Amumu used his skill in the Soraka's E

Blue Panda·Jun 6, 2018·8 votes·5,496 views

Please check the video. Why Amumu used his Q inside Soraka's E circle? He should be silenced.

24 Comments

RiotRiot AficJun 6, 20184 votes

Looks to me like this is a result of the soraka E silence being applied every server tick (basically it isn't a 100% consistent thing. If you are resurrecting from a GA, soraka places her E over your corpse, you will be able to spam flash and flash before you get silenced. Same thing here). Pretty sure the amumu walks into the silence zone, and shortly after walking in (before the silence is applied) he casts his bandage toss.

BobaFlautistJun 6, 20182 votes

Server tick rate is such an underconsidered part of what makes online games feel smooth or not (sometimes more so than latency). RuneScape is IMO a super solid base game but the tick rate is 0.6s which feels incredibly sluggish when doing anything contingent on slow timing.

Not sure really where I was going with this but I think it's a pretty important part of what makes mechanics in league work the way they do.

RiotRiot AficJun 6, 20181 votes

I assume there are quite a few reasons (one of them probably being performance related) but I don't know the details.

BobaFlautistJun 6, 20181 votes

I mean it's been around for such a very long time, I imagine 0.6 was probably totally appropriate when it was released.

And at this point, upgrading something like that is just...such an astronomical venture. I can't even begin to imagine what it would take.

But, on the other hand, boss fights that are balanced 75% around "don't stand in the fire" are really difficult to learn when the game has a bult in 600ms lag, and not the fun sort of difficult.

So, I guess, main point, thank you riot for having a higher tick rate and for being willing to absorb the backlash when you make sacrifices to pay "Coding Debt" and improve the underlying system.

VerxintJun 6, 20182 votes

Runescape has 0.6 second long ticks? That explains a lot

BobaFlautistJun 6, 20181 votes

It really does, doesn't it? Makes bossing way less fun than it should be IMO.

VerxintJun 7, 20181 votes

Runescape makes me sad. If the same game was actually built on modern technology and not on an imposed grid system and that tick rate and everything, I'd probably play it.

BobaFlautistJun 7, 20181 votes

I mean the secret is that everything is built on a grid/tick system on some level (with exceptions, I guess it would be possible to rasterize an entire mmo but I have no idea what that would take), Runescape's problem is that the units are big enough to be visible.

Think of it like resolution: if the units are too big, the individual pixels become visible and the output is noticeably limited by the medium. At high enough resoultion, it's easy enough to forget that there even is a medium between you and the content.

One more realistic thing that RuneScape could do, which would still be a ton of work but hopefully a lot less than retooling the whole game, is upgrading the systems for specific instances. A lot of boss fights are instanced anyway (held in a separate universe from the rest of the game, possibly even a separate server) and they could improve the underlying infastructure for ONLY those instances - I would play a RuneScape where the boss fights and only the boss fights ran on a much better system. Add keyboard commands for movements, get some super solid low-latency servers for bossing, and I think the experience would be 10x as good.

The biggest problem with upgrading RS, is that the playerbase is super cheap, entitled, and fetishizes veteran players so far that even the League players whining about rune changes and sunk I.P. would be like "Woah those guys just played the game from earlier, they're not gods...". It's a super common problem for aging MMOs, where a solid portion of the consistent income comes from people that believe that the new player experience should be every bit as shitty as theirs was, for the rest of time, which makes it really hard to make useablility and anti-grind changes, and puts a lot of pressure on the devs to keep awful "legacy" mechanics, because "Well if I had to fight the controls rather than the boss, everyone should have to! And what's with the game being so damn fun now, back in my day it was a grindy snoozefest, as it should be".

Tl;Dr RuneScape has a lot of good still left in it, and plenty of options for improvement, they just need to avoid the super tempting trap of weighing long time players' opinions too highly.

VerxintJun 7, 20181 votes

Well yeah, everything has to be quantized in a video game. But most games don't have pokemon style grid movement from square to square like runescape still does. The slow tick rate just explains why moving and actions feel so crappy as well. And why sometimes you give a command and it happens instantly and sometimes it takes half a second. I always figured that was just shitty servers

CleverCactusJun 6, 20183 votes

[{quoted}](name=Riot Afic,realm=NA,application-id=LqLKtMpN,discussion-id=LWYEdcRP,comment-id=0003,timestamp=2018-06-06T21:28:14.344+0000)

Looks to me like this is a result of the soraka E silence being applied every server tick (basically it isn't a 100% consistent thing. If you are resurrecting from a GA, soraka places her E over your corpse, you will be able to spam flash and flash before you get silenced. Same thing here). Pretty sure the amumu walks into the silence zone, and shortly after walking in (before the silence is applied) he casts his bandage toss.

Are you sure Soraka E is applied every server tick? It really seems like it's much less frequent. Most ground-targeted lingering AOE effects like this do a good job of almost instantly applying their effects, look at Cass's Miasma, Singed's Mega Adhesive, or Viktor's Gravity Field.

I'm almost certain Soraka's E updated much less frequently than other skills.

Aurcus DyrnwynJun 6, 20181 votes

I definitely agree that it's updated less frequently. I've actually seen people walk out of the root effect because of the delayed updates.

RiotRiot AficJun 6, 20181 votes

not sure of the specifics, but ya it updates on some cadence, which is what caused this to happen

DrCyanideJun 7, 20181 votes

When other spells have behaved inconsistently in the past Riot has taken steps to make them more consistent. Can this one get looked into as well?

What makes this sting is that Soraka did everything perfectly, preemptively setting up the zone, but the server decided it didn't want to count what the player did. Could you imagine if a Zhonyas activation fluctuated that much?

ModThe DjinnJun 6, 20182 votes

[{quoted}](name=Riot Afic,realm=NA,application-id=LqLKtMpN,discussion-id=LWYEdcRP,comment-id=0003,timestamp=2018-06-06T21:28:14.344+0000)

Looks to me like this is a result of the soraka E silence being applied every server tick (basically it isn't a 100% consistent thing. If you are resurrecting from a GA, soraka places her E over your corpse, you will be able to spam flash and flash before you get silenced. Same thing here). Pretty sure the amumu walks into the silence zone, and shortly after walking in (before the silence is applied) he casts his bandage toss.

Out of curiosity, is there a reason silence zones aren't coded in a way that it checks if you're in one and then denies you the effect if you are? It seems odd, given that there are grounded zones as well which I'm guessing would have this same edge-case functionality that probably isn't ideal.

I'm guessing it's just that those sorts of abilities are slightly newer additions, and infrequent enough that this edge-case has been allowed to persist?

RiotRiot AficJun 7, 20181 votes

probably because of deep rooted game flow/design decisions that made the most sense at the time. I assume it would take a non trivial amount of work to redo how these types of systems interact.

ModThe DjinnJun 7, 20181 votes

[{quoted}](name=Riot Afic,realm=NA,application-id=LqLKtMpN,discussion-id=LWYEdcRP,comment-id=000300020000,timestamp=2018-06-07T16:33:44.967+0000)probably because of deep rooted game flow/design decisions that made the most sense at the time. I assume it would take a non trivial amount of work to redo how these types of systems interact.

I figured that was likely the case, as the number of persistent "can't do X while in this area" abilities in the game is extremely small. Appreciate the response though!

KnuckleballerJun 7, 20181 votes

Checking if a player is in an effect zone is an expensive operation (several multiplications for distance calculation).

Setting flags during server ticks only requires distance checks during the time when the silence spell is in effect.

Checking at cast time requires those same checks every single time a player tries to cast a spell during the entire game (and also when it ends since maybe a silence appeared during cast time). There are optimizations, but the basic problem is since the player is not directly affected by the silence, you have to check far more often than if the silence sets a flag directly.

It's just far more efficient to set flags during server ticks. I imagine there are edge cases where someone might be able to get a cast off in between server ticks, but if League is running at a tick rate of 30Hz (from what I googled), that's a pretty small window of time.

RouxfulJun 6, 20182 votes

Seems about right. Gotta nerf soraka anyway ;D

ChaosThiefJun 6, 20182 votes

The silence that the field applies is 0.25 seconds and refreshes so long as you stand in it. Amumu happened to walk in at the time that the silence wouldn't apply to him (somehow, see the 2 second mark in the video), and the animation of the Q already had started when the silence applied to him.

In other words, that's one lucky Amumu.

Also, before you say "it should silence anyone standing on it," it does; the problem is you can't force it to refresh fast enough for it to always, at every single instant, silence people who walk on it. Doing that would put a lot of strain on pretty much any computer trying to run that silence field, since it would be looping at an incredibly fast rate.

Also, notice how Amumu, after using his Q to escape the silence field, was still silenced for a short while after leaving the silence field. (5 seconds in for about half a second in video time.)

This might not be a satisfactory answer, but it's the best I could come up with after seeing this.

flibitydooJun 6, 20181 votes

He visibly walks onto the silence field before casting. The animation begins once he stops moving. And he his silenced the moment he steps on.

Your explanation isn't what happened.

What happened ,was ability queuing (aka input buffering). The game does this to help with latency, but it basically reads what abilities you activated and then casts them, and will not stop even if you're cc'd. It's why even when polymorphed by lulu, a zed can still full combo you if he mashes fast enough during his ult animation.

ChaosThiefJun 6, 20181 votes

That's not what I'm seeing.

https://i.gyazo.com/e4ba264236b24d6fd2528a77a1fb5e12.png

Amumu is currently standing on the silence field in this image; this starts near the very end of the first second (according to video timestamp) and lasts until about halfway through the 2 second mark. Amumu began his Q before being silenced, the first few frames are visible there, but you can't tell Amumu is using his Q until the indicator that he's silenced begins.

The image, however, shows how Amumu isn't silenced, while currently on the field.

Notice how, up to here, he's still silenced:

https://i.gyazo.com/96d16efa174b10ccc9dd3dc017171e9f.png

A rioter also commented on this as well, so I would suggest looking at that too.

Fondling GemsJun 6, 20181 votes

Soraka E has a really slow update tick on it, only 4 times a second or something like that, meaning you have up to .25 seconds to still use abilities after walking into it. People have been asking for it's tick rate to be updated for years.