League of Legends General Discussion Thread

[Tyrmith]

I think though that the game isn't supposed to be about the map, it's about the team working together, the tactics, and the figuring out how to use your team composition to the maximum advantage.

I think where I saw this best shown was in a TreeEskimo video he had where he was explaining that his team was losing because his team was using a composition that had a ton of poke to just do team fights against a team that was built for team fights. They lost the teamfight every time they simply charged in because they didn't maximize their teams potential to maximum. When they did how ever start kiteing the enemy team they won every fight. Once they started forceing the other team to follow them around the map while attacking them at range where they couldn't attack back TreeEskimo's team could simply wait till the enemy team was a much lower health (and potentially dragged out of position) and then mop up the remnants with ease.

Edit: Here's the link- start at around 25 minutes then later 29ish probably -- http://www.own3d.tv/TreeEskimo#/watch/56028

[Gustaran]

On the whole, I was reasonably impressed with the bots -- Annie in particular was very good at focusing fire and choosing targets. Creating an AI for a game like LoL must be a huge task, and it'll be nice to practise with some competent bots occasionally when trying a new champ.

I agree with this, I am already happy that the bots finally use summoner spells and group up and change lanes
The bots are probably not meant to be a match for experienced humans but rather for new players, the tutorial right now is rather lackluster.
And yes, the players were not the best, I think one guy comes from Riot's marketing. But who wants to watch a game in which Phreak is slaughtering bots ?

IMHO, it's reasonable for Riot to exaggerate the bot strength a little, after all, any game on the market promises spectacular graphics, groundbreaking AI, and incredible features, even if it's just a remake of Pac Man...

There will never be an AI that can beat a decent human team in LoL since a large part of skill depends on evaluating the heroes and the abilities you are up against. I.e. If the enemy team has a Malzahar with ult up, you can't get near him once you are below 50% life or you will die. Or attacking a tower while Shen is nearby and getting taunted, split push with use of global ult, etc.

[Pandajuice]

I'm not particularly tired of the game itself yet despite the fact that I haven't really played it much in the last few weeks but I definitely see where a lot of you guys are coming from. Too many new champs with little focus on other features that'd make the game more fun is annoying.

What I am most tired of though is the fact that every game usually hinges on one player who can screw it up for either team and with my luck, I usually end up on that team. Being stuck for at least 30 minutes in a game with a player that has Lag, disconnects, leaving, afk, feeding, an asshole, or is just a poor player is demoralizing and really takes away from the game. I also like to have fun when I play video games and sometimes people and games can get a wee bit too serious about it for my taste.

I'd love to play games more often with you guys to not have to deal with the headaches of solo queue, but unfortunately I'm stuck in Europe and most people are active late in the evening just before I head off to bed. Not to mention the fact that my wife hates me playing it because it literally ties me to the PC for 30-60 minutes at a time.

I'll try to pop on now and again, but for the most part, I've put LoL on the shelf for now. Keep us posted though if there is an RB move to another game as I'd like to come along as well.

Edit: I just watched the Riot vs Bots game and wow, so bad. The AI definitely seems much improved which is cool but those players were bad. It's unclear whether they were intentionally bad to make the bots look better (that's what I'd bet on) but I agree with Sullla: the whole thing did seem very disingenuous.

[Sullla]

Don't get me wrong, it nice that Riot took the time to improve the performance of the AI bots, and they definitely are much better than the old "run around in circles at the tower" ones. But there were a lot of things that were off-putting about the event that Riot staged:

- They advertised and built up the event like it was going to be a competitive game, then the actual show was dreadfully bad. I mean, cover-your-eyes awful level of performance. All of the human players acted like they had never played the game before, missing out on extremely basic aspects of LoL play. (Durrr, maybe you should go heal when your about 2 die???) When your game is performing on large scale (30,000 live viewers when I was watching), this isn't the impression you want to give.

- The whole thing reeked of fakery. Phreak saying over and over again before the thing started, "I just don't think the bots have a chance to win..." Gee, I wonder if the outcome was pretermined ahead of time? You sure fooled me, Riot! I also found it noteworthy that Phreak immediately minimized the in-game chat, but not before the Brolaf player typed "jungling with no runes or masteries, fun." Hmmmm. What were they really typing to one another during the game? Instructions on how to make the bots look good, perhaps? The whole thing felt like a carnival barker shell game, patently false and designed to play up how "awesome" the new AI bots were supposed to be.

- I think they should have gone about the whole thing differently. The make-believe game wasn't fooling anyone, and it further made Riot look bad because it gave off the impression that they suck at their own game. (Not a good vibe for your community!) Rather, they should have made another one of their YouTube videos highlighting good/smart plays from the AI bots. This would have looked much better, saved time, and been a more honest way to go about advertising the new feature. For me personally, it's extremely off-putting when a company advertises "Hey we've got this great new feature, watch!" and then sets up a Potemkin Village situation to make it look better. Ugh. Just be honest with us, guys.

- Finally, I also feel like it's a waste of their development resources to focus on improving AI bots. We know that Riot is a small company, and they're very limited in their staff right now. Where they choose to put their development resources matters a lot. And... was anyone really claming for better AI bots?! League of Legends is a PvP game, where the overwhelming majority of the games are between two human teams. Bots are used only for practice or (much more frequently, from what I've seen) for IP grinding. The bots will never be good enough to substitute for human players, so does it really matter THAT much about improving them? When we're still waiting on additional maps, additional game modes, a replay mode, and so on.

Yeah, I was a little pissed yesterday watching that, just because Riot repeatedly claims "we need more time to add maps/replays blah blah blah" and here they are wasting time on this pointless spectacle, trying to deceive their own player base. I lost a lot of respect for them over that. Not the way to do things, guys...

[Gustaran]

The whole thing reeked of fakery. Phreak saying over and over again before the thing started, "I just don't think the bots have a chance to win..." Gee, I wonder if the outcome was pretermined ahead of time? You sure fooled me, Riot! I also found it noteworthy that Phreak immediately minimized the in-game chat, but not before the Brolaf player typed "jungling with no runes or masteries, fun." Hmmmm. What were they really typing to one another during the game? Instructions on how to make the bots look good, perhaps? The whole thing felt like a carnival barker shell game, patently false and designed to play up how "awesome" the new AI bots were supposed to be.

Of course the game was designed to show off how good the bots are. Riot spent resources to improve the bots. So now imagine the human team would have rolled over the AI... Everybody would have said that programmers at Riot suck. To me, it was a purely promotional event. I wonder why you would think of this as a true contest? It's the same way with the summoner spotlights, where every champion miraculously shines, because Phreak is 5 levels higher and has tons of items.

Rather, they should have made another one of their YouTube videos highlighting good/smart plays from the AI bots. This would have looked much better, saved time, and been a more honest way to go about advertising the new feature. For me personally, it's extremely off-putting when a company advertises "Hey we've got this great new feature, watch!" and then sets up a Potemkin Village situation to make it look better. Ugh. Just be honest with us, guys.

I think that's a little unfair. You got to see a whole game with bots. Now you can decide for yourself whether you think the bots are good or not (and the general consensus seems to be that yes, the bots are better than before, but they only won because the humans sucked).
Now a youtube video could easily be edited and scripted and noone would really know how the bots play in a real game.

- Finally, I also feel like it's a waste of their development resources to focus on improving AI bots. We know that Riot is a small company, and they're very limited in their staff right now.

I totally agree with you, but every free2play game caters to the casual players. Champs are often nerfed to the ground not because they are overpowered, but because the forum whines (Mordekaiser, stealth champs, etc...).
For us here, a replay mode would be a great thing, but if you go ahead and play solo queue you wonder how many players would actually be interested in watching replays of their games to improve. I am just saying that for those companies it's not about creating the best game, it's about getting as many people as possible to spend real money on microtransactions.

I have been through all of this before, when I bought Battleforge for 50$ on release.
2.5 months later, the game was free2play, the promised supply of new missions stopped very soon in favor of releasing new editions/units (which had to be bought for real money).
So I suggest taking LoL for what it is and only to spend the amount of money you think the game is worth right now.

[Tyrmith]

Really I just don't see how adding a champion every two weeks is a sustainable model for making money- eventually you're just going to dillute your pool of champions so much that there's little reason for anyone to buy the new champs (or skins for those champs) unless you're just one of those people with way too much extra IP, in which case it doesn't matter anyway income-wise for the company.

[pocketbeetle]

I had a small hope, when we heard about the tencent further investment, that Riot were simply padding their balance sheet to make the numbers look good.

With every "a new champion approaches" announcement however, part of that little hope shrivels up and quietly dies.

[Cull]

To give some idea of just how delayed replays/new map(Magma Chamber) is ATM, when I first started playing months ago they were saying these features were coming out soon.

[Tyrmith]

Amid all this, hopefully replay system will be sometime this year now! :D
http://www.leagueoflegends.com/news/seek...et-patcher


--
Personally I just wish Riot would be more informative to the fans. I see just the sheer amount of time that Blizzard spends talking with their subscribers, even to stupid winy kids, (each thread there is one that a blizzard employee has posted in), and just how transparent they are (and how honest they are about the stuff they arn't telling us) and it makes me sad.

[Gustaran]

Amid all this, hopefully replay system will be sometime this year now! :D
http://www.leagueoflegends.com/news/seek...et-patcher

A cross version replay system sounds very nice, I am just a bit sceptical about the "first stride forward on a road towards" part....:aar:

Somebody on the forums posted a link to this interesting writeup about the value of good bots in a multiplayer game:

http://gamasutra.com/blogs/JoshuaMcDonal...d_Bots.php