Talk:VPBE/@comment-24669805-20140505143640/@comment-3974211-20140505145806

My personal thoughts: I miss the ward coverage of season 3, but I do not miss the requirement to buy an inventory of wards at the start of every game. The starting items introduced for supports were strong enough to be more desirable than starting with 5 wards, but the general lack of sight early game is getting to me. I thought the original 90 seconds was decent.

Riot's verdict: "We've lowered the 'game start' timer of trinkets down to 30 seconds.

When we first introduced trinkets in the 2014 season, we gave them a 'start of game' cooldown that prevented them from being used within the first 90 seconds of the game. Since we couldn't be certain of how trinkets would be used/swapped in competitive play coming from a world that had never seen trinkets, we selected 90 seconds as a conservative timing to guard against potential/unseen abuse cases. Since their introduction, we've concluded that the initial trinket cooldowns need to go one of three directions:
 * Push the trinket timing further to effectively remove them from competitive openings.
 * Pull the trinket timing back and fully embrace their use in competitive openings.
 * Be content with the 90-second timing and fairly predictable trinket use case in competitive openings.

In the 4.4 patch we pushed the initial trinket timing to 120 seconds under the assumption that a healthier variety of strategic openings could exist without trinkets as a factor. What we've learned since then is that the costs associated with many openings, such as traditional 2v2 or 2v1 lanes, is relatively too high in comparison to the common "3v1" or "4v0" openings we often see today (this is influenced by the need for early vision to safely setup a non-4v0 opening, the early power sacrifice to acquire that vision when purchasing wards over gold items or combat stats, and the disadvantage incurred in lane by opting into those setups). At this point we believe that pulling the trinket timing back and allowing teams to incorporate trinkets into their openings will reduce the cost discrepancy between openings in areas where they were a bit too harsh."

Basically, the current strategies of 4v0 and 3v1 is becoming so dominant that players are beginning to revert to Season 3 full-ward starts, and Riot isn't happy with the huge disadvantage that buying the wards has on the rest of early game (having no real starting item) all for the sake of countering the first 90 seconds of the game.