Category: Editorial (Page 11 of 34)

Current Affairs: Can support be engaging?

November 7, 2011 / Jeff Morgan

When I’ve queued for ranked games recently, I’ve often been one of the last two picks on my team. For me, that has meant being pigeon-holed into playing support, a role that I utterly loathe. What could be less interesting than standing around in lane and occasionally cast Clairvoyance and a heal? Not much. Not for me anyway. I know a lot of players share that sentiment, but there are players that enjoy support. One such player made a post defending the support playstyle (albeit, calling Riot out for not releasing more support champions), and I think RiotStatikk’s response was pretty interesting.

I’ll leave you to read through his post on your own, but his basic points are these. First, bottom lane lacks diversity. This one is sort of inarguable. The subset of champions that play in bottom lane is very small, and that needs to change. Second, supports do not make interesting item choices. As Statikk sees it, “Currently bottom lane Supports function purely off of how powerful the Gold per 10 passives are.” I actually take issue with this one, because we definitely can’t peg this all on the gold-per-10 items. There’s another serious problem that allows the gold-per-10 stack to work.

The reason support players stack the gold-per-10 items is two-fold. First, gold-per-10 gives them the cash to buy wards and elixirs, performing the role they were designed to play. Second, supports can perform their role without any items. This is the big one. The base values on support spells are simply too good. You may remember a while back that the scaling values on heals got dramatically reduced in favor of stronger base stats. I actually think Riot should have done the opposite: reduce the base stats, maybe even by a lot, but allow the spells to scale well with items. Why? Because it incentivizes support players to actually build items. In their current form, support players have no reason to buy items like Deathcap or Rod of Ages. The items don’t provide enough benefit for the cost and they starve the support of ward money.

What if support couldn’t be effective without a moderate farm? What if they needed a few items in order to really support their team? Would we still see ranged AD/support in bot lane? Probably not. Ranged AD characters are typically only successful when they have a big farm. If support takes some of that farm, the Ranged AD becomes much less effective. There are characters that can still function with a moderate farm: the Tanky DPS. That’s right, all those characters that typically hang out top and have cozy little farming competitions with one another can also perform fairly well without a monster farm. They do tend to get a big farm in top lane, but you’ll notice a lot of them also take a gold-per-10 item or two. The reasoning is pretty simple – they can generally farm and avoid dying without the help of powerful items.

I think aggressive support and Tanky DPS could make for some very interesting skirmishes in bottom lane. That combination could also open the door for double-stun combos, high-burst combos, and maybe even some push combinations. Driving ranged AD up to mid or top lanes also makes for more interesting matchups in those locations. Junglers have more susceptible gank targets and the lane matchups can be more varied. Ranged AD doesn’t typically play well against a bruiser, but there are all sorts of counters between the various assassins, ranged AD, and AP carries out there. Those matchups become a lot more interesting if we force the support champions to farm a bit and drive the Tanky DPS out of top lane.

I actually enjoy a number of the support champions in the game, I just really don’t like their playstyles. Sitting in bot lane and watching the enemy jungler run in circles is not interesting gameplay. Aggressive play with a focus on buying interesting items? That’s a playstyle I can totally support.

Current Affairs, Editorial, league of legends

support support boring support buff support changes support nerf support options support players support playstyle

Zileas comes clean on the Gunblade nerf

November 6, 2011 / Jeff Morgan

I’m not happy about the Gunblade nerf. It’s not that I don’t think the item should have been nerfed – it absolutely should have been – but rather that the item nerf didn’t solve the problems with champions that use Gunblade. The most obvious offender here is Akali.

Zileas posted on the forums this weekend, claiming that Akali “WAS toned back by gunblade nerf.” That could mean a lot of different things. It might mean Riot thinks her damage is now at a reasonable level. It might mean she’s being banned less and running away with fewer games. It might mean all of the above and more, I can’t really say. I will say that I disagree. I don’t even build Gunblade on Akali in most situations. She doesn’t need it in order to be successful. Plain and simple, it’s just bonus damage.

Zileas said a bit more about the nerf, and it’s his latest statements that really have me confused. Here’s the quote, answering the question, “Why did you decide to nerf gunblade instead of akali directly?”:

Because [Gunblade] when stacked was causing the majority of the problem due to the stats being of such high value relative to other items.
We believe in taking the minimal effort required to adjust for OP situations, and a number of OP situations were coming out of gunblade. Rather than get into the hazy territory of nerfing several of champions who would then use gunblade as a crutch, we just did that. Less undesirable side effects.

First of all, stacking Gunblades have absolutely nothing to do with Akali’s current state. Was it problematic on Dominion? I don’t know. I never saw it. But I have never seen a Gunblade stack on Summoner’s Rift on any champion other than Kat. Never.

And Gunblade is hardly a crutch for Akali. It’s more like the minigun that gets strapped onto War Machine in Iron Man 2. He already had a massive arsenal. Did he really need that minigun? Same goes for Gunblade on Akali.

Most importantly, though, I really dislike the whole “minimal effort required” when it comes to nerfs. I’m not saying “you guys aren’t trying,” because I know that they are. But to see a problem with multiple solutions and say, “which one is easiest?” is shoddy balance at best. This would be a fine approach if the easy solutions were actually solving problems, but they just aren’t. The Gunblade nerf is almost perfectly analogous to the age old “attacking a symptom instead of curing the disease.”

Akali is a plague on this game in her current state. I know she has counters. I know there are plenty of bad Akali players. But for every Akali I see play poorly or get countered I see another 20 run away with games they had no business running away with, securing double kills and triple kills with ease, and essentially ruining the game for at least five other people involved.

I understand you guys don’t want to disrupt the game too much, Riot, but an Akali nerf is long overdue. Her combination of burst, mobility, and survivability is just too high, even for an assassin. Stop doing the easy thing. Stop attacking the symptom. Cure the disease.

Development, Editorial, league of legends

akali akali buff akali nerf easy way out game design gunblade gunblade changes gunblade nerf zileas

Is LoL approaching a ‘balanced’ state?

October 31, 2011 / Jeff Morgan

Shyvana.

This week we’ll see the release of Shyvana, which also means a patch with some balance changes. The change lists on recent patches have been fairly light, which surprises me. For a while there it seemed like we would see significant changes to a wide range of champions. Lately, though, we’ve had tweaks to very few champions at a time. The most obvious reason would be that Riot is settling into what they feel is a balanced state of the game. It could also be that Riot saw that they were adding too many changes to the game along with frequent champion releases and wanted to scale back the effect of each patch. I’m betting on the first, though, at least for the time being.

I’m a little bummed out that the solution to current balance issues is an increase in HP and scaling for the underpowered characters. The health creep in League of Legends is a phenomenon I don’t really understand. It used to be unusual to see characters with 4000 HP but I see that all the time now, often more than once per game. I’m tired of Trinity Force. I’m tired of Warmog’s + Atma’s. I do think we have some hope, though, even if it’s a long shot.

For now, I’m hoping that once all of the melee looks the same, Riot will come through with a nice new kit of items or some serious mechanic change that makes the current bruiser build slightly less attractive. I would also like to see some more viable strategies come forward in the near future. One of the things I first liked about League was that it was less push-oriented than DotA. In DotA a lot of my games would come down to the team with the better push comp. In LoL, at least at this point, push comps don’t really exist. In fact, I haven’t seen a comp other than the standard objective-taking rig in a long time. The game has slowly morphed into a giant farm calculator, which was fun for a while but could really use a tune-up.

Summoner’s Rift needs new life – new strategies, new playstyles, new champions with interesting, game-changing mechanics. Even if the game could be perfectly balanced as it currently is, I would still be writing this post. I didn’t fall in love with MOBAs because they’re perfectly balanced tests of skill. I fell in love with this genre because it was all about adaptability. The game was about using one skillset against another, very different skillset and attempting to be successful, whether that meant pushing or teamfighting or controlling the map. I think LoL has lost some of that magic. Here’s hoping Riot can bring it back.

Editorial, league of legends, Patches

An open letter to 1300 ELO players and other non-pros

October 26, 2011 / Jeff Morgan

Dear 1300 ELO players and fellow non-pros,

We have a problem. I know, you’ve been trying your hardest. You’ve been picking the champions you see the pros picking. You’ve been begging your last-pick teammates to please just play support. But you’ve also been complaining about your team not having CV. You’ve been complaining that your teammates don’t ward. You’ve been complaining when you see anything that doesn’t look familiar from one of those 2200 ELO streams you watch on a daily basis.

I’m going to give it to you as straight as I possibly can: You are not a pro. I know this is hard to hear. I know it’s just your teammates getting you down. I know it’s the noobs feeding that are keeping you in the 1300s. Nevertheless, you are still not a pro. You are a 1300 ELO player, and that means a few things.

First, you don’t have to do everything the pros do. The pros play the game a certain way because they are experienced, skilled, consistent players. They make very few mistakes. They select team compositions based on their lack of mistake-making. They choose team comps based on their intimate knowledge of one another’s playstyles. Even when they don’t seem to be communicating, they are counting on their teammates based on thousands of games of experience. You don’t have that luxury. You need to go in to every game with the goal of giving your teammates as much information as possible. You need to choose champions you can personally succeed with.

Just so we’re clear, support + ranged AD is not the only combination of champions that can be successful in a lane. Champions with high damage and crowd control can effectively shut out a support and AD. No buts. I don’t care that you only see support + AD on streams. You aren’t a 2200 ELO streamer. You are a 1300 ELO player. You are playing against 1300 ELO players. They will make plenty of mistakes, I promise.

Second, we all need to stop acting like we can pinpoint exactly what went wrong in every game. I’m guilty of this, too. Each game has mountains of data that will lead you to often faulty conclusions about the reasons for winning and losing. Granted, it’s not a good sign if your mid has 50 creep kills at the 20 minute mark, but if you haven’t been controlling dragon, if you haven’t been aggressive in your lanes, if you haven’t been helping out in teamfights, well, it’s not just your mid’s fault. League of Legends is a very fragmented game with several different phases and each champion performs differently at every stage of the game. Giving up two kills at level 1 is not the end of the world. Hopefully it will encourage more careful behavior for the next ten minutes, but the game is still winnable.

Third and lastly, try banning champions that are extremely forgiving over the course of the game, not champions that require a high level of skill. Ban Morgana. Why? Because she gets a free farm for one button press. Ban Irelia. Why? Because she has a crazy kit that allows her to survive her mistakes. Stop banning Fiddlesticks. Very few people play him and even fewer know what they’re doing. Stop banning Kassadin. Most Kass players at our level miss their Force Pulse at least 25 percent of the time. Stop banning Gangplank. He’s extremely soft for the first 12-15 levels of the game. Force your opponents to play champions that suffer when they make mistakes.

I want to repair our relationship, I really do. If we continue down our present course, though, I can’t see a future for you and I.

Sincerely,

The Wiggin Boy

Editorial, league of legends

elo hell elo loss lol pros pros

Dipping into Diablo 2

October 24, 2011 / Jeff Morgan

The fall release schedule has been pretty underwhelming so far. Most of the big titles have had their release date pushed back, though we will see Battlefield 3 tomorrow. Personally, I’m not much of an FPS fan these days, so I’m holding out for the RPG/ARTS games that are yet to come.

For now, Diablo 3 is my number one pick. I played the hell out of Diablo 2 back in high school and college and I’ve actually picked it back up to get in the mood for the next addition to the franchise. I’m surprised how much enjoyment I can still get out of a game that is nothing more than a gear grind. There’s still something fun about it, despite it’s gross imbalances, too. Why can Hammerdins kill everything in the game with such ease, even with a relatively easy-to-find kit? Why are high runes such a crapshoot? Why do immunities even exist in this kind of grinder?

I’m going to avoid answering those questions and instead offer some advice. If you’re thinking about going back and playing through Diablo 1 and 2, I’d highly recommend checking out the Reddit server, at least for your multiplayer Diablo 2 experiences. I played some Battle.net not too long ago and immediately ran up against the game’s big problems – bots and duping. High-level items are so common it’s silly. With Reddit’s private server, though, the economy is pretty balanced and, more importantly, the players are friendly. It’s been nice to go back through some of my favorite classes and specs, finding help along the way from generous players.

You can find out more about the Diablo 2 Reddit server at the server’s subreddit. I’m playing there under the account “thewuggler” if you happen to join.

Out of this fall’s games, what are you most looking forward to?

Development, Diablo 3, Editorial

diablo 2 diablo 2 lod diablo 3 diablo 3 beta fall fall release