Quick Gameplay Thoughts: November 1
Morning folks,
Usual Disclaimers
These posts will often contain talk about future work we're doing, or planning to do, that isn't yet guaranteed to ship. The nature of the work could change or, depending on what we discover, projects mentioned may get put delayed or even stopped. If you'd like to see a Tweet whenever a new one of these posts goes up: https://twitter.com/RiotMeddler
http://ddragon.leagueoflegends.com/cdn/6.24.1/img/champion/Ziggs.png
Champs without Keystone Runes
One of the things we'll be looking at the most once pre-season goes out is whether each champ has keystones that meet their needs sufficiently. While we're confident there are multiple keystones that are useful on every champ that doesn't necessarily mean there'll be keystones that are good fits for them in the tree they want to go for a particular position.
A good example of that is Nunu, who if wanting to jungle while going resolve primary may or may not have good choices. Aftershock's not available to him at all (nothing on his kit triggers it). Grasp of the Undying is available, but looking at how the mastery version of it has gone hasn't been that appealing on him historically at least. He could take Guardian, especially given BloodBoil will trigger it, though it's not yet clear if that'll be worth considering on him.
Assuming there are champs, whether Nunu or others, who need some help with keystones then we'll be considering a few options:
- Changing how some keystones trigger/interact to include otherwise excluded champs. A recent example of something similar is how Sudden Impact now triggers on leaving stealth as well, not just after dashes/blinks.
- Adding new keystones to fill needed gaps. This approach is most likely if there are a range of champions all showing the same problems (DoT mages potentially, though the Arcane Comet changes may have met that need).
- Buffing individual champs. If some champs have adequate keystone options, but don't synergize as strongly with them as others, the right fix might be to just buff them a bit.
Adjusting some champ and skin VO
We're currently looking at champs and skins that play their VO to everyone, with the aim of adjusting those that are too chatty, resulting in an annoying experience for others. We've already made some tweaks to Pulsefire Caitlyn, so if you've found the VO playing alongside or against that skin excessive in the past let us know if it's still a problem. Next up is Super Galaxy Rumble, who'll get toned down in an upcoming patch (maybe 7.23, not sure exactly yet). We'll be looking at other skins and champs after that too at some point, so let us know if there are particular ones you think are out of line.
Word Clouds
One of the ways we look champion survey data is by aggregating commonly used phrases into what are called word clouds. Examples of a few of those below, since when we've mentioned them in the past some people have expressed an interest in seeing some of them. Each word cloud is for a single champion and reflects what players tell us about them when we run surveys in the LoL client. The larger a word is the more often it was used. We've found these to be a useful tool in conveying things like:
- What players see as the defining features of a champion
- How wide ranging different views of a champion are (e.g. are there words that contradict each other cropping up from different groups of players frequently?)
- Whether or not a champion has a well fleshed out personality (e.g. are all the large words on the cloud purely talking about how a champion's abilities work or does some of their character also come through prominently?)
- Etc
