I was planning to let FG LoL Mondays slide through the holidays, but I have some extra time on my hands tonight so I figured, let’s play a few games together. I’ll be online around 9:30 this evening to play a few games and experience that new jungle with you guys.
If you’d like to play, jump online and join the channel “Fearless Gamer” in the PvP.net client. You can always find me online as “The Wiggin Boy” as well.
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.
The proposed jungle adjustments have finally made it through testing and are now live. Here’s a peek:
Increased total base Health in the jungle a bit, focusing on the larger monsters. This is to help accommodate single-target focused junglers.
Increased base Damage in the jungle a bit. This is to add some additional counter-jungling danger, as well as making sustain-based junglers, such as Warwick or Fiddlesticks, fill their specific niche again.
Increased Experience rewards of the jungle, both base and scaling. Simply put, this should make sure the jungler stays somewhere between the solo and duo lanes in most cases, as opposed to closer to the duo lane.
Reduced the Health scaling on the small golem camp. This is to adjust the difficulty/reward ratio on these monsters as the game goes on.
Moved around Gold and Experience rewards so that the Blue Wraith, the Giant Wolf, and the Medium Golem give a higher percentage of the reward for defeating their camp. This is a specific change to increase the viability of counter-jungling. Stealing big monsters will be more impactful.
Monsters now will start to accumulate more reward if they remain idle on the map for a certain amount of time. While we like there to be tradeoffs between ganking and farming, this should somewhat reduce the penalty of failed ganks and reward successful ganks more. Additionally, counter-junglers can steal these monsters and reset their “bank” of additional rewards.
More thoughts after the weekend when I have a little more time to play.
I have to give credit where credit is due. Bloodybunny, who reads here and plays with us on Monday nights, scoped this story a few days before it hit the forums. He sent me a message the other day saying he expected a legendary Warwick skin, based on the remakes to Warwick’s animations. Wouldn’t you know, we’re now looking at a teaser for Hyena Warwick. Good call, Bunny.
It looks like Hyena Warwick is in the works. I know I say this every time we see a legendary release, but I still have trouble understanding why Riot continues to release legendary skins. I guess people are still buying them. The only problem I have with it is that Riot willfully devalues legendary skins by releasing skins of equal or higher quality for half the RP. Those skins eventually go on sale, cutting the price in half again. It gets pretty tough to justify spending the 1820 RP with that scenario.
Big news in the game world today is that Notch has passed development of Minecraft to his number two at Mojang, Jens Bergensten. I was surprised at first but it makes a lot of sense. Jens, who goes by the moniker “Jeb,” has become the personable face of Minecraft over the past six months, guiding the community through the glut of development that led to Minecraft’s official release.
In the meantime, Notch has created his fair-share of public snafus. His involvement in social platforms is admirable, especially considering the size of the Minecraft community, but Notch has used his massive fanbase to air more than a little bit of dirty laundry off the cuff. It’s an ugly way to do business, particularly when you consider how much of Minecraft’s development has been a community effort at this point.
That’s only going to increase. Jeb’s primary focus at this point is implementing an API to make modding more accessible. We probably won’t see anything until March, but this is the next big step for Minecraft’s open world.
It’s funny how hot-and-cold I feel about Minecraft at different times. I’m in a cold spell now. We had a huge dearth of content for a while, then a massive boom. Unfortunately that boom required new worlds on a nearly bi-weekly basis, and I just burned out. With API modding I’m sure I’ll get interested again. I like the promise of easy mod access, especially for community run servers.
I realize I’m rambling a bit, but that’s how Minecraft goes for me. It’s a game that slips in and out of my consciousness but something I’m sure I’ll be coming back to for some time. I’m glad to know the game is still in good hands.
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