Riot Games recently made the announcement that WASD controls are coming to League of Legends, following months of speculation following a data mine that revealed the addition of this control scheme to the game's Public Beta Environment (PBE).
Riot qualified the announcement by saying the feature would be spending several patches on the PBE before coming to the live servers. Additionally, the team will be closely monitoring the balance between WASD controls and traditional controls to ensure one is not necessarily better than the other.
Since the announcement, the community has been discussing this change and the consensus feeling appears to be one of worry. WASD controls could fundamentally change how League of Legends is played, especially for characters that rely on kiting and other micro movements.
Currently, to 'kite', i.e. to move backwards away from an opponent while weaving in auto-attacks, you need to rapidly click your opponent (to initiate the auto attack) and then click behind your character once the auto attack has fired (to move backwards). This requires a lot of precise mouse movement, and adds a high skill ceiling for ranged carries.
With WASD, depending on how Riot decides to smooth out the animation cancelling,...
