League of Legends: a look at all the problems of the jungle

6. Red side imbalance and vertical jungling

Because Scuttle Crab became such an important early game objective and two crabs spawned early in the game, a jungle meta began to evolve around them. Junglers would take the Scuttle Crab on their strong side (the side where laners would have a pushing advantage) and basically be able to invade and counter-jungle the enemy at will with their lead.

Compounding on this fact, junglers realized that the two best camps in terms of experience (outside of Scuttle) were located in the red side of the jungle (Raptors and Krugs). Because of how rubberband experience worked, junglers began to do something called “vertical jungling” where they would (usually) start on their own red side, clearing their camps and the Scuttle Crab before invading the enemy’s blue side.

Because they would have a massive experience advantage, the other jungler would basically be unable to fight them unless they had done the same starting path and transitioned to their own blue side. Instead, most junglers opted to “split” the map and just farm the half of the jungle where their red buff was located.

This meant that the laners on that side of the map would have to play conservatively because they knew their jungler wasn’t going to be on their side of the map for a long time. Already feeling pressure from the early game gankers, the pressure began to ramp up as laners on opposite halves of the map knew they were vulnerable with no chance of help.

Riot did move the Scuttle Crab’s spawn timers back a bit in Season 9, which offset some of these issues, but vertical jungling is still quite strong. Giving junglers incentives to essentially concede one of their laners to the enemy jungler because of experience imbalance feels quite unfair to all parties involved.

Stay tuned for our next article, where I discuss some possible solutions to fixing these issues!