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.
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.
【WASDペナルティ回避！目押しカイトテク】こんばんはボチカです、今日実装されたWASD移動は左クリックを長押しで引きうち（カイト）ができる親切設計なのですが。「実質AS上限がありDPSが落ちる」というペナルティが存在します今回はそのペナルティを回避する裏技を伝授しちゃいます #LOL pic.twitter.com/GdsoTXwexODecember 3, 2025
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.”
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