League of Legends is more than 10 years old, but its player base is still finding out many different things about the game and its processes. One player, for example, recently discovered that red side cannon minions have had 20 less attack range than blue side’s cannon minions.
In the post, the player provided a handful of proof to back up their claims. One example they brought up was if you have two opposing cannon minions reach each other without interference, they won’t attack each other at the same time. Instead, the blue minion will usually attack first. He looked at those League Wiki values the same way you are right now. Nope, this isn’t about other minions on any separate map; these are SR cannon minions. The Blue Cannon has 300 attack range; The Red Cannon only has 280 range. As it turned out, this has been a bug since the earliest builds of the game we have access to; all the way back from Alpha!
An excerpt for the cannon minion data in the game files also corroborates these claims. The red side cannon minions are reportedly coded with 280 attack range, while the blue side cannon has 300 attack range.
The final test had the player use Syndra’s W ability to pick up the cannon minion and throw it varying distances. If the minion attacks without having to walk forward, then the player threw it within its attack range. If it has to move forward, the throw location was outside of its attack range.
By standing in the same spot and throwing the cannon in identical spots, the player discovered that at the max range throw, the blue side cannon doesn’t need to move forward to attack Syndra, while the red side cannon has to nudge forward a bit to get in range.
Popular League content creator Vandiril is known to test out and push the limits of various champions. After a few minion tests, he also noticed that the blue side was favored by a decent amount.
This is a big discovery, especially since wave management is such a huge part of higher Elo and professional League play. The post also claims that this bug has been in the game’s code since the Alpha in 2009. Later on Riot Games acknowledged the bug and said that they will roll out a fix in Patch 10.16.
With the Patch 10.16 being live, the bug is no longer present and both sides of the map should be okay with the latest changes.