League of Legends' Jungle Won't Be Changing This Preseason

League of Legends junglers can rest easy this year knowing that the jungle will not be changed during the next preseason.

During each one of League's preseason periods that takes place after the competitive season ends and the next begins, Riot often turns its attention to broader gameplay changes that would be quite disruptive if they were implemented during a season. The jungle is often a focus during this time, with sweeping changes made to the game's jungle camps, among other features and changes. Jungle plants including the Blast Cones, Honeyfruits and Scryer's Blooms, for example, were all implemented during a preseason period. It's also the time when nontraditional champions find their way into the jungle, such as the preseason takeover of Ezreal who was nigh untouchable.

That's not happening during this year's preseason — at least not to those levels, Riot Games said. Lead game designer Mark "Riot Scruffy" Yetter shared a list of goals for League's preseason on the game's boards to preview what's to come, and jungle changes are not on that list.

"Some of our infamous preseason targets we will not be touching significantly this year," Riot Scruffy said. "In particular we're not changing the jungle and we don't want to do too many fundamental shifts with all of the changes in the last months."

Hey! I just dropped a big post about our current plalns for LoL gameplay and a preview of our preseason goals this year:https://t.co/0AhznqhoFN

— Mark Yetter (@MarkYetter) August 8, 2018

This means that how the jungle is now — or at least how it'll be leading up to the game's preseason period — will persist into the experimental part of the game's competitive season. While some slight changes are still likely to come between now and then, it appears that they won't be on the scale of overhauling jungle camps or adding entirely new features.

The laning phase, on the other hand, will be a target of preseason changes. Riot Scruffy said that the design team wants to extend the duration that champions are in lane up to the point that they can complete one full item by the end of it, one of the preseason goals said.

"The laning phase is a core phase of the game where players get to enjoy the constant back and forth of a 1v1 or 2v2. We want to make the lane phase a more stable segment of quality time in every game and push players a a bit farther into their power curves before the game transitions into the more fluid mid and late game phases," Riot Scruffy said.

Season 8 still has a few more months in it, so the preseason changes won't be implemented until later on when they hit the PBE first for testing sometime in November.