League of Legends General Discussion Thread

[Cull]

If the viewer wants to watch a DoTA esque game, without the gameplay changing so much it barely resembles DoTA anymore, there is going to be a period of farm. Its simply the game is played, with the very core concepts the way they are like Sullla mentioned. If you want to play a pure just teamfight game play Bloodline Champions or something like that.

[sunrise089]

I agree with Sullla, people are free to go play Halo if they want instant action.

I came from a MP game where games took 3 hours, and now they take 45 minutes. If you can actually stop griefers that's a really good game length.

And, I don't find the early game boring at all. I'm sad Riot seems to be forcing these changes in champ style...if people want to play early action champs they are still out there - take early ganking junglers or lane pushers or the like.

[Speaker]

I spent an hour this evening and went through all the game recaps from Gamescon and threw them into a spreadsheet by character. I am missing one game, from the first semifinal, which doesn't appear in the game recap for some reason, and the video was having trouble loading for me. I wanted to compile bans as well, but the game recaps do not always list them, and I didn't feel like going through all the videos. That would be great information, if anyone wanted to compile it.


In all, 45 different characters made an appearance this weekend.


Here are the ranged AD characters. Urgot was the big winner, seemingly out of nowhere. Caitlyn was the most popular pick, and the least successful. Ashe and Vayne were both banned a lot. Miss Fortune surprisingly did not make an appearance. I thought she got some air time at Dreamhack, but I may be mis-remembering. Corki was clearly overnerfed, going from a popular choice in June to Twitch territory. Kog'Maw seemed really strong. I wouldn't be surprised if he becomes the new FotM and thus gets nerfed (Sorry, Varis!). We have seen with him this in our Tuesday night games pretty frequently, actually. Late game, he does more damage than any ranged carry.


19 different AP heroes were chosen at least once. Brand was the clear best choice. Orianna and Zilean were also excellent, with Orianna being banned a ton. Annie is clearly not as good as the forum QQers would let you believe. Anivia was the definite worst pick.


Gangplank and Lee Sin were the clear winners here. Neither of them need the blue buff to successfully jungle, so they provide their team with a huge advantage by giving it to the mid, and they are great gankers, and a good source of tanky dps late game.


Alistar and Soraka were the clear winners here. Sona the definite loser. Soraka was the most-picked hero of the entire weekend.


The most balanced class, with no dominant, nor weak characters. I think Jax and Udyr were banned a lot.

[Jowy]

If the viewer wants to watch a DoTA esque game, without the gameplay changing so much it barely resembles DoTA anymore, there is going to be a period of farm. Its simply the game is played, with the very core concepts the way they are like Sullla mentioned. If you want to play a pure just teamfight game play Bloodline Champions or something like that.

Just so you guys know.. Dominion isn't here to replace Summoner's Rift. If you prefer the slower pace of Summoner Rift, then play that. If you prefer the quicker pace of Dominion, play that. If you feel like playing both, then play both. There's absolutely no need to go play some crappy unknown PvP game or Halo for that matter. Sunrise, you should read up a little on Dominion if you think it's like Halo. It's more like the current LoL gameplay except without a laning phase and with faster pace. Not a first-person scifi shooter for the Xbox 360.

The whole point of Dominion was to create a new alternate gameplay for LoL, so it's kinda silly to whine about Dominion being different.

[sunrise089]

Just so you guys know.. Dominion isn't here to replace Summoner's Rift. If you prefer the slower pace of Summoner Rift, then play that. If you prefer the quicker pace of Dominion, play that. If you feel like playing both, then play both. There's absolutely no need to go play some crappy unknown PvP game or Halo for that matter. Sunrise, you should read up a little on Dominion if you think it's like Halo. It's more like the current LoL gameplay except without a laning phase and with faster pace. Not a first-person scifi shooter for the Xbox 360.

The whole point of Dominion was to create a new alternate gameplay for LoL, so it's kinda silly to whine about Dominion being different.

Come on, that's disingenuous. Cleary LoL isn't like Halo in the sense of being a console FPS made by Bungie. But it's certainly more like Halo than Civ IV is, and both are more like Halo than RB PBEM Diplomacy. The idea that Dominion has a "faster pace" and doesn't have the build-up laning phase is exactly how it more like (not the same as) Halo or other fast-paced "twitch" games.

Your larger point has merit of course - like Twisted Treeline this isn't going to make Summoners' Rift go away. However we live in a world of scarce resources and tough choices. One of those choices is for Riot to spend resources making new champs, balancing existing champs, and creating skins versus making a reply client or improving server stability. Another choice is focusing on a new map with a new gametype instead of the aforementioned replay or stability additions, or even different new game modes or maps more in keeping with the style of game I enjoy.

[snip]...Not a first-person scifi shooter for the Xbox 360...[snip]

Come now young one, I played Halo on the Xbox no-freaking-number via 16man wired LAN play, so don't go dropping your fancy circa-2006 video game console info on me

[Jowy]

Your larger point has merit of course - like Twisted Treeline this isn't going to make Summoners' Rift go away. However we live in a world of scarce resources and tough choices. One of those choices is for Riot to spend resources making new champs, balancing existing champs, and creating skins versus making a reply client or improving server stability. Another choice is focusing on a new map with a new gametype instead of the aforementioned replay or stability additions, or even different new game modes or maps more in keeping with the style of game I enjoy.

It's really not that simple Stuff like the replay client and server stability only need minimal creative and artistic input and are mostly technical stuff. Champs and Dominion on the other hand are mostly about that creative input and creating the art. Different people are working on different stuff. There's some overlap of course, like QA people have to test both. But say recently, they've been working on:
- New champs and skins (numerous new ones)
- Dominion (playable)
- Fixing EU servers and the region split (done)
- Balancing (see: every patch)
- Observer mode (almost done)
All at the same time. Probably on other stuff too that we don't know about.

I do understand your point about hating on Dominion just because you personally dislike it. That's fine. But don't see why people should rather go "play Halo", cause Dominion is not Halo. It has creeps, bases, the same 80 or so champs with 4 skills and a passive, items, gold, towers, bushes, levels, pentakills, summoner spells, talent trees, runes, teamfights, team comps, tanks, supports, ap carrys, ad carrys and so on. Sure, it's not EXACTLY the same as current gameplay, but pretty damn close even with all the differences.

[VarisNox]

I, for one, will reserve judgement on Dominion until I actually play it; I don't want to favorably or unfavorably judge or compare the game until I experience it for myself. While I definitely like the Summoner's Rift laning playstyle, I could definitely see myself enjoying a game of Dominion every so often for something different. On the other hand, if Dominion is something I do not enjoy at all, I will simply ignore it and continue to play standard LoL. I'm sure everyone will have their own varying enjoyment of Dominion depending on preference for gameplay styles.

[sunrise089]

Just one clarification of my point Jowy: Riot is a somewhat transparent company in some ways, and a somewhat closed company in others. I don't know if they have a staff list, nor whether it's possible to find lists of hirings and firings and detail their growth over time.

My personal sense though is that Riot is terribly mismanaged. They developed a core game with X employees. That involved doing all the background programming work on the game and interface, the base design work, creating and balancing 40 champs, the physical setup of website, servers, and payment systems, not to mention office stuff like handling investors, payroll, tax paperwork, physical space, etc.

Very clearly now they have X+Y employees where Y>0. Their output should be much higher if they have anything like the level of efficiency they had prior to their launch. In extremely simplistic terms you could keep the art, programming, and testing teams working at the same rate on a 1-champ-per-2-weeks system provided the original 40 champs took less than 80 weeks to code and draw. Yes balancing 80 champs is harder than 40, but due to similarities in mechanics it should not scale that badly. Then take the teams that did 1-off stuff and make them do the new stuff, like replays, new maps, stability, improved graphics, etc.

Now obviously that just isn't working. The game we have now is really not very different than it was at launch - we have TT which no one really plays. I have two theories for why this is:

1) Senior management is grossly incompetent at project management, probably because they have no management experience or training. They tend to assign projects that look cool and then they don't focus resources, so you have feature creep and all your release dates slip.

2) Productivity scaled inversely with growth. New people face a huge learning curve, they're less motivated than the old guard, and they're not closely overseen to make sure they're being productive and on track. Yet the old competent employees now spend more time in meetings with newly expanded teams, or training people to use specialized software. Plus the low-hanging development fruit is already taken, so an hour's worth of development time doesn't add as much to the project as it did at first. This is what happened with first-gen web startups and it's even what's happening with Google now

Now introduce Dominion into that world. We've assigned, in your words, creative and art people to the Dominion project. Where did that staff come from? If they're old have they been idle for the last six months? If so they were deadweight keeping my desired features from getting resources. If they are new staff then they're definitely keeping resources away from the stuff I want since Riot chose to hire art guy A over network administrator B.

Basically we need to explain the world in which we live in, and that's a world where Riot's announcement timing is almost totally inconsistent with what actually happens, and where seemingly trivial additions are what, a year, behind schedule. Within that world of silliness I want as little as possible shifting resources away to even more new projects

Final thought: I looked up the CivIV credits. Counting Firaxis and listed 2K staff, and not stopping to catch double counting (Sullla appears in the credits 3 times, that's probably rare but not unique), there are about 130 people listed. Riot is currently advertising for 131 open positions. Now I can see some of those being necessary due to the scaling popularity of the game (in simplest terms they have to process many X the number of credit card payments now as they did on launch, but write the same amount of champion lore per release), and at least 20 of the positions are things like that, mainly in the form of localization support. But you're still looking at a company that has all of their original staff available, plus almost as many new employees as the entire CivIV design team, plus whatever staff they've hired between launch and now, and they still can't commit to a replay client release date???

[Jowy]

Well to be fair, it's a very small minority of players who actually watch or cast replays. And they all already have LOL Recorder, streaming programs or video capture programs to study or show off their games. The change will be minimal, the replays will just have a little more information than now. Is it really worth it from a business standpoint to invest all your resource to this rather than to put some on this and rest on other stuff?

[Jowy]

YESSSSSSSSSSSS! Nidalee heal nerfed, but spear and cougar form buffed!! I was a bit afraid they'd nerf her damage to justify the heal, which would have sucked because hitting with that spear from max range is pretty much the best thing in the world.