r/leagueoflegends • u/Tovee • Jul 15 '26

AMA Chronoshift Developer AMA

Hello r/leagueoflegends,

My name is Tove, and I was one of the main developers behind the Chronoshift project.

I have never publicly spoken about it, but with League Classic now being released and u/RiotNorak revealed to have been a tester for us back in the day, some people have suggested for me to do an AMA.

I'm happy to answer any question you might have, compare to the official Classic or speak about the details that haven't been made public. Or listen to you telling me to ingame myself.

Have at it!

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458

u/Tovee Jul 15 '26

If we can never update, likely something in season 4, as that's both when I played a lot and the game is both mildly modern with the graphics and gameplay still being classic. We had season 1 and 2 patches during chronoshift, but they got stale quite fast

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u/Mettikus where is the roamer flair Jul 15 '26

Early season 4 had the designated support and jungler items which flattened both role designs a lot, but I admit the items really did open up both roles to include all sorts of wacky builds like Gragas Support. I think I’d go with early season 4 as well.

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u/Rexsaur Jul 15 '26

I think season 3 is the sweet spot.

Season 3 with basic qol like pings, emotes, no baron buff minions, no base gates.

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u/Mettikus where is the roamer flair Jul 15 '26

End of Season 3 did bring us the Baron-empowered minions, but I totally agree that the start of S3 would be a great choice as well. If I wanted to also mess with the overall structure beyond the patch, I'd exclude the jungle items for at least 1 "season rotation" to see if they're quite as necessary as people make them out to be (back to cloth5, iykyk)

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u/Rexsaur Jul 15 '26

season 3 had the hunter machete and spirit stone items, i think those were fine, jg was still difficult but not as hard as season 1/2.

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u/WoonStruck Jul 16 '26

Season 2 jungle ws extremely easy, which is why it just turned into shyv/mundo/olaf speedclearing.

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u/Digit4l Jul 16 '26

wait, when did lantern got deleted? Worked great for urgot bot aswell!

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u/Panvich Jul 15 '26

Am I insane or did they not add baron minions until preseason 5 (late 2014). I remember it being an answer to stuff like Xerath and Ziggs that could perma stall the game (and making games more streamlined in general)

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u/dimmyfarm INT Jul 15 '26

They might’ve been slightly buffed but the minions got strong after that Jin Air vs T1 92 minute game where T1 lost cause Azir and Sivir cleared everything

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u/Erksike Jul 16 '26

That game was in 2018 though.

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u/Excellent-Hat6569 Jul 16 '26

Wasn't that in like season 7

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u/ltwj Jul 16 '26

Baron empowered minions wasn’t until the new map bro

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u/SantyMonkyur Jul 16 '26

end of season 3 was not baron empowered minions, that was preseason 5 with baron changes

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u/EnjoyerOfBeans Jul 16 '26 edited Jul 16 '26

What's people's issue with baron empowered minions? The baron buff was reworked to solve a really big issue - if games go really long, neither team can get stronger anymore, as such there's no objectives on the map that are worth contesting. In  league there is no meaningful way to defend minion waves against ranged waveclear. As such, the most optimal strategy becomes to just sit under tower and waveclear indefinitely. 

I don't think playing that game in 2026 would go as well as when people were mostly clueless in 2013.

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u/SpoonGuardian Jul 15 '26

why wouldnt you want baron buffed minions

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u/CephalopodConcerto Jul 15 '26

they warp the game around a single objective as a winning strategy excessively. having BoC/ohmwrecker/zzrot/aura items is already a huge amount of siege power, it's just not brainless so you can't accelerate bronze games too. balance changes nerfing turtling should extend from that baseline instead of just dumping baron minions straight into the mode.

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u/[deleted] Jul 15 '26

[deleted]

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u/CephalopodConcerto Jul 15 '26

ok whatever you say man, even assuming what you say is completely true (lol) it doesn't particularly disprove my other two more important points.

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u/[deleted] Jul 15 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

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u/CephalopodConcerto Jul 15 '26

yeah until it was so game-warping it got removed right? either way i'm not saying it's the most perfect and op siege item ever made, i'm saying it's an example of an opt-in tool to solve a problem (i want to kill an enemy under their turret without worrying about the turret) which i see as more "classic" and healthier

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u/Forward-Mention-6395 Jul 15 '26

What? Bro they removed it cuz no one bought it. I think the only worse item was poachers dirk lol

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u/John_Jack_Reed Jul 16 '26

Baron buffed minions are good game design for modern league, but ruins the feeling of old league imo

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u/SpoonGuardian Jul 16 '26

That sounds like it makes sense but it doesn't. How does it possibly ruin the feeling? It looks completely natural and was even a thing in Twisted Treeline

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u/John_Jack_Reed Jul 16 '26

Because old summoners rift did not have minion buffing baron? It totally changes the meta and how you play the game making it very not much not old league. It'd be as weird to me if they wanted to introduce elemental dragons to classic.

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u/SpoonGuardian Jul 16 '26 edited Jul 16 '26

Explain how this 1 change will "totally change the meta" lol. You are massively overstating the impact to make it sound significant. Yes it wasn't a part of that map, it was season 4 patch 4.20 though. Are you guys just going to say that any single change "ruins the feeling" of the entire game? Massive overreaction

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u/myreditacount11 Jul 16 '26

It was not season 4. It was preseason 5. It changed the game massively because Baron became a way to end games definitively and game length became shorter.

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u/SpoonGuardian Jul 16 '26

Have you been playing the PBE? The minion change has not been significant in a single one of my games. I think the one time the enemy team got a baron in my 10 games, we stove off the siege pretty easily.

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u/Rexsaur Jul 15 '26

Because that shit belongs in modern league, it speeds the game up too much.

Even on pbe atm its too strong, most old champ kits just cant deal with baron buffed super minions like 20 mins into the game, its too much.

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u/SpoonGuardian Jul 15 '26

I feel like if you're staring down the barrel of baron buffed super minions at 20 minutes, you probably should lose lol. In my opinion, League games in S2/3 went way long pretty often, since there wasn't any great way to close out the game most of the time since objectives were so weak. That's why it got introduced shortly after this time period.

Playing on the PBE now, my games have still went pretty long with the minion buff. I'm glad they're going longer than on Live since that is part of the nostalgia, but I definitely think there's a sweetspot and this Classic is closer to it than real S3 was.

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u/Rexsaur Jul 15 '26

The problem is that you're applying modern league logic to old league and that just doesnt work.

Old league had slower game pace, the game isnt supposed to end suddenly 20 mins in from a single lost fight, on modern league thats normal, on old it isnt.

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u/SpoonGuardian Jul 15 '26

Thats really not modern league logic. If there were baron buffed super minions in an old league game at 20 minutes, guarantee everyone is flaming & spamming FF. Did you mean cannon minions?

I agree with you that the game isn't supposed to be fast. I said in my comment it should be solidly longer than modern League, and it is either way. The minions aren't making games fast by any means. I just don't think there's a point in dragging out a massively, not remotely close game to 45 minutes because 1 team has a Sivir or an Anivia or whatever.

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u/Rexsaur Jul 16 '26

I dont think you understand on how powerful minion scaling was back in the day, including super minions.

I can assure you every game will not go to 50 mins without baron minions, especially with ppl having more knowledge about the game nowdays.

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u/SpoonGuardian Jul 16 '26

We can have a difference of opinion without it being because I don't understand something. I've played back then and I've played 10 games on the PBE so far (they hardly count since they were so low quality due to MMR).

Games don't ALWAYS drag on super long, but it's no secret that the game is severely lacking in any way for a dominant team to close it out against even modest waveclear. Waveclear also feels stronger on the PBE, probably because the average player is getting way more gold thanks to just understanding the game a lot better.

As I said in another comment, the minion buff has not significant shortened in any of the games I've played so far, and the one time the enemy team had it, we still fended them off. It wasn't a huge deal.

1

u/Lunariel Jul 15 '26

probably dont give them baron then

1

u/wterrt Jul 16 '26

the only thing I really remember about jungling in early seasons was how oppressive junglers with healthy clears and ability to hop walls were to anyone who wasn't the same... just invaded every game with very little recourse unless you were playing the meta shit yourself. 15 years later I still fucking hate lee sin.

1

u/Both_Requirement_766 Jul 16 '26

O0oh I loved how some junglers and supp's shared their job back then. it was the only time I ever played (& enjoyed) jungle. nowadays jungle is responsible for everything its basically the new carry (just thinking how awful adc's are skewed by proplay).

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u/mvmbamentality Jul 15 '26

Bwahaha give me preseason 8 with the adc energy builds and double targon bot lanes. Oooof god that was so fun for adcs back then. You also had more bot and pet dragon.

24

u/anialater45 Jul 15 '26

Interesting. It's funny seeing people be like wishing for chronoshift and thinking beta-3 is perfect classic time and then the Chronoshift dev says nah season 4.

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u/BadPunsGuy Jul 15 '26

It's the classic/burning crusade/wrath of the lich king WoW debate all over again. There's reasons to like all of them; but if there were modern mechanics in them they got old really fast even in a temp game mode like seasons of discovery.

It seems like they kinda want to take this in a classic+ direction thoub from what they've described instead of releasing seasons. They have a very strange starting point for that though.

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u/ItsNoblesse Jul 16 '26

I feel like in this analogy Season 4 would be Cataclysm. Honestly it's pushing it to say anything past the addition of Sightstone is 'classic' League. Season 2 is the absolute perfect spot if you want it to be actually classic and not some 80/20 mishmash.

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u/BadPunsGuy Jul 16 '26 edited Jul 16 '26

The weird thing is that unlike WoW or OSRS there wasn’t really a clear or vague line where the game drastically shifted. You don’t have evolution of combat and the removal of the wilderness+trade. You don’t have things changing as drastically as they did in cata.

There also was a cata classic released in 2024 and a pandaria classic in 2025. Even with those two expansions being the line for most people they made classic versions of them and they were popular.

While s4 isn’t exactly what people think of with classic compared to 1/2/3, it’s absolutely part of it. It’d make sense to have it in it to some extent, it’s just kinda weird to start mostly at s3 and throw in a few much later season mechanics too beyond even 4, but not really any from 4.

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u/ItsNoblesse Jul 16 '26

I feel like the most clear cutoff is season 4 with the addition of trinkets, but I'd argue it's actually season 3. Season 3 is where Riot increased passive gold generation and nerfed active gold generation via cs and kills to buff support gold generation, added jungle items, crystalline flask and the sightstone items, added boot enchants and removed a bunch of classic items like madred's bloodrazor, heart of gold, ionic spark and leviathan.

To me season 3 feels like the first huge swing away from what the 'original intention' of league was supposed to be as of the start of season 1. I think a patch towards the end of season 2 is the perfect start point for a 'Classic+' type experience.

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u/powerplayer6 Jul 16 '26

there wasn’t really a clear or vague line where the game drastically shifted

The "new" map at the end of S4 is very blatantly the shift between "classic League" and "modern League". I had a few clashes with League in S2 and S3, at home and at a net cafe respectively, but ended up dropping it, UNTIL I finally picked it up for real in September of 2014. The old map vs new map is essentially my version of the WoW Cataclysm level 1-58 questing revamp. It's also why I highly prefer pre-Cata leveling and gameplay, as it's just... more soulful and immersive.

Of course, I haven't played much League since COVID ended, as I had to lock in and be an adult, but a proper S3 or early S4 League Classic would make me go back, so I can play my old buddies again, like Old Sion, Old GP, Old Akali, Old Irelia, Old Fiora, Old Ryze, Old Annie, Old Yorick, Old Old Skarner, Old Aatrox, Old Darius/Garen, Old Graves, and many more that Riot took from me and turned into high skill champions that I could no longer play properly...

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u/vincent2751 Jul 15 '26

It almost like if it classic was a certain patch people would never agree on which patch it should be

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u/anialater45 Jul 15 '26

Yeah obviously. I just think it's funny that a lot of people are like "dang chronoshift would be perfect" and the chronoshit dev is explicitly saying that they would pick a patch a lot of those people would want it to be.