This past holiday season Riot was kind enough to dish out 450 RP to any summoner who had not been the subject of punitive action over the course of November and December. It was a nice gesture, though the surprise gift didn’t do much to incentivize ongoing good behavior. Riot did mention that the gift was the beginning of a much larger project aimed at rewarding the kind and persistent.

That project starts…at an undisclosed time. Once a summoner reaches level 3, a staggering feat to be sure, he will be gifted 400 RP, just for sticking around. Yes, level 3. No, you don’t get it if you’ve been level 30 for the past two years. Apparently the 450 RP in December was for you…and everyone else over level 6. Honestly, these initiatives confuse the hell out of me and seem to stir up a real shit storm for the folks at Riot. Almost the entire first page of comments on that post fall in line with this sentiment, courtesy of GuardiansAngel:

“How about you start rewarding the guys playing thousands of games of league of legends before you reward the guys who play a few games and quit.”

Those posts have hundreds of upvotes while the actual announcement has less than 100. Now, it could be that the malcontent level 30 summoners are the majority of the players on the forums, but it could just as easily be that the people committed to the game don’t like to see new players get incentives just for being new.

I understand that this is meant to be a gesture, but here’s the thing: gestures are usually thoughtful ways to show appreciation, gratitude, or praise. Key word in there is thoughtful. Riot’s efforts in this regard have been historically careless, and feel much more like a marketing gag to get their hooks into new players than an actual gesture of appreciation. The 450 RP this December was the exception – that was a nice gesture. This, this is just a marketing gag.

I’m also curious, why level 3? Is Riot struggling with new player retention and, if so, is 400 RP at level 3 going to change that? I don’t believe that this is an actual strategy for keeping players around, but then why do it? Level 3 can be accomplished by winning two games – is this really something worth pumping RP into? Maybe the numbers simply worked out that when players are given a certain amount of RP, X percentage of players will double down and buy RP to bridge the gap for a more expensive purchase. If that’s the real reason this RP is going out, well, good for Riot I guess. I’m just so confused by the whole thing that I’d be happy with such a logical conclusion.

It has actually been interesting to see the kind of discussion that has happened in Morello’s thread and more interesting still to see the way he has responded. A lot of the thread has been the typical “none of this will work” kind of stuff, which was to be expected. There are a lot of people who are willing to spout off on the forums but don’t have a whole lot of experience with the game. Morello has been mostly level-headed, though he did get a little rowdy with one commenter.

Here’s the original comment:

The thing is, this testing has been done over and over. I honestly feel like you are so out of touch with this game at times it’s ridiculous.

Whether or not Xin beats AP champs mid isn’t the issue at hands. Certain champs don’t fit into the game, period. Xin is just a bad champion currently. This is from someone who has hundreds of Xin games played on their main. His problem is he doesn’t scale for anything and his synergy with items is inferior to better tanky DPS (ie. Jarvan and Irelia). Xin doesn’t have a way to back out of a fight. Once he initiates, he is in. You force him to go glass cannon but don’t give him the defenses to stay up for more than a few seconds.

That aside, there are lots of times I have seen champions like Talon and Pantheon picked to hard-counter certain AP champs. So noting this in the OP isn’t something new.

If you want to break the meta, you need to focus on buffing champions instead of nerfing them. Stop the power creep and bring older champions back in line with newer ones. At times it seems like you guys try to do this, but you don’t hit their problem areas. Let me give you and example:

Ashe has the weakest base and scaling AD of ALL the AD carries. So you buff her HP and Mana? I hate to make this sounds rude, but that’s the only way it can come out: Do you even play this game?

I think this could have been said a little more tactfully, and questioning whether Morello plays the game or not is a little silly. Still, I think this guy raises some decent points, even if his argument is a bit…confused. This whole “who can beat an AP mid” discussion doesn’t really matter on a champion-by-champion level. There are counters all over the place. Unfortunately, without the other lanes changing, beating an AP mid with Talon or Pantheon won’t make the meta suddenly change.

I’ll leave you to read Morello’s response on your own. It’s a spicy one. And don’t get me wrong, I don’t think he’s out of line. I think he addressed most of what the guy said fairly well. I just want to highlight one part of Morello’s response to this part of the discussion.

What did we do to change the meta in the US to the EU one? Why are Ezreal and some other AD’s the standard mid in the China metagame? Why does Korea excel at AOE comps? Is one of them superior to all the others? Are they representative of different styles? Do players from different areas practice different primary skills?

It could be any of these, but I’m pretty sure “the current way the local region plays is the best way to play” isn’t true, especially with as often as we do change things.

I think this is where Riot needs to be spending a lot of energy. There are most definitely reasons the meta has developed as it has. There are reasons it has remained the way it has for months now. I wish I knew more what he meant with the “as often as we do change things” bit. From my perspective, the game hasn’t changed very much over the past six months or so. Part of that is certainly meta-driven, but developmentally the game looks very similar to the game in July. Riot is pretty mild with their buffs and nerfs. The one major change has been to the mechanics of the jungle, but even that didn’t shake loose a stagnant meta. Certain champions rose and fell in popularity, but the way people play the game has remained the same.

I would love to see a focus on much bigger concepts regarding meta. Why is safety such a cornerstone of the current gameplay. Why did support/AD bot become such a big deal. Where does sustain fit in to all of this. It would be simple enough to add a new queue that has a more volatile system of buffing and nerfing, and I think that could be really exciting. I’ll be keeping an eye on more discussion about this. For now, results are hugely inconclusive, and I don’t think this forum thread will get many, if any, people to play the game differently than they’re used to playing it.

For a while there, I was thinking Riot was happy with the current metagame. It looks like they might like to see a little more change than has happened over the past six months, so they’ve turned to the community for ideas. Morello started a thread called “Morello challenge: bust open the meta (AP mid edition),” hoping to stir up some new ideas for changing the current meta.

I like the idea as whole – I think it would be great to see the community come up with new ideas for changing the game – but I think he’s asking the wrong people. The current meta didn’t just evolve naturally. It came from tournaments. It came from the pros. It came from livestreams. Those are the people we need to have pumping out new ideas, but unfortunately new ideas don’t really fit with what they’re doing.

The current meta evolved for a few reasons, but I think the basic theme is consistency. Pro teams were looking for a way to maximize map control, farm, and objective contest power while minimizing the ability for the other team to influence those goals. Perhaps the one wild card in the current meta is the AP mid, but the AP mid is mostly there to provide burst and control in fights, both of which can be overcome in the late game with a farmed top lane and bottom lane carry. You could say the jungler is a wild card, but the evolution of jungling into yet another tanky DPS is just another move toward consistency. Pros want reliable performance, and they’ve found the best way to get it.

Feedback from the rest of the playerbase is going to be mostly anecdotal. For starters, there is very little consistency in skill between games. Every game I play has a wild swing in either the positive or the negative. I sometimes play with very good players, I sometimes play with very bad players. In either case, this is obviously going to have a serious impact on whether a selected champion can beat out an AP mid. I’ve taken loads of champions mid and been very successful – anyone from Talon to Kayle, Shaco to Sona – but that isn’t going to bring about a shift in the meta. In most cases these matchups come down to player skill, and it is that variable that inevitably thwarts most attempts to shake up the meta.

I’m not trying to say that you can’t play outside the meta and win. You totally can. But doing so on a regular basis requires a level of coordination that most players just don’t get in their average game. You certainly aren’t going to see it much in solo queue. This is why Morello’s thread puzzles me – he’s asking a group of people that really have no influence over the meta to come up with ways to usurp the meta. Do you think M5 is reading that discussion thread thinking “omg gaiz, we should totally put Taric mid?’ They aren’t. Even if they are thinking that, they sure as hell didn’t read it in that thread.

If Riot really wants to break up the current meta, they need to do a couple things. First, incentivize top players and streamers to try new things. If those guys aren’t doing things outside the current meta and doing it on a highly regular basis, no one else will do it either. The best way to incentivize this kind of play is to make it viable for winning games. That’s number two on the “break the meta” to-do list. Make more options viable. Return some of the experience to champion kills. Stop the diminishing gold returns on killing players. Encourage teamfighting. Release some strong pushers. Encourage players to use spells thoughtfully instead of spamming them for farm and big harass. Return creep damage so that players have to think before engaging in a lane fight because they might actually lose health.

Those things will break up the meta. They will probably require some significant balance tweaks if implemented, but they could actually have an effect on the way the game is played. Asking players to rethink a method that has been advertised to them by top players for a year? That’s not going to cut it.

I’m sure many of you remember the lengthy rant I posted the day Riot cancelled the Mac client. As was clear from my post, I think Riot handled the situation very poorly, and they haven’t had an answer for the Mac users since. I had heard rumblings of a community-driven LoL for Mac project, but I just looked at the project and I am damn impressed.

A player by the name of “Boompje” hosts the LoL for Mac project, a community effort to bring League of Legends to Mac players. I’m not sure how it all works, nor can I honestly figure out how Riot hasn’t issued some sort of cease and desist (he is asking for donations, after all). What I do know is that I would buy Boompje and his team a beer if I could find them. I don’t play League on a Mac, but the fact that they are willing to devote personal time to supporting Mac players is absolutely fantastic.

I am, however, concerned for the future of the project. I don’t know the legal ramifications of the LoL for Mac project, but I would imagine there are some issues involved with distributing a version of the client for an unsupported operating system. Perhaps some of the legally and technically educated among you can offer some insight here. I would imagine, though, that Riot needs to protect its IP, and I would imagine this violates the terms of use agreement in some way.

All the same, show those guys some support. They’re doing the community a great service.

I can’t remember exactly when it started with League of Legends, but some time ago the classic “Why is every girl a barbie-proportioned stripper?” question started to pop up. Despite arguments on the other side of the fence (“What about Poppy?”), I think the argument holds a lot of weight. The diversity of female champion design in League of Legends could be described as falling anywhere on the scale between “tragic” and “nonexistent.” I’m going to try to avoid getting into the argument much because, frankly, it’s overdiscussed by a group of people who aren’t serious about it and underdiscussed by the people who really care. What interests me is the range of responses Riot employees give as reasons for continued stream of bimbos.

A good place to start is at this thread, which is where I got the image above. The interesting thing here isn’t that the champions tend toward slutty archetypes, but more that the body type is exactly the same, regardless of tier. This was a much more interesting analysis to see than the typical “OMG LOOK HOW BIG HER BEWBS ARE.” I would love to see a witch/hag champion that has some crusty old woman flavor. I also love the silhouette of a large, ogre-ish woman in the top right.

The really weird parts of this discussion come courtesy of Riot employees, like Ricklessabandon, who says, “while i’m totally okay with seeing variety in form, i don’t really like the idea of having diversity just for the sake of having diversity. that is to say, i wouldn’t want an old chick just because there are too many 20-somethings in the roster–that’s not a good reason in my opinion. i’d want an old man/woman only if we had a good story concept and the best fit happens to be an older person. the main problem i’d want to avoid is aesthetics replacing part/all of a champion’s character, and i think that’s harder to do when you set out to create a character for the sake of adding diversity to a roster.”

What he neglects to address is that the roster is almost exclusively 20-somethings, and that for the most part there is no character design that backs this trend. Why wouldn’t a woman capable of wearing full plate mail be a little thicker in stature? Would trained warriors really be such waifs? Annie, one of the few characters that bucks the trend, is also one of the few characters for which there is actually a character-driven reason behind her aesthetics. That’s to say nothing of the fact that story doesn’t really have a place in League of Legends. I’m not saying character design/flavor isn’t important – it is – rather that Riot shouldn’t be waiting for a cool “story” to design some different champions.

I’m going to leave a link to another thread through CLGaming’s redtracker because it will allow you to see the original post and IronStylus’ red response. This also contains links to two Kotaku articles that are worth a read if you’re interested in this stuff. I’ll end my discussion here, though. Let me know what you think in the comments.

Image Credit: Lunakuneko on the official forums

This may be old news for some of you, but I didn’t notice it until today while I was playing Shaco. I Deceived over a wall to catch a low-health Ashe under her second turret. She saw me and moved away, though not before I could land a Two-Shiv on her. I was devastated to see that the spell wasn’t quite enough damage to drop her, especially since I was soaking so much turret fire to attempt the kill. Much to my surprise, she died just as she entered the fog of war. As she disappeared, I saw what looked like the burning animation from lizard buff.

I haven’t been able to find anything official from Riot regarding this change – it certainly wasn’t in Volibear’s patch notes – but it seems that this has been active since the most recent patch. I saw it today with Shaco, Nunu, Ryze, and Swain, though some of the threads I’ve found confirm that it is any single target spell.

This is a pretty huge change, one that further complicates the current jungle situation. Imagine giving lizard buff to Urgot at level two. Yeah, now his Q applies lizard. Have fun with that. How about Ryze? Katarina? LeBlanc? Kassadin? Kennen? Akali? Oh dear god, Akali. The problem, of course, is that it means the jungler is giving up a serious amount of XP early in the game. Unless he is ganking extremely well, passing off buffs isn’t really an option in the early game. Still, I always like to have more options than fewer, so I’ll call this “interesting” a the very least.

Had you already noticed the change?

With Volibear’s patch came a change to one of the longest-standing mechanics in the game: minion damage versus champions. Minion damage against champions was nerfed by “about 15 percent.” I would love to know the actual numbers behind the nerf, if only because it seems like champions are taking much less damage than even that.

I think the change is problematic for a couple reasons. First, it was a nice way to slow down those heavy physical damage dealers. I know, I know, lane passivity and all that, but I actually think minion damage contributed to lane activity. Riot seems to be confusing “aggressive gameplay” with “mindless gameplay.” Aggressive gameplay doesn’t necessarily mean champ-on-champ battles with no outside influence. Aggressive gameplay, at least as I see it, is encouraging more activity in lane than just minion farming, and minion damage does just that. The more potential damage sources against a champion, the more likely that champion will get low, which opens up opportunities for kills. That’s aggressive gameplay.

Reducing incoming minion damage also limited a lot of the counter options available in the lane. With the old damage, I could be losing in lane but bait an attack with a large minion wave and manage a kill. I had more options, and my opponent had a more interesting decision to make around whether or not he could get the kill. He had to factor in more variables, which means more chance for error. These are all good things.

What I really think Riot should have done is make magic damage dealers draw minion aggro the same way physical harass does. I usually don’t think additive solutions are very good – just look at the current health situation – but in this case I think more damage in the lane is better.

I hesitate to write this post, because it’s entirely possible that I’m overanalyzing the situation, but the changes around the new jungle are so bizarre to me that I just can’t help it. The latest in this new saga is that Zileas, Riot’s Design Director, is digging around the official forums for feedback on the latest round of tweaks. Zileas comes and goes on the forums, so it doesn’t necessarily mean anything, but he hasn’t been largely involved in the feedback on this project, so why now?

For one, the playerbase is clearly upset. There have been forum threads since the jungle changes were announced crying foul. What’s more interesting to me is that Riot seems to care so much. There have been issues in the past that upset the community – what makes the jungle changes different? I can only think that Riot is seeing some sort of statistical or high profile pushback on the jungle changes that merits Zileas’ personal oversight. I know some of the streamers have been unhappy, but just how many is hard to say.

I only mention the statistical angle because Riot seems interested in quieting people down as quickly as possible, and there has to be some backing to that. We’ve seen unpopular changes in the past that lingered for a long, long time. Why is this one so different?

I give Riot credit for being willing to change one of the longest standing conventions in the LoL style of play, but I wish the company was standing behind it. The change needs time to permeate. Sure, we’ll get a few million hours of playtesting done in a week, which provides a decent chunk of data, but it takes much longer than that for playstyle changes to trickle down through the playerbase.

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.

Today’s maintenance was supposed to remove Normal Draft mode from the list of available queue types, along with re-enabling ranked game modes. I was pleasantly surprised when I logged in and found that Normal Draft was still enabled.

Later in the day, Tamat followed the surprise inclusion with this post:

We’ve heard your feedback, and as a part of our ongoing commitment to making League of Legends an even more fun and awesome experience for players of all preferences, we are officially introducing Draft Mode into Normal Games! Now you can play like the pros without any impact on your ranked rating!

I have to say, this is probably the best feature launch we’ve yet seen in League of Legends. Why? Because we didn’t expect it. It wasn’t overhyped (unless you count the rumors/occasional red posts saying it may have sort of might be almost is kinda getting worked on). Hell, we were even told we wouldn’t be keeping the feature.

And yet, here it is, and it’s pretty awesome. Good on you, Riot. Good on you.