League of Legends General Discussion Thread

[Sullla]

Speaker linked this to me today - one of the most appropriate things I can recall reading that relates to the League of Legends player base. Just remember this the next time you come across the 10 million threads at the LoL forums that begin "I'm a good player, and my ELO score doesn't reflect how good I actually am..."

[Deceptus]

BTW, if I ever tell you that "I can't play with you, I'm in a different premade", it probably means I'm playing with the guys from the Giant in the Playground forums. And a few of those very creative minds have just created this:


Simply fabulous, I must say.

[DerWille]

This whole Civ5 = LoL thing seems fairly nonsensical to me...

I can see why you'd say that. The analogy doesn't hold up entirely and I haven't explained why I said that all too well.

Both games didn't start off all that hot. The early days of League of Legends were two things primarily. The League of TF and the League of R. TF was the most over powered ridiculous character ever. His destiny was a global teleport + slow. Wild cards didn't ridiculous amounts of damage. This guy was beyond god tier.

After TF was fixed it became the League of R. Mass AoE Ultimates it is like the ICS of MOBAs. All it requires is that you get everyone together in one spot and press R at the same time. You win. It requires little strategy and thought. Kind of like spamming cities as close as you can to each other with as many trading posts as you can + carnivals and what else have you.

Where LoL did it right was that they patch fixed their game. Sure there were some balance problems here and there, but overall the game was fun and presented alot of options. The problem started when they tried to micromanage everyone's emotions at every moment throughout the game so they kept patching. Before I quit, I tallied up how many changes they made every 2 weeks from the beginning of season I to the last patch when I quit around mid to late December. This was how often they buffed, nerfed, ambiguously changed a rule, or fixed a bug. I didn't account for the severity of a change, just whether or not something changed. I also didn't count new heroes or changes to PvP.net. It came to that the average patch had about 70 changes to it.

Honestly I think the best thing could do is just to leave their game alone. No more new champions. Stop tweaking for every little gripe or perceived unfairness.

The next part is that the design decisions for both games are eerily similar. To give an example, in Civ 5 roads cost maintenance because one of the developers (Jon Schafer?) thought that road spam looked bad. Similarly, Zileas went forward with some Gankplank nerfs not because Gankplank was over powered or that players were complaining about him. No, he was nerfed because Zileas believed that he was anti-fun. He cited that raise morale was the most anti-fun ability in the game (I have not seen or heard one person complain about this move). Decisions for both games seem to be based more on the designer's vendettas against particular mechanics rather than the health of the game.

Another example for LoL. Part of the reason that junglers were nerfed was because the design staff felt that it was anti-fun to have someone pop out of the jungle and gank you. The trolls of the forum mocked him proposing, "Why do you just put walls around each lane?"

Dammit what is it about this game that makes me write essays?

[Tyrmith]

TBH a lot of what you are saying I agree with, but when you come down to it, Riot is running a business. To do that they got to make money, and they have to make money in an area that's very hard to actually make a profit in as well. I'm as frustrated as you guys are, but I just don't see where they have a choice. Statements like "they should just stop making champs" just doesn't seem reasonable when you realize that their probably when they're one of the major sources of income for the company. They stop getting money and they're going to have even more trouble keeping the servers running then they are now.

Just seems like they're between a rock and a hard place. Maybe their business model is bad, and just doesn't work, but with in the model they set up it doesn't seem like there's another way.

On an aside, I think a large part of the problem with the thing that we as a community want new in the game just isn't something that the majority of people playing the game care about. We want features that just arn't relevent to the majority of players. They'd feel the same as we would if Riot decided to add facebook integration or some other nonsense.

[Sullla]

I have to say I disagree with that... Yes, I'm aware that League of Legends is a free to play game, and that they create new champs to bring in additional revenue. At the same time, once you have a certain amount of champs, adding more of them hits of process of diminishing returns. When there were 40 champs, a new champ was a big deal, because the overall pool was relatively small. Now that LoL is up to 70 champs, it's not nearly as interesting.

More to the point, relentlessly adding new champs and skins without stopping is simply bad for the overall health of the game. Imagine if Blizzard created a new unit for Starcraft 2 every other week. No matter how good your testers might be, you can't create balanced gameplay when you're implementing so many feature changes at a rapid pace. (See DerWille's point above about 70 average changes per patch!) LoL would greatly benefit if they released one champ per month, made sure the new champ was balanced/fixed so we don't get totally useless champs like Cassiopeia or Karma, and then used more of their developer resources on creating new content in the form of maps (not yet another reskinning of the same one!), more game options, a true replay/observer mode, and so on. And yes, these things are highly desired by the player base - just check how often people have been clamoring for Magma Chamber over the past six months (!!!) since it was supposed to be have released.

Pumping out all these champs and skins does make more money - but only in the extreme short term. It reminds me of Activision doing everything they could to exploit the Guitar Hero market by putting out three games per year. Well, that worked great for about 18 months, and then the market collapsed. Guitar Hero 3 sold 15 million copies in 2007; Activision just announced last month in 2011 that Guitar Hero would be discontinued as a franchise. Gigantic sales to dead market in just over three years. That's the business plan Riot is following at the moment. By doing nothing to add true additional content to their gameplay, they're setting themselves up to lose their whole customer base as soon as a real competitor comes along. As several others have said, I don't know if that will be DOTA2, but it will happen eventually.

Overall, Riot just looks way too much at maximizing short term revenue.

[Gustaran]

LoL would greatly benefit if they released one champ per month, made sure the new champ was balanced/fixed so we don't get totally useless champs like Cassiopeia or Karma, and then used more of their developer resources on creating new content in the form of maps (not yet another reskinning of the same one!), more game options, a true replay/observer mode, and so on. And yes, these things are highly desired by the player base - just check how often people have been clamoring for Magma Chamber over the past six months (!!!) since it was supposed to be have released.

Yeah, that's a point I was wondering about, too: Most of the new champions don't add anything to the game or are vastly inferior.
And regarding some features I feel Riot is plain and simply lazy. HoN has released a map editor for the community and the best user made maps are integrated in the game.
Why can't Riot do something similar ?

At the same time it is very hard to understand, why there are no additional game modes, such as ARAM. I mean, you just have to fill the two sidelanes with trees, deactivate minion spawning there and you are good to go with at least a basic ARAM mode. How long is that gonna take ?
In Battleforge, some users would use the editor to create missions with a storyline, complicated trigger events and patrols - 10 times more complicated then this dumb Summoner's Rift map which needs nothing but a respawn timer for minions and jungle creeps.
I understand that Riot needs to make money, but you have to strike the balance between cosmetical and gameplay enhancement. If there is no long term motivation, players will leave. Actually you see this mistake in many supposed MMORPG, WoW killers (Age of Conan, etc). Players will reach max level, discover that there is no content, then they leave and never come back...

[fire&ice]

At the same time it is very hard to understand, why there are no additional game modes, such as ARAM. I mean, you just have to fill the two sidelanes with trees, deactivate minion spawning there and you are good to go with at least a basic ARAM mode. How long is that gonna take ?

they are already have the map (Tutorial map)
All they would have to do it is map is 5v5 and release it.

What is so hard about that?

[Sullla]

Also, one other thing: Riot is terrible at managing expectations. They have this silly habit of announcing some new feature, and then failing to deliver on it. Remember how Coop Play Versus AI was supposed to be released "later this week"? Well, it's been a week now, and still nothing. Like everything else, the official response on the forums is that the feature will be added "soon". And they have been consistently doing this for the last year. Drum up publicity for a new feature and then fail to deliver on it - what are they doing?! I mean, you can't ask for PR much worse than this! If they would just keep their darn mouths shut, they could save themselves a ton of forum "QQ".

[Dantski]

Well on the subject of new maps, Riot must have information about how much their last released map (Twisted Treeline) gets played. I don't think I've played a TT game in months and I imagine several others here are in rhe same boat.

If a new map comes out in will increase queue times with the players being further spread and if no-one really wants to play the new map a month after release, Riot will have wasted a bunch of time and effort which you suspect is how they feel about TT now. I'm not saying I don't want to see new maps though, far from it.

The lack of new gamemodes causes me to think Riot lacks many high quality programmers, as other people have said ARAM on the original tutorial map would be pretty darn easy to implement, all they'd have to do is disable recalling, a couple of summoner spells and a few items. That certainly doesn't take years to create so either they aren't working on it at all or they've only recently started on it or lastly they're really slow.

LoL is still a very fun game, it needs more variety badly though. Imagine if all minions were changed into super minions for instance? Would be interesting to see people take smite for laning.

PR wise, Riot is unfortunately not alone in false promises and hype. has Duke Nukem forever been finished yet? It probably has but it was such a long running joke

[Deceptus]

Maybe they should leave making maps to the community?

Best competitive maps for StarCraft weren't made by Blizzard.

Then again, as someone who liked grinding those maps when I was still playing Starcraft seriously, I don't mind that I play on Summoner's Rift 99% of the time. It's not like every single game is the same thing.