League of Legends General Discussion Thread

[Sullla]

I can't really weigh in on these changes to say whether they are good or bad. It's just *WAY* too many changes, too fast, in too short of a period of time. In the span of two weeks, Riot has done the following:

* Introduced new masteries
* Changed nearly all of the summoner spells
* Rebalanced most of the AD carries
* Completely, 100% changed how jungling works
* Altered health potions, minion damage, red buff, and other very basic game mechanics

Again, these sound like good changes in theory, but holy crap man! Slow down there. Riot does new patches every two weeks, so why this rush to throw out a ton of new stuff all at once? For all of us playing at a pretty high level of play, it's frustrating to see vast sweeping changes being thrown around willy-nilly. There's... really no reason why these new changes couldn't be spaced out gradually over the course of several months to #1 test them properly and #2 give players a chance to get used to them. I don't enjoy feeling like a beta test dummy, unless I'm actually getting paid to do so.

[sunrise089]

I also don't like the minion damage change. Looking at recent patches and listening to patch previews it really seems like they want to punish careful positioning in favor of running up and just rightclicking away. I think Riot's preferred lane for "fun over non-fun" would be two Trynds both with infinite ults

Re: junglers - Why would people be jungling at level 1 anyways? People at level 1-5 don't even have an understanding of the XP mechanics or what the buffs do. I disagree too that you need OMG runes and masteries at level 10 or whatever to jungle. I climbed from ~level 10 to 30 jungling Amumu in 75% of my games. High sustain junglers like Nunu are cheap, easy, and give people plenty of jungling fun sub-30 if they want it.

@Sullla - 100% agree. I'm very amused by Riot's timing. We just went through "preseason 2." Here's a wacky idea - introduce major gameplay changes gradually through a preseason so competitive play isn't as impacted, analyze the data, and then get everything stable for the season launch. Apparently Riot doesn't like that approach...

[Tyrmith]

They'd have to massively change the gold/health restored ratio to really change things imo. In the end they'll just prevent you from buying more than 1 at a time I think if they are serious about changing things with health restoration.

Remember that making the game fun and easy to learn is what separates it from the 20 other competitors. I don't know about you guys, but when I was leveling up and playing alone with out RB people the laneing phase could last until level 17 or 18. There was just no reason to leave the lane unless you were crushing your lane or being crushed. Now people might leave their lane when they push and kill jungle creeps or roam more. With this change to the jungle things will get more chaotic in low level games, and so hopefully more interesting. In high level games where people know better and are more organized, so it won't affect us.

Who know what'll happen with the "every creep has a buff" nonsense though. It just seems like all it will do is mean that blue and red buff won't mean nearly as much and dragon and baron will mean more.

Edit: I do agree that it's pretty funny that they are making all of these changes as soon as the season started, though tbh I don't think the whole season thing means much. What matters are events like MLG and IEM, not some random totally unknown indefinite length of time that really doesn't do anything that wasn't already being done.

[VoiceOfUnreason]

This patch got me to reconsider this question: "how many hours per week do you have to play just to keep up with the changes?"


I'm probably not Riot's target audience - despite my willingness to send them dollars, I keep looking at the time investments and thinking that I could manage to fit quite a bit of life into that much walk clock time....


That said, they should by now have a mountain of data to mine to see if their changes are having the kinds of effects they hope on their income, if they are doing the sweating to tease it out and drawing the correct conclusions.

[spellman]

This patch got me to reconsider this question: "how many hours per week do you have to play just to keep up with the changes?"

More than I have....

[Sullla]

Voice of Unreason makes an excellent point, one that I felt as well. I play this game on a pretty frequent basis, and I watch the top players on stream far more often than I should. I feel as though I have a very good understand of the game's mechanics, which has been built up over many, many months of experience.

Now Riot hits the reset button, and much of that knowledge has instantly become worthless. It's like a comment I saw posted about the new jungle elsewhere: "Cool, so the 4-5 months I've put into getting good at jungling, understanding creep gold/xp/time, best routes, runes to use, all the junglers I learned, masteries is now wasted. Thanks riot." For a game that already has a high time investment needed to play it effectively, the extremely rapid pace of patch changes sure can make League of Legends frustrating. I found myself thinking yesterday, "How much time do I have to continue devoting to this game to play it effectively?"

So yes, I do think it's a good idea in theory to make jungling more open to newcomers and less punishing to those who don't have the propery setup. However, they kind of already did that with the new masteries, which opened up jungling to a huge range of new characters already. Adding this latest change a mere two weeks later, when people were still just barely adapting already, kind of comes as a kick in the nuts. I honestly don't care about "casualization" or "dumbing down" or blah blah blah forum complaints. What I do care about is forcing too many changes on the player community too fast. Why? Because it's not fun for existing players, and it's very obvious how unhappy most of the existing player base feels over these changes. No one wants to have to keep learning the same game over and over and over again endlessly.

Overall: good changes in theory, the execution of them feels rather inept.

[Deceptus]

I have a bad feeling that my favourite role is going to become diluted. I don't even know if running a full jungler is going to be worth it. Especially since you are going to be behind if you aren't staying in the jungle and farming - the camps come back so fast there is little reason not to be a jungling little SCV and killing them all the time. Because if you fail a gank you will be behind. And counterjungling? Say I steal Amumu's wraiths. Does that hamper him much? Not at all. What I think will happen is either we have farmfest in the jungle or junglers will become obsolete (NOOOOOOOOOOO!) and we will see those mini-junglers that just walk from lane to lane picking up kills while jungle farm goes to laners (mid clearing wraiths, top doing small golems, et cetera) and to the gankers when they're not busy killing people.

If the mini-junglers idea proves true (more jungle Blitzcranks and Twitches), I will call the period after those changes are implemented...
*puts on sunglasses*
...the Rise of Roam.
(yay~)

[UberTri]

Well for any of you that are interested, you can watch this video to get an idea what the new jungle meta is gonna be like.

[Gustaran]

This patch got me to reconsider this question: "how many hours per week do you have to play just to keep up with the changes?"

I'm glad I don't play ranked so I dont have too keep up with the latest changes. I remember when I started playing, it was rather easy to acquire basic knowlegde about every champion in the game. Right now, I couldn't really tell you the name of any skill from Riven, Shyvana, Skarner, Fizz or Yorick.

The constant champion rebalancing doesn't help either. I mean it's fun that a lot of champions are viable, but sometimes your favourite champion drops 2 tiers and suddenly you are basically forced to get the newest FOTM tier 1 champion if you want to play ranked.

Jungle example:
You like to play Warwick ? Nah, too slow now. Nunu who was a great choice once ? Bad idea.
But hey, I just recently bought Nocturne because he was supposed to be so good. Epic fail, because in the meantime Riot buffed Skarner from jungle trash tier to god tier while Nocturne fell out of favor....

Just imagine you are a pro player

[Axiis]

I guess I only post to complain about Riot, but I have a question:

Would it really harm their business model to just let the game be static for a little while? How about a three month period where all they release are skins and small balance patches? I know they get most of their money from new champs, but as a bunch of other people have said, it's really frustrating to constantly have to relearn the game. I just really learned how to jungle with Riven and dropped a bunch of IP on jungling runes, and now all that effort is pretty much wasted. And really, how many new players want to jungle anyway? I don't think I could have jungled and enjoyed the role before I got a solid understanding of the game's mechanics.

Riot just keeps inventing problems. I don't really know of any other game that sees so many changes to core gameplay mechanics. And you know what blows me away? They have a hugely popular product with a gigantic player base, yet they continue to claim that they must make these changes in the name of FUN. I wouldn't play if I wasn't having fun, and I'm pretty sure the however many millions of people that make up the LoL player base wouldn't either. These changes just annoy me because every time I see the jungle get completely revamped (and thanks for not showing it off at all in the video introducing it riot!), I just think of it as more work for a game I already sink too much time into anyway. Which, by the way, is the opposite of FUN.

I guess I'm just lazy

But I really do want Riot to stop screwing around with the game and just let it breathe for a little while. Maybe make a replay system or finally finish Magma Chamber. And buy me a pony.