Riot seems aware that classical Pro strategies, like lane swaps could come back

Craig Robinson, Senior Editor

Last Updated: 31/07/2026

Riot Games recently released Classic League of Legends to the world. The era gone brought many players back, both new and old, to try the mode and experience a version of the game that roughly resembles what they may have grown up playing.

Alas, along with the nostalgia, a reality hit of how the old game is. Things like towers fall over extremely quickly, snowballing is back, and other strategies that simply are neutered down in the modern game.

It gave us an idea. What if old strategies, ones that Fnatic and the EU LCS mastered in 2015 with lane swapping, are to make a return? Back in the days where Koreans had to adapt to us, teams used these tactics to dominate lanes for favourable CS advantages, smash towers down with little resistance, and watch their gold leads blow up for hyper-scalers. Here’s a classic clip for reference:

Riot admits Lane Swaps could come back, along with other old school strategies

We were able to ask Riot representatives during a hands-on session with League Classic recently. We posed the question:

“Are there any balance concerns that old, pro strategies may come back? Like lane swaps with towers having drastically lower defensiveness than live, top and jungle co-farming, etc.” – Me

With it being a Riot press event, they chose to answer that, providing an opinion of the mode philosophy and a more practical response to it. Honestly, I’m impressed they were anticipating a degenerate like me to remember such events and ask about them.

The opinion side of the response is that the employee loves the idea. During the briefing, the presentation revealed the idea of bringing back old philosophies; old fun, old one-shots, old snowballing, and old outplays. Players remember the old times for these crazy builds; strategies, and other random things that come from the era.

But, how could lane swaps work in Classic? Well, given that towers are extremely fragile, predating tower defensive buffs; tower platings, and the tower defensive items you find in its item slot bar these days. Instead, towers are extremely prone to crumbling over coordinated map movement, wave management, and other tactics.

If a coordinated team can perform a Frankenstein classical version of a lane swap, then it’s something that could indeed work. And that employee is totally fine with it. So, it seems like if you want to employ those types of strats on Season 3-like towers, go right ahead.

The second part of the answer is something more practical. The global dev and balance team also likes the idea of classic stuff remaining in the game. That said, they don’t want things to get “too out of hand,” as the rep put it. They also went on to say, “We want to make sure Classic stays fun for you, and fun for your opponent.” Dedicated people, such as David “Phreak” Turley, are going to be part of the balance team, and they’ll be looking at that aspect on a regular basis.

The idea is not to keep the game perfectly balanced, but to let players try things—without letting things go too far. That’s essentially the balance philosophy behind anything that becomes too game-warping and unfun for everything related to Classic.

The odds of it happening seem fairly low, though

Could that mean degenerate strategies could impact LoL Classic? Potentially. There’s Go4LoLs coming up in August, where prizes are to be won every weekend. If we do see something like this be viable and abusable, it will likely happen in coordinated games.

But, given that LoL Classic is largely a pug fest, with a soft ranked title associated with your classic 5v5 PvP mode normal queue, odds are it stays more silly than serious. I wouldn’t count on lane swaps coming back and destroying queues for games. But the potential is there.

It would certainly be interesting to see how Classic manages these extreme cases, which did affect balancing through the years, without turning Classic into a more “retail-like” version of Classic. I guess, that where you, the player, and the tribunal voting system will likely step in over the coming weeks and months if we do get to that point.

Craig Robinson, Senior Editor

Craig began his career with Esports News UK back in 2015/2016, looking to write about a passion while studying at Manchester Metropolitan University. He stayed there for several years before moving on to other websites to begin his career after graduating. Now he's back, covering esports adjacent topics and UK stories.

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