Category: Current Affairs (Page 12 of 17)

      Minion changes to be altered next patch

      March 4, 2011 /

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      It took less than a week for Riot to see that the minion changes do not directly accomplish the goals of ending games more quickly. I don’t want to bag on them too much – there’s no way they can match the thousands and thousands of player hours logged on patch day in playtesting – but still, this should have been pretty obvious. It’s good to know that there is already some brainstorming going on for a fix. Morello dropped by the forums today to lay some knowledge on us.

      Basically, minions are too strong, too early, allowing strong pushers like Master Yi, Sivir, or TF to painfully exploit exposed lanes. Granted, the reduced respawn timers actually help with that (even if they’re otherwise bad for the game), but with a well-timed teleport, it’s possible to rock your way down the lane in a very short period of time.

      The next patch will move the additional cannon minions to the 40-45 minute range, up from 20, and reducing the cannon minion resistances a bit. While I think the changes will likely be good, I really don’t want this to turn into a trial and error situation. While I think it’s cool that Riot is trying different things to manage pacing, I can’t help but wonder if minions are really the solution. What about the fact that average champion durability on release has gone way up in the past several months? If it takes too long to kill champions at towers, the game becomes more and more defensive as the tower advantage is what really decides the outcome of a fight.

      The fact that Riot is turning to minions makes me wonder what the development team thinks about the current field of champions. Do they like where the metagame is at? For now, all signs point to yes. Personally, I think the tanky meta has more than run its course, but maybe that’s just me.

      Current Affairs, Editorial, league of legends, News

      The new death timers have to go

      March 4, 2011 /

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      The main focus of this week’s patch wasn’t champions or items or lane balance. This week, Riot wanted to address game pacing. Too many games were dragging out long after they had been decided. Minions got buffed, gaining more damage against turrets, higher resistances, and after 20 minutes, each lane spawns an extra cannon minion. It’s hard to say whether it was the right change because Riot also made a mechanic change that directly conflicts with game time reduction: death timer reduction.

      Since Tuesdays patch, champions respawn much faster than they used to. The old system had death timers start at 28 seconds and ramp up to 50 by the time players reached 18. Now it starts at a mere 12 seconds and goes up to 50. In short, the system is terrible. While it does let players actually play the game more often, it also wrecks the game’s pushing mechanics. If the games were too long before, they’re nearly eternal now.

      I had a game a few days back in which my team was doing very well. I started off 5-0 as Cho’gath, and most of my teammates had similar farms. We had one of those sprawling teamfights that are so common these days, far past our own minion waves but resulting in 3-4 kills. Before we could bring our creeps up to the turret, their team was back up. At the 20 minute mark we aced our opponents by diving their second lane turret. We killed the turret just as the fight started but still took a bit of damage from it. Again, by the time we had pushed up to and started in on the base turret, a couple of the enemy team were back, able to defend the turret without much trouble. In most games, that would be an inhibitor. Things only get worse with characters like Shen and Rammus. They’re back to turret so quickly and turrets hit so much harder that it’s nearly impossible to push before 30 minutes.

      The timers aren’t just bad in teamfights; the timers are bad for the lane as well. It used to be the case that winning a lane fight bought you some time to farm minions and hopefully get some work done on the turret. With a 12-18 second death timer, dying is almost no worse than a simple recall. If you just barely won the fight, that free period in which you could get a few more last hits and do some tower work is all but gone. Lanes last longer, which means the laning phase is much longer, which lengthens a game.

      Here again, I like the idea Riot had. It’s boring to spend 30 secs at the base at level 2. That was an important mechanic, though. It taught players not to get careless at early levels and it gave enemies the chance to exploit the advantage they had created. I’m really hoping Riot either reverts this soon or comes up with a way to counteract the effects of champions getting back to lane so quickly. Until then, settle in for some long, frustrating games.

      Current Affairs, Editorial, league of legends

      Magma Chamber delayed by the ‘Shiny’ update

      February 21, 2011 /

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      This past week’s patch fueled a surprising outburst of rage, mostly centered on the IP system remake. Of course, any time Riot makes an unpopular decision, the forums explode with demands for Magma Chamber and general unrest. Phreak responded with a fairly lengthy post, covering most of the features Riot has yet to release. It’s not really news, but he did reiterate the fact that Magma Chamber is being delayed until the graphical update, which Riot calls “Shiny,” is released.

      In short, that’s a huge bummer. I know that Shiny is meant to improve the graphical experience on both the low and the high end, but it means very little for veteran players. Newcomers might be slightly more impressed, but what we really want is features. I read an article in a digital media class in college about the intersection of graphics and gameplay. Though I can’t find the article, a simple search for “graphics vs gameplay” brings up scads of blog posts, articles, and forum threads dedicated to the discussion, most of which lean in favor of gameplay. That’s no surprise – I think almost everyone could agree that gameplay makes the game. It’s interesting to see developers then go for graphics in many instances.

      Now, I don’t really think that’s what Riot is doing. Riot’s growth has been something of an anomaly in the development community, so as a company, they have to focus on the total package experience and getting that total package to as many players as possible. That includes the people playing at the low end of the hardware spectrum. It just sucks that veteran players are still waiting for a compelling feature release, and the thing that’s holding it up is a graphical overhaul.

      Current Affairs, Development, Editorial, league of legends

      Is champion selection a barometer of balance?

      February 13, 2011 /

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      There’s a post on the forums right now citing the champions that are “mained” by the top 50 players in ranked solo queue. It’s interesting to see what those players use most, but I’m not so sure what sort of conclusions we can reasonably draw from the information.

      The most played champions among the top 50 players are Shaco, Pantheon, Kassadin, and Ezreal, each with four players who main the given character. You have to remember, these are just the characters those players play most often. Also, they don’t represent a huge majority over other characters. The original poster said this:

      – Only 28 of the game’s 69 champions are represented in the Top 50 as someone’s Main.
      – Only 2 tanks, Singed (3) and Alistar (1). I guess if you count Nunu (1) it’s three.
      – Only 5 Ranged AD carries… and only 1 of those is high on the list. I guess six if you build AD Ez

      The fact that 28 characters out of a possible 50 (remember, only the top 50 players were recorded) are represented actually seems really good. To me, that points to player skill as more important than champion choice, but even that is hard to qualify.

      Zileas also posted in the thread, giving overall stats for champion choice. The window between the most played champion and least played champion is surprisingly small. Ashe is played in 3.8 percent of games while the least played champion is .4 percent of all picks. Again, this doesn’t really say much about balance. Riot has said that players over 1200 ELO make up roughly the top 25 percent of the player base. Basically, there are a lot of low-skill players affecting those numbers, players that don’t really factor in to the balance discussion.

      Also, among all of this, it’s important to remember that not all champions are free. As Zileas pointed out, it’s not really surprising that Ashe is the number one pick. She’s 450 IP and very easy to play. When you consider the champion rotation and the way that players unlock different champions, it’s tough to say that the number of games played per champion mean a whole lot. It’s probably fair to assume that a crazy OP champion would be purchased right away, at least at the higher tiers, but I don’t know how much that matters to newer players. I would imagine that new players don’t see the full potential of a character very often, particularly if they’re new to the MOBA scene.

      There are definitely some interesting stats in the thread, but I don’t think we can take much more from them than that free champion rotations keep more champions in play. Since players have limited access to champions, the free rotation makes us more likely to try someone new when they’re available, which is a good thing. Other than that, all I can say is that I wish Riot made more stats like this available. It’s a really interesting look at the player base and how all the different aspects of the game affect player choice.

      Current Affairs, Editorial, league of legends

      Community programmers release League of Legends replay tool

      February 11, 2011 /

      LoL Replay.It was only a matter of time before intrepid programmers from the LoL community got fed up with the long wait for Riot’s official replay system and decided to do something about it. Matt and Cam, two programmers from Perth, have made a third party League of Legends replay tool, and it only took them three weeks.

      Yeah, three weeks. It doesn’t interface directly with the LoL client, and since Riot is currently working on its own replay system, the company has been removing links to the program on the official forums. That said, you can get the program, called “LoL Replay” from the developer’s website.

      Up to this point, the best way to see a “replay” of your game was to video record your desktop, which can be a resource intensive process. The LoL Replay tool works by recording network traffic and using the data to recreate the game afterward. This allows the player to view different perspectives from the match, though I don’t know if it’s possible to watch enemy movements.

      I’m away from my desktop right now, but I’ll be giving this a test later today. The news is especially relevant now that Riot has released a launcher/patcher capable of supporting replays, even if it is only in beta.

      via: PC Gamer

      Current Affairs, league of legends, News

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