Riot responds as League players expose major flaw with Red Minion damage

LoL players will be well accustomed to seeing minions perched on top of a cannon running down the lanes, defending their respective teams’ towers, and dealing damage to opponents in hopes of helping the Champions secure victory on Summoner’s Rift.

After 11 years, it’s hard to imagine that these Minions have had a monumental flaw since their introduction in the game’s alpha, but some investigative work by both League fans and Riot developers has revealed that players on the blue side of the map have had a distinct disadvantage this whole time, thanks to a simple setting involving the Cannon Minions.

Riot Games

Siege Minions can often be seen trundling down the lanes of Summoner’s Rift.

In a post on the League of Legends subreddit on July 27, user Caenen_ revealed that while searching through the game’s files for research, he discovered a difference in the code between the red and blue Cannon Minions.

Unsurprisingly shocked by his discovery, Caenen_ included the proof taken straight from the game’s code, which shows the blue Minions having a range of 300, while the red team’s Cannons only have a range of 280.

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After discovering this fact, the user went back through every build that they were able to get their hands on to see just how long this has been an issue, discovering that it has been in the game all the way since Alpha, which lasted from February to April 2009.

Reddit: /u/Caenen

A GIF showing the differences between the Red and Blue Siege Minions range.

The good news for fans is that the game’s developers are already on the case, with RiotPhlox commenting to say that they had discovered the same thing just last week, and had spent hours double and triple-checking to make sure those values actually controlled the range of the characters.

“Anyways, the very fabric of League of Legends is probably going to break,” they joked in the comments, “And Minions will never be the same after this.”

The fix has now been sent to the 10.16 PBE for testing and should launch with the full patch, which includes a role swap for Evelynn and nerfs for Sett.

Of course, over the years there’s always been discussions about how the blue team would generally win in a match where no player-controlled Legends took part, and over the course of the game, the blue team has had a higher overall win rate.

Whether this is because of the Minion ranges is hard to tell, but at least the playing field will be truly even when teams jump onto Summoner’s Rift in 10.16.