We have official confirmation: Akshan will be disabled for 2021 Worlds. This really shouldn’t come as a surprise, but it’s still nice (and also somewhat disheartening) to get an update from the folks in charge. Enabling such a powerful (kit-wise) champion for the biggest and most important tournament in the world sounds like a surefire recipe for disaster.
His current solo queue win rate (which is way below the 50% threshold) is by no means impressive, but there’s a very big difference between solo queue and competitive. Pro players could potentially find new and unique ways of harnessing his abilities (some of which are truly spectacular if not downright OP) and getting an upper hand over their opposition.
This way, however, everyone knows what they’ll be getting themselves into. There’s simply far too much on the line for a single champion to potentially affect the odds. Fortunately, the following rule was put into place long ago to prevent such (potentially) unfortunate things from happening.
Riot’s Official Rules for New Champions
It’s For The Best
“These decisions are obviously always done in working closely together with the Gameplay team. And if a Champion only gets limited exposure in pro play that makes balancing significantly harder of course – which is part of the reason the 메이저놀이터 old rule existed in the first place,” said Maximilian Peter Schmidt, European Head of Esports over at Riot.
In the end, we’re glad that Riot has decided to disable Akshan for Worlds 2021 as it’s the only logical option. He’s still imbalanced, has a myriad of bugs (some of which are truly game-breaking), and still warrants a lot of attention from the LoL balance team. All in all, it’ll still take a while before Akshan reaches a satisfactory state balance-wise, so it’s best to just have him disabled and not think twice about it. There’s simply too much at stake, and a chaotic meta wouldn’t really benefit anyone.
