrei “Meddler” van Roon.
Riot’s goal behind the new bounty system was to offer the behind team more opportunities to climb back into a game, so the fact that bounties get applied to anyone due to farm, regardless of who’s in the lead, directly contradicts that goal.
In some cases, Riot says that the system works fine, but more often than not, players are getting punished for evening out a game. That doesn’t feel great if you’re the team playing from behind, as you’re essentially being punished for doing what you can to win.
Unfortunately, Riot didn’t provide any specifics to the changes on the way. Instead, the forum post vaguely stated that some behind-the-scenes changes to bounty calculations would be pushed to prevent the problem. On the bright side, the post did give a timeline, and if all goes according to plan, it will be live very soon.
Patch 9.3 is the target for shipping these behind-the-scenes changes, which means we would only have to wait about a week for a better bounty experience.
