League of Legends: a look at all the problems of the jungle
By Josh Tyler
1. Players feel they lack individual agency/control of their lane if they are playing against an aggressive jungler
Skillcapped noted that this became a problem back in Season 1 when junglers had access to gold/10 items that basically allowed them to perma-gank lanes without falling behind in gold. Unfortunately, this continued in later seasons when junglers feel unleashed to spend a lot of time ganking lanes without risk of falling behind.
This has become a problem in Season 9, with the early Scuttle Crab duels and level two ganks being incredibly prevalent. The dominance of the oppressive early game junglers made laners feel that their lane match-up is being overly determined by their jungler rather than their individual skill.
2. Players don’t have linear control over the game from start to finish
Going hand-in-hand with point one, right now there is a discrepancy in the power dynamic perception among laners. Laners feel that getting ahead early is determined by the jungler, while junglers feel like their advantage is handed off to the laners who take their gank pressure into the match-up.
For instance, after a gank, the dying top laner feels bad that he has fallen behind because the enemy jungler ganked. However, that ganking jungler also feels that his advantage is not within his control, but instead, he has put that advantage into the hands of his own top laner who could easily throw away that advantage even absent jungle pressure. Both sides feel the other controls their fate.
3. High farm strategies are not viable due to long spawn timers
When highlighting the perceived “Golden Age” of the jungle – Season 3 – Skillcapped notes that, although heavy gank junglers were still quite strong, hyper-farming strategies were also prevalent because there were high experience and gold values on camps, which had low spawn timers. In particular, the video notes that in Season 3 camps would respawn every 50 seconds, whereas now they respawn every 150 seconds.