Meddler Answers Questions About League of Legends' New Rune System

The last week has been a great one for fans of League of Legends and it's ever-evolving nature. Riot not only unveiled the new Honor system, which looks to make people remember that there is, in fact, and honor system in League of Legends, but also the long-awaited Rune rework. While we've been anticipating a rework to the Rune system for years now -- Riot confirmed it was coming as early as Season 4 -- no one expected the changes to be as large in scope as they turned out to be. Riot didn't announce a tweak to the Rune system, they announced a whole new system that will fundamentally change the way the game is played in much the same way keystone masteries did.

All of this excitement has left quite a few questions unanswered, however. Despite all the hype around the new system, we don't really know all the much about it, nor when we'll be getting more information. Fortunately, Riot Meddler took to the boards to throw those of us who were praying for news a bone. He gave a short Q&A about the new Rune system, and when we can expect more information about it. Notably, he didn't mention directly when the new system would be launching, but he did comment that we would be talking about Runes for "the next 5 months", which insinuates that the promised rework will be launching around the time Preseason 8 begins.

The full text of Meddler's comments on the new Rune system have been copied below.

A few other things important to note about the new Runes system:

- It's still pretty work in progress. We're talking about this stuff far in advance because we want to give you folks context into what we're doing and to get feedback on the design while it's in development. That means some things will change from what we show, some questions aren't ready to be answered yet (e.g. what happens to existing runes/runepages?) etc.
- Speaking of showing content in development we'll be continuing to reveal work in progress runes for discussion every couple of weeks or so. Goals there are to help people get a better understanding of the system and get feedback as we work on individual runes. Given how far out numbers certainly won't be final and other details, or even the concept of a specific rune could change. Feedback on how you'd expect a rune to be used, what sort of choices it offers/skills it tests etc's going to be really helpful. Comments like 'that's busted and will break the game' or 'I don't like it' by contrast need good explanations paired with them otherwise they're not very useful.
- The updated Runes system has been called 'Perks' internally for quite a while. That's never intended to be a final name, but we did want some way of clearly distinguishing it from existing runes while we were working on it initially. Mentioning that since it's all but guaranteed that someone (probably me...) will refer to Perks at some point while we're talking about Runes over the next 5 months.