Over the weekend Zileas gave us a rare gift – a list of development patterns that guide the design process for League of Legends. I can’t tell you how much this kind of thing interests me, though I’m sure you can guess from my own detailed critiques of several champions. This also gives us a chance to consider some of the recent champion releases against this list to help understand just how complicated the design process can be, especially when the company has committed to a bi-weekly deadline for champion development.

Consider Swain: a big part of his problem was that he was originally designed under a burden of knowledge, that is, the player had to be aware of a complex mechanic in order to understand its use against opponents and against himself. It was undesirable enough that Riot decided to make it more understandable, but there wasn’t enough time to rebalance the character before release. Even the champion spotlight was released with the original skill in place.

Personally, I don’t think burden of knowledge is a good enough reason to change a hero like this. After a point, there will be too many heroes with too many different mechanics in play for new players to truly understand the game. In that case, the game has to adapt, to be better suited for a player to pick up. Make the knowledge more available, don’t dumb down the game. I still see people who don’t know the basic mechanics of some heroes. It’s not that they are incapable of understanding, just that they haven’t yet discovered the mechanic. Make the discovery process easier and burden of knowledge only becomes an issue in extreme cases.

As Zileas notes, we could find examples of each design pattern he mentions within League of Legends. I’ll be referring back to it often to help me better understand what’s behind a champion. We’re getting Lux tomorrow, so you can bet she’ll have my full attention during the week ahead.