/dev: Introducing Swiftplay

Starting in patch 25.S1.1 (formerly patch 15.1) we’ll be introducing a new queue to League of Legends: Swiftplay.

What is Swiftplay?

Swiftplay will be a faster way to experience authentic Summoner’s Rift gameplay that’s focused on letting all 10 players experience their champion’s fantasy within a game of League with the same skill tests, but doesn’t punish early game disadvantages nearly as hard. This means making sure everyone gets a chance for their champions to lane, teamfight, scale and test their champion’s limits. Things like farming, snowballing, and objectives are still important, but these aspects alone won’t make or break your ability to contribute to your team’s success.

That isn’t to say that Swiftplay won’t be competitive–after all, it’s still a heads-up PvP experience with a winning team and a losing team–but we’re aiming to shift the emphasis from dominating your individual opponent and much more on developing your own champion. For those that have played our other games, you can think of this new queue as a Hyper Roll from TFT or Swiftplay from Valorant in that it will be a lower stakes way to experience the game.

Our goal with creating this new queue is to create a more accessible experience for players that are looking for a bit more of the traditional League experience than ARAM with a slightly less (but not zero) competitive mindset – players who want to play with friends, players who just want to chill in the evening after work, players who are just learning (or relearning) the ropes, and so on. Modes are great for some of these players, but for others, the action-strategy mix of Summoner's Rift is the main attraction.

What’s Changing?

One of our primary goals in creating Swiftplay is to preserve the traditional Summoner’s Rift game flow (laning, teamfighting, contesting objectives, etc). The general approach we’ve taken is to change rules in relatively small but impactful ways, tuning them far enough to have an impact without invalidating the overall structure of Summoner’s Rift.

• Almost all sources of gold and experience give out increasingly more rewards as the game progresses. The beginning of the lane phase will have minimal changes, but things will accelerate pretty significantly from there.

• Players who have fallen way behind the curve will get more gold and experience from most sources, depending how far behind they’ve fallen. This won’t be enough to slingshot them into the lead (unless they make some great plays, of course), but it should mean they’re never out of the game.

• Players who are getting crushed will be worth much less gold. Farming the worst player on the enemy team on repeat will be a much less effective way to build a lead – if you’re behind, you’re a lot less of a liability for your team and should have chances to come back later. On the other hand, just dominating a single opponent through lane phase won’t be as rewarding in this queue.

• Most timing elements of the map have been accelerated. Turret Plating falls earlier, Baron spawns earlier, it only takes 3 Elemental Drakes to claim a Soul, Support and Jungle quest items complete sooner, and so on.

• All champions near a dying enemy minion get some gold. The last hitter still gets full value, while everyone else gets a fraction of that. Think how ARAM minions work.

• Supports get considerably more gold in Swiftplay than in traditional SR, so the price of their items have been increased with the added bonus of significantly more stats for each item so that they don’t cap out on items way sooner than everyone else.

Exact numbers are still being fine tuned, and will continue to change as the queue rolls out on PBE and potentially right up to launch and even after. There are definitely going to be rough edges to Swiftplay when it goes live, but as we see what you all like we’ll be looking at your feedback and how games play out to iterate on and improve the mode over time which will also inform other decisions like how we balance this queue.

A last note is that we’re looking to make some small improvements to the get-in-game flow that Quickplay uses today which will be shared by Swiftplay. When Swiftplay launches, you’ll be able to select the same champion for both roles if the champion doesn’t have a massive pickrate in the queue (most likely for new champion releases / updates), since we do want to find you a match swiftly.

What does this mean for other queues?

For an initial trial beginning in 25.S1.1, we’re planning to replace Quickplay with Swiftplay in order to help maintain queue health (after all, no one likes to be stuck in a queue for a long time). So if you’ve been a Quickplay aficionado we’re hoping you’ll find a place in either normal SR draft or in Swiftplay.

We want to be clear that Swiftplay doesn’t reflect a change in our approach to traditional Summoner’s Rift. Our core rules have served League and our players well for many years, and we’re not making any changes to them. If you love Solo Queue right now, well, nothing is changing for you – we hope you’ll continue to queue up for traditional SR, and we’re not trying to get you to switch.

All regions will continue to have access to an unranked queue with the traditional ruleset for SR. When it goes live in 25.S1.1, Swiftplay will replace Quickplay in regions that already have another always-on unranked Summoner’s Rift queue:

• North America

• Latin America North

• Latin America South

• EU West

• EU Nordic & East

• Russia

• Brazil

• Turkey

• Taiwan

• Vietnam

Other regions will come later if we see the queue doing well in the initial regions above. We’ll be watching how you choose to engage with Swiftplay and looking closely at your feedback to determine if it’s something that has long-term potential!

That’s all we have on Swiftplay for now, but it’ll be hitting PBE when patch 25.S1.1 does on December 11, 2024 and LIVE when we kick off the new year. We’re looking forward to getting this new queue out to all of you and seeing your feedback, but until then we’ll see you on the Rift (and after that hopefully in a Swift)!