Tag: forums (Page 3 of 3)

      LoL: What’s the Nidalee consensus?

      February 17, 2010 /

      Nidalee.Phreak dropped by the forums today to ask for a little feedback on Nidalee. I was pretty interested in the topic, mostly because I think Nidalee occupies a very weird spot in the LoL spread of champions. She’s definitely a support toon, but she’s capable of carrying a team to victory and utterly terrifying in any 1v1 situation. The most surprising part of the discussion? People think she’s balanced.

      I don’t have huge gripes about Nidalee, just minor issues that I think could be tweaked. The real problem I see is that Nidalee can fill every gap a team may have. She heals (one of the most mana efficient in the game), has map awareness, provides a great pushing buff, has incredible escapability and, as such, is one of the best chasers in the game. Add to it all that cat form is excellent for farming with virtually zero consequence and you have a champion that feels far from balanced. It’s not that any of these in and of itself is OP, but that giving them all to a single character results in a team slot that heavily tips the scales. Consider a well played Nidalee versus a well played Nasus (support DPS) or Morgana (support DPS/CC) and I think you’ll find she offers most of the other’s benefits, with the exception of snare/slow, plus a whole lot more.

      You can find the full contents of the post in the general discussion forums.

      Development, league of legends, PC

      LoL: Snowballing and its eventual nerf

      February 15, 2010 /

      Morgana's about to get ganked.We’ve all been on the receiving end of a good old-fashioned beat down at one time or another. The other team bangs out a couple early kills and suddenly you and your teammates are stuck 3 levels down and your towers are getting steamrolled.

      This situation happens frequently enough that Riot is looking at ways to change it. According to a post from Zileas, they’re trying to discourage the 5-man roam that has become so popular. Here’s his post:

      Our philosophy on this issue is that individual snowballing is good, and team snowballing is bad. Right now, team snowballing occurs too much — one super carry twitch is a lot easier to handle than 5 guys who are 3 levels higher than each of you.

      We are going to make some experience table tweaks to reduce team snowballing without hurting individual snowballing much. We are also going to make a new 3 lane map that is larger, has less cross-map connectivity (so that there is higher cost to 5 man roam, and less shutdown of the farming/laning phase via the first tower being down), etc.

      We probably will nerf flash.

      We wont be nerfing snowball items. Emotional highs from the game you super carried make this genre sticky. We removed it too much in the beta, and it cost us. Sorry, but being super carry annie or super carry corki once in a while gets a player through the 8 defeat in a row streak they hit the next day.

      I’m on the fence about early gold for kills. It’s been something we have been talking about, for the reason you cite. OF course, an early kill is also harder than a late kill.

      I can appreciate the thought behind this, though I worry about the pace of the game. The roaming gank squad has already taken its toll on pace. I’ve had a number of games recently where safe play from both sides led to more than 20 minutes without a death. Discouraging ganking seems like it will just make the laning phase that much longer and more painful. There are plenty of games in which I feel like losing my outer turret is the best thing that could happen because it breaks me out of the laning mentality. I realize that this is the point – to keep people from leaving lane – but that’s where the fun of the game is.

      If anything, I think the best solution is the 3-lane map with less interconnectivity. That at least gives you the option to farm a lane once the tower is down with some potential for intra-lane ganking so long as there are enough hiding spots.

      What do you think? Are there too many games in which snowballing is a serious problem or are you okay with the 5-man roam?

      league of legends, PC, Strategy

      LoL: Queue dodgers make the dodging even more worth it

      February 13, 2010 /

      Evelyn, the noobmaker.My friends and I have a new rule: no Heimer, no Eve, period. It held guideline status, but there was always some occasion where our team comp looked good, despite the potential for a noob Heimer or Eve and we would let it slide. Every time we made the exception, or so it seemed, we would lose. The player would be just as bad as we expected and our team would fall apart by the 30-minute mark. The same thing happened last night, which is why we’ve taken that guideline and bumped it up to constitutional amendment levels. In the current matchmaking system I will no longer play a game with Eve or Heimer in it.

      Say what you will about queue dodging, I value my time in the game too much to spend 25 minutes watching teammates feed, and as experience dictates, Eve and Heimer players are noob players the vast majority of the time. I don’t have fun trying to drag them along behind me, giving encouraging advice that they just won’t heed. Instead, I’m always going to try to convince that player to switch toons or I’ll be dodging the queue.

      There are a lot of other people who obviously feel this way. Most games I have to wait through two or three queue cycles before I can play. For the most part, it’s not something I mind, if only because I can understand the mindset. As queue dodging becomes more prevalent, it becomes more beneficial to my sanity to dodge as well. When it takes five to ten minutes to find a game, I want that game to be competitive, not a landslide in either direction. It’s a vicious cycle, but one that’s become almost necessary for my enjoyment of the game.

      I would love if this was not the case and there is a simple solution: fix matchmaking. Queue dodging, for me, is a symptom of the poor matchmaking system. I would be totally fine playing with Heimer and Eve if I was confident my teammates were at least decent players and hopefully aware and ready to compensate for their respective champion’s weaknesses. That’s just not the case, though, and until I start to see significantly better players in my queue, I’ll be dodging the champions most prone to noob players.

      league of legends, PC

      LoL: The community take on queue dodging

      February 10, 2010 /

      Rawr-pendragonThe forums have been riddled with posts about queue dodging for as long as I can remember. Riot has made official that it will be penalizing queue dodgers with a time limit between joining games. As someone who admits to queue dodging, albeit rarely (the queue dodging, not the admission), I can’t think of a worse thing for the game. The matchmaking system is so far from providing reasonable results that the player has to have some option for managing his/her teammates. I’ve included my own post below but be sure to keep up with the thread.

      My problem with the queue dodge penalty is that it prioritizes finding a game over quality of gameplay. The simple fact is that matchmaking is not accurate enough to ignore player discretion when it comes to team composition. Why should players be encouraged to play games with teammates who have a clear misunderstanding of the game.

      Case in point – I joined a lobby the other day in which my team was a bad mix of casters, including a Heimerdinger (sorry Heimer players, the vast majority I see are poor players) and a Katarina (with rally, which, unless she specced for it, won’t help this team). I mentioned our need for a tank and offered to play one if we could switch someone out for ranged physical DPS. Katarina insisted that she was both physical DPS and a tank. I tried to reason with her and explain the mechanics and was met with, “Do you even see my character?!?!?”

      As others in this thread have mentioned, the time wasted by queue dodging is regrettable, but the time spent playing a game with severely under-skilled players is typically at least 25 minutes for all players involved. I’d much rather spend 10 minutes finding a decent game that might last 35-45 minutes than 3 minutes finding a game I will not enjoy.

      As for the “artificial ELO inflation,” you have to realize it’s a two-way street. As matchmaking functions now, I would guess that my ELO is artificially seesawing, based on the skill level of my teammates. One game everyone plays as I would expect and at least attempts to coordinate. The next I watch as a player on my team dies 3 times in 8 minutes – this is someone with a fundamental misunderstanding of the game mechanics. My only assumption can be that a similar player is on the opposite team for some sort of balance, in which case my loss (if my team happens to feed more than the other) unfairly penalizes my ELO because I was “beaten” by a player with a much lower ELO than my own. I’m then bumped down to playing both with and against players who are below my skill range, hoping my team manages to die less and we pull out a victory, which will likely not award the same amount of ELO I’ve lost to get to this point.

      My solution is that we leave queue-dodging and reevaluate the lobby system. I realize this is something you have probably already discussed and others have obviously mentioned. Really, though, as the game grows it seems it would get easier to fill that one spot than drop all players and restart the search. In many cases I’m seeing the same 2-4 people in my lobby queue dodge after queue dodge. Wouldn’t it be easier if we just never left?

      league of legends, News, PC

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