Accidentally, the minions on one side were having a “better” time in League of Legends (LoL) than those on the other side. This bug has been present since alpha in League of Legends and has gone unnoticed by almost nobody.
What kind of bug is it? In League of Legends, minions are an essential part of the gameplay. They come in melee and ranged varieties.
The ranged variants also include the Cannon Minions. They are characterized by the fact that they curve along the lanes with a cannon.
The now-appeared bug is embedded in the code of League of Legends. It manifests itself in that the Cannon Minions on the red side have over 20 units less range than the Cannon Minions on the blue side.
How much influence does this have on the game? The difference in attack range is not particularly large and therefore does not have a significant impact on your games. A player writes on reddit: “That’s probably why the minions on the blue side always win when you just let the minions fight. Because the blue Cannon Minions can attack earlier.”
This mystery has occupied players for a long time. In their observations, they could not determine such a small difference in attack range. They wondered what caused the blue side to win so frequently. Now we finally know.
YouTuber Vandiril conducted a small experiment showing that the blue side has an advantage.
How was the bug noticed? Reddit user Caenen_ was working on a text for the LoL wiki page and wanted to write about the effects of Baron Nashor. He asked a friend what the attack range of minions buffed by Baron is. The numbers “1050” and “1030” came back.
Confused, Caenen_ looked at these values and realized that there have been these differences in minions since the alpha of League of Legends. Even without Baron buff, the values look like this:
- Blue Cannon Minions have 300 attack range
- Red Cannon Minions have 280 attack range
Apparently, nobody else has noticed this except him – at least not on the developers’ side. He shared his discovery on reddit and received already over 27,500 upvotes and more than 1,200 comments. The community is passionate when it comes to bugs. A LoL player has listed 180 bugs related to a champion – it is his hobby.
By coincidence, Riot also stumbled across the bug with the minions almost simultaneously.
After over 10 years, the bug is finally history
Curious coincidence at Riot Games: In the comments of the reddit thread RiotPhlox also speaks up. He is a designer at LoL and writes:
“That’s such a strange coincidence. Just last week, I was going through the values of the minions and found this bug. I spent a full two hours making sure that these values are indeed the ones that control the range. Who would have thought this has been the case since alpha?”
What’s next: As the discoverer from the community, Caenen_, writes, this bug is currently being fixed. The fixed version is already on the test servers of League of Legends. In this version, the minions of both sides have the same attack range.
No player has truly been harmed by the bug with the minions. However, things can go very differently in the game. Recently, there was an exploit in LoL that was so powerful that even the victims were banned. Luckily, that is now gone.
