League of Legends just got WASD controls after 16 years, and you can probably guess how smoothly the rollout's going

The League of Legends community is in an uproar following a recent patch that added alternative keyboard controls to the popular MOBA. Developer Riot Games released an update on December 3 that brought WASD support to certain game modes, echoing Path of Exile 2's embrace of more actiony controls in what has traditionally been a mouse-driven style of game.

While that change proved to be a great success in Path of Exile's sequel, it hasn't gone quite so smoothly for Riot, with initial fears that it would unbalance the game now mostly giving way to the opposite problem: players complaining that the controls suck to use.

When Riot announced the change in a blog post in August, it framed it as a way to make the game more approachable. “We’ve seen that for new players, WASD is the most familiar control scheme for PC games today, and let’s be real, a lot of us instinctively put our fingers there when coming back to League after playing something else,” the developer said. “By offering WASD as an alternate control scheme, we believe League will feel more intuitive to some players who come from other games.”

Soon after the announcement, players were already spiraling into doomsday scenarios decrying the decision from Riot, and the early feedback was concerning. Marc "Caedrel" Lamont, a streamer and assistant coach of the professional team Los Ratones, tried the WASD controls during a closed testing period and compared them to playing the game with “aim assist" in a stream.

“If you play on WASD, you already have Master to Grand Master level spacing,” Caedrel said. “All you have to do is hold the directional keys you want to run in … and you hold your mouse right-click on top of the enemy champion. That’s it. Then your character will automatically run away and hit on every single attack speed that it has.”

Caedrel suggested that WASD would make precise spacing and landing attacks far easier than with mouse-click movement, meaning certain roles like attack damage carries would stand to strongly benefit. In reality, early impressions claim the implementation of WASD is quite the opposite—the keyboard movement comes at a major cost for the minn-maxxing types. WASD players can't use animation cancelling to their full advantage for extra auto attacks, making the classic setup is better for the more competitive.

After that initial round of testing, it seems Riot imposed a slight attack speed nerf on the WASD setup. That's a big deal for the whole roster, but it's an extra nasty penalty for speedy champions like Jinx or Twitch (the rat, not the streaming platform). On the League subreddit, poster J0rdian shared their admittedly imperfect science for comparing the two control schemes and claimed "WASD has substantial DPS loss, especially at higher attack speeds."

The recently updated PBE (public beta) release had most folks reporting the same conclusion, leading to Reddit threads questioning "Is everyone complaining about WASD for nothing?" And, well, it sort of sounds that way.

Others like WanderingRin got a little deeper with their explanation:"They stopped it from auto canceling and they implemented an artificial attack speed nerf. Now you have to hit 0 movement inputs while the attack is playing out and only input one when it's cancelable. On top of that it's still nerfed at higher attack speeds."

On X, Riot senior tech game producer Darcy Ludington highlighted a video that seems to address the potential for WASD play to compete with classic controls while also explaining why it feels slower.

"You can avoid the delay between autos by releasing WASD keys before the attack fires and alternating movement ->attack->movement," wrote HydroZenith in a quote response. "You can get into a good rhythm to succeed, props to this player for figuring it out so quickly!"

Perhaps the early feedback really sunk in and Riot did some major surgery, but regardless it's not the WASD doomsday scenario some imagined. Did the developer overcompensate? Maybe—there are, of course, some players now complaining that WASD isn't good enough, but it's clearly going to take an adjustment period for both players and Riot's balance team to assess the impact. The control scheme isn't even available yet in Ranked play where it's sure to come under the most scrutiny.

"It'll be more than a month before we communicate out the outcomes, mainly as WASD is one piece of the pie for new players," Ludington wrote on X. "We have tested it already though with new players and did see it was one of the major barriers to trying LoL out."