May 9th was a dark day in the 2XKO official Discord. A conversation on could-be characters begam harmlessly, as it has for years when there’s been no news to discuss. But this time, debate devolved into arguments, as the intricacies of how Fiddlesticks – a lanky horror-inspired scarecrow would make the transition. League of Legends is packed full of champions that find themselves in a tricky position where a fighting game moveset can be derived.
I have dubbed this the Fiddlesticks problem. How do you take a weirdo – someone without direct links to the genre – and bring them over to this genre in an exciting fashion. The balance between keeping a character loyal to source material and keeping them fun to play is a perilous tightrope.
It’s a problem that the 2XKO team has surely had to tackle with characters like Ahri, which had her moveset overhauled between public builds. Designer Alex Jaffe spoke to me a little about this balance back at Evo 2023, and here I was back at Evo again asking similar questions.
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