Ever have a match in League of Legends and just know something that is wrong? For players on the red side, it turns out they were right. Since League of Legends’ launch more than 11 years ago, Siege Minions (the big guys with the cannons) on the blue side have enjoyed a slight advantage over red side Siege Minions. Red Siege Minions have 20 fewer units of attack range than their blue counterparts. Developer Riot Games is already on the case, with a fix up on the Public Beta Environment (PBE) setting both units attack range to 300.
A small value difference in the red Minion’s attack range was discovered by Reddit user Caenen_ while they were digging through some League of Legends game files. After asking a friend for help, Caenen_ realized that blue Siege Minions have an attack range of 300 units while red Minions are set at 280 units. League of Legends uses the fairly vague term “unit” to define how far an attack travels. A unit of this type is the same length as what Riot Games uses to track character movement.
Once Caenen_ discovered the discrepancy between the two minions, they double-checked the values against older builds of the game. Turns out this error in the two Siege Minions dates all the way back to some of the earliest Alpha builds of League of Legends from 2009. Caenen_ was then able to confirm the difference by throwing Siege Minions different distances with Syndra’s W ability. After throwing both types of Minions the same distance, the red Siege Minion had to move ever so slightly to attack.
Coincidentally, Riot Games designer RiotPhlox had recently discovered the same error in the game’s code. After spending several hours double and triple-checking the values for both units, RiotPhlox changed both values to 300.
“Anyways, the very fabric of League of Legends is probably gonna break and minions will never be the same after this,” they said in the comments of the Reddit thread. “What a wild bug, and what a hilarious coincidence.”
The difference in the two Minion’s attack range is new but the phenomenon that blue side wins more games is anything but. For years players had long suspected that the slight advantage blue side has was due to the asymmetrical layout of the Summoner’s Rift map. There is plenty of discussion as to what differences may cause one side to have the advantage over another but thankfully this 11-year-old bug will be fixed when the 10.16 patch releases soon. For more League of Legends news and more, make sure to follow Daily Esports.
