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[INTRO] Greg “Riot Ghostcrawler” Street - Game Design Director

RiotGhostcrawler·12/9/2015, 9:06:52 PM·1 votes·34,537 views

WHO AM I?

My name is Greg Street, Riot Ghostcrawler. Before working at Riot, I was a lead designer on World of Warcraft for 6 years. Before that I was a lead designer on Age of Empires for 10 years. Before that, I was an oceanographer, which is where the crustacean avatar came from. I was an army brat who lived lots of places, but I identify most as a Texan.

My favorite game of all time is Dungeons and Dragons. I have played for 30 years, in all 5 editions. For video games, I’ll just list broad families of games that I love and that have influenced me: XCOM, Final Fantasy, World of Warcraft, Chrono Trigger, Diablo, Doom, Civilization, Legend of Zelda, Dark Souls, Baldur’s Gate, Planescape: Torment, Mass Effect, Metroid, Grand Theft Auto, and Okami. Outside of games, I enjoy travel, reading about history and science, and being outdoors. My last research project as a scientist involved collecting live, radioactive alligators. I have been attacked by animals as diverse as: Portuguese Man-o-war, Roseate Spoonbill, Southern Stingray, Rock Rattlesnake, Coatimundi. My favorite animal is the Mantis Shrimp.

I currently own: 4 dogs and 2 cats.

WHAT AM I DOING AT RIOT? WHAT CAN YOU EXPECT NEXT YEAR?

I joined Riot in 2013 and I am now the game design director for League. I describe my job as a combination of three things: I'm ultimately accountable for the design quality of League, I work with the other leads to determine long-term strategy and our big bets for the next year, and I manage the design department. I work a lot on projects such as our Season 2016 plan. I help answer things such as what kinds of champions should we be making, what do we want the pace of the game to be, and what new features does League need.

WHAT AM I GOING TO TALK ABOUT?

The best kinds of questions to hit me with are about our design philosophy or core design values. The kinds of questions I can best answer are "Would Riot ever consider this Big New Feature?" “Where do you see League in 5 years?” "How does Riot balance for such a wide range of skills?" "How much counterplay is acceptable?" "What were Riot’s goals with preseason?" "Is League too snowbally?" "Does Riot make too much change to the game?" "How many champions can League support?" I don't directly balance champions or design new items. I'm fine if you blame me for bad balance, but if you want to know our thoughts on a particular change or the state of a champion, you're better off asking the Rioters who are working directly on them.

WHAT WOULD YOU LIKE TO HEAR FROM ME?

If you know anything about me, you hopefully know that I strive to be really transparent with players and that I have very thick skin. AMA.

134 Comments

Malicious Metal12/9/2015, 9:38:55 PM8 votes

What's your stance on Mordekaiser's Rework? It didn't really shake up the botlane meta, seeing that Marksman+Support are still down there 99.999% of the time and his rework had a lot of controversy.

Judging by the current statistics it even managed to make him less popular (With the fourth lowest pick rate) and his win rate plummeted down to the 40% bracket. Mordekaiser fans were very disappointed and while the other Juggernauts as well as other reworked champions found their niche, player base and healthy spot Morde's still a black sheep.

But hey, I might be biased but most Morde mains would agree that shifting him bot lane was something most people don't really like especially since it affected his solo lane so heavily. Giving him the option to go bot would have been enough but it just feels forced.

RiotGhostcrawler12/9/2015, 9:47:04 PM7 votes

Okay,care to comment on the other permanent game modes like Dominion,ARAM or Twisted Treeline?(Yeah,yeah "What's Dominion?" blah bla) Just general thoughts & opinions are all I need."Are these modes good to have in the game?","Any way we can make them better?","Would we add new maps/permanent game modes in the future?" etc.

I'll be completely honest: we have neglected them, especially Dominion and TT. We view the heart of League to be SR, and that's where we spend most of our development effort. We aren't happy with that answer however, and we have some ideas for how we can give Dominion and TT a little love. We'll talk more about this soon. We are unlikely to add new permanent maps in the future. Often, they lack the depth of SR, which means they are popular at first and then slowly lose players over time. In some regions where we have fewer players, it can also cause long queue times by sub-dividing the bucket so much.

RiotGhostcrawler12/9/2015, 11:50:53 PM5 votes

pet names?

You can call me Sugar or Pumpkin or even Ghost. It's up to you.

J/K. Current pet names aren't too exciting. Previous pet names included Creamsicle (he was an orange tabby with some white), Mudslide (he was a brown and white Siamese all smeared together), and Gargoyle (he is in the Starcraft 1 credits for realz).

oh and i like this question "How many champions can League support?"

I think by around 300 we'd need some kind of seasonal roster or something. At the current rate we make champions, we won't have to worry about that for some time. The game can handle a lot more than it has today IMO.

RiotGhostcrawler12/10/2015, 12:31:46 AM4 votes

Thanks for all the questions and comments. I'm heading into some more meetings. I may be back on tonight or else tomorrow.

RiotGhostcrawler12/10/2015, 12:31:21 AM4 votes

If that's too far out of the range of answerable questions, how about this: during one of the podcasts, you said quote "We strive not to just make change for the sake of change" which legitimately made me laugh in real life. Over the last few years, League has seen random, unnecessary, unwarranted, and unwanted changes go through despite how hard the community pushed back.

Consider one the (many) unwanted changes that happened recently with the Morde rework. Even people outside of his fanbase were pushing back trying to derail this project before he would break the game and following Worlds, become useless. How are changes like this not change for the sake of change, and why do the devs continue to stonewall us before, and even after said changes go through? And please don't fall back on the juggernaut catastrophe, that was one instance where Riot actually listened and it backfired (for the most part.)

We strive for evolution, not change for the sake of change. That doesn't mean we always nail it, and it's an easy trap for developers to fall into, especially folks who haven't been making games for very long (which is almost every Rioter). It's a compass heading.

Morde was not change for the sake of change. Morde was not working as champion and we didn't think it was possible to deliver on his current direction in a healthy way. He really needed a change the same way Poppy and Sion needed a change. Were there other changes we could have made that might have worked out better? That's entirely possible. Was the community right and we should have listened to them? In 20/20 hindsight, that happens all the time. I'm trying to illustrate there is a difference between a bad change and change for the sake of change.

Change for the sake of change comes about when you see devs say things like this:

  • I'm bored. I think I'll try something crazy.
  • I never envisioned this champ as X. I'm going to try Y because that fits my personal impression.
  • Z hasn't gotten any changes for awhile. It's his turn.
  • I don't know what will work, so I'll try this.

Change to add depth to the game come about when you see devs saying things like:

  • This pattern lacks counterplay so we need to add an opportunity for the enemy to do something.
  • We can't increase this champion's winrate without their pick rate skyrocketing and players seeing them every game. We are going to have to change some of their abilities.
  • This system is something solved that players don't really think about anymore. We need to get interesting decisions back in.
  • Our values or goals are X, but this champion isn't meeting those goals. We need to make changes to meet them.

In general, the changes we try to make are strategic, try to deliver on goals or values, try to open up options or decisions for players, and try to fix real problems.

RiotGhostcrawler12/10/2015, 12:10:48 AM4 votes

Hey Ghostcrawler! I first heard about you on your work on the TForce Podcast, I think its awesome that you put yourself out there for the community!

Shout out to my friends on Trinity Force!

Warning here this will be a bit of a rant so sorry in advance. I've been playing since S2 and back then the champs were pretty simple. Someone like Malphite was really simple and most people could play him no problem whatsoever. Now with the champions coming out of recent we are seeing kits that are more complex than I could have anticipated. Not to mention every ability having a passive. Holy Batman. Now I'm not saying that complex to play champs are bad, but it does hamper the expirence of new to MOBA players (like I was when I started League).

About the passives, it seems that almost every champ that has been released since S5 has had an ability with a passive on it (exeption off the top of my head being baum). If we look at someone like Tahm who has a passive on his e and r as well as his aquired taste passive, is really strong and its another thing to keep in mind when in lane. Whereas someone like WW has no passives on his abilities, suffers because of it, not to mention if you are keeping track of CD's in your head you only have to worry about 3 instead of Tahm when you have to worry about 5-6.

We feel overall that the ramp up in complexity on champs (the extra passives and double passives and so on) isn't a great trend to stay on. It's a challenge when you're in the trenches, because you want players to get excited about each new champ that's released, so we keep trying to outdo ourselves. If we released [next champ] with Vlad's Q, I think we'd all be disappointed. But that's the short term view, and in the long term view, we don't want to end up at a point where champs have 4 passives and 20 abilities and so on.

ULTRA RAMOOSE12/15/2015, 4:15:48 AM3 votes

Let me translate the above text:

WHO AM I? I'm the guy who took a successful game (WOW) and forced millions to bail on it by taking the accomplishment out of the game and dumbing it down for filthy casuals, then I left it to kill this game in the same manner, watch out for my style of changes, by the time I'm done most of the core players will leave and only casuals will reign supreme.

WHAT AM I DOING WITH RIOT? WHAT CAN YOU EXPECT NEXT YEAR? "I'm ultimately accountable for the design quality of League" which I will hack into an unrecognizable masterpiece of sadness and dumbed down unrewarding gameplay.

WHAT AM I GOING TO TALK ABOUT? Here I will type a lot and make it seem like I care, but as long as my checks keep rolling in, I will find ways to dumb the game down and maybe make it so simple you only have to click one button and use 1 rune, 1 mastery and true damage for all, except tanks, they will suffer, coz I still hate paladins.

WHAT WOULD YOU LIKE TO HEAR FROM ME? (Here I feign the opportunity to act like my hubris isn't the one driving the show and you little people actually have some kind of imput... HAAAH!)

I dare you little people to actually ask something, you will be fired or banned whatever side of the riot line you stand, I am GHOSTCRAWLER!!!! king kong ain't got nothing on me!

RiotGhostcrawler12/9/2015, 9:43:21 PM3 votes

Many champions get a lot of attention from Riot without a lot of reason I can tell. Biggest example of this is Taric. He gets reworked so often for awhile reworks were referred to as 'taric style.' Now he is in line for a major update. Why are you doing him before you do someone like Warwick? A champion who only gets nerfed and has one of the most outdated binary kits in the game? Is this actually part of a 'class' type update that you are hiding? Or do you just love gems?

Yeah, it's pretty much just the gems.

Seriously though, a lot can go into the determination of which champion update we work on next, including whether we have potentially good ideas for how to fix the champion (thematically, visually and mechanically). We do have someone working on Warwick, because he desperately needs it, but it's too soon to tell how or when that may pan out.

In the past a lot of rioters have made comments to the affect of 'we dont like champions that are nothing but a bundle of stats with no counterplay.' This is why I HATED when you touched Mundo a few months ago. I saw his modifications as nothing but MORE 'free stats with no counterplay' and I really wanted him on the medium term radar for something more meaningful.

Generally speaking, we do two kinds of changes -- things that have a chance of a long-term fix and things that are band-aids just to tide things over until we can get to a long-term fix. That said, Mundo is somewhat simple, but I don't know that he needs a major update.

Then of course you release Yasuo, who has 2 passives that are the definition of free stats with no counter play (double crit and free pen from ult). When I read his abilities I thought to myself 'this is ridiculous and counter to riots game play design' and I was not referring to his E- Why on earth would you do a champion who is only balanced through free stats? Especially 2 stats that counter the group of champions that are supposed to 'counter' him (tanks/fighters).

Yasuo's winrate generally isn't all that high because his skill cap is insanely high, one of the top 2-3 in the game. That is the challenge for why he is tricky to balance moreso than the double passive, IMO. We'd have to ask the champion designer who worked on him the origin of the double passive though.

The message seems inconsistent to me. So I guess the question is : How/when are you going to handle the champions who have too many 'free stats' and give them more actionable stats?

It's less about free stats and more about whether a champion is nothing but a bag of stats. If your win rate is high because your stats are higher and not because you make good decisions, that's the kind of thing we want to fix. We have fewer of those champions this year than we did last year.

Also- how many games do you play/week of league, and what are your favorite roles?

I tend to play in bursts like lots of players. I am playing fewer games now because I have been spending so much time on Fallout 4 and the Bloodborne DLC. Before I came to Riot, I'd say I played mostly Support (I played a priest in WoW) and ADC. I have tried to double down on improving my weaknesses rather than my strengths since I have been here. Jungle is by far my weakest role. I need to spend more time there.

RiotGhostcrawler12/9/2015, 9:44:33 PM3 votes

What do you think of Vlad? He's been a champion that's really stuck in my craw pretty much the entire time I've played League... One of my least favorites to see that I'm stuck going up against. Very annoying to lane against, and he certainly gives this semblance of "thoughtlessness" with how he just kind of Qs whenever it's available, it's always the right move for him. No mana and the ability to sustain forever from range, and he can make for some annoying top lane matchups.

He just comes off as crazy binary, he wins hard but he can get behind and be really useless too. I've never really heard of any talks of reworks for him, though I've heard a lot about how he probably should have never been made, that kind of thing. Any plans for him or thoughts on him?

We agree with just about everything you said. "What is the problem with Vlad's Q?" used to be a question on our design test for potential new hires, but we removed it because it was too easy. Thematically, he's fine. He needs better abilities. We'll get there, potentially with the mage roster update this year.

RiotGhostcrawler12/9/2015, 9:52:29 PM3 votes

Does Riot consider the Juggernaut work a success?

It was a good proof of concept for the roster project. We're happy with Garen and Darius, less so with Skarner and Morde. Overall, hitting 4 champs is probably not enough to feel like a roster was really updated. However, compared to Marksmen, Juggernauts barely even had a function in the game, so in that sense, we feel like it was successful.

What is the reason for Riot's reluctance to use 10 total bans per game, instead of 6?

We don't want to be in a perpetual arm's race. We have some fear that if we did 10 today it would be 12 next year and so on. There is some evidence that giving each player one ban in solo queue might be a better experience. We have some changes with the new team builder (with still just 6 bans) and we will see how that plays out first and then evaluate.

Have there been any regions where getting League into been so problematic that Riot pivoted and left the area? (ie India/Arab world/Africa/ect..)

This is a great question but I don't have a great answer. Maybe another Rioter who has been here longer will share a good story with me that I can then relate to you guys. Going into a new region is a fairly expensive commitment in that we have to localize a whole lot of text and VO and then either set up servers and matchmaking ourselves or find a regional partner who can do so. We have to be convinced that we can develop a sizable player base in a new region for it to be worth it. That is usually the biggest barrier to going into a new region. There are some interesting quirks though -- we can't play on Korean servers because Korea requires you to have the Korean equivalent of a social security number to play. (We were able to play when we visited Korean PC bangs though).

RiotGhostcrawler12/9/2015, 10:27:41 PM3 votes

If you were to group up with the whole team and design again LoL from scratch, among all the things, would you consider unifying AD and AP items so the item selection regarding damage is not strictly halved and working class differences on something else?

I haven't socialized this with the team, so they might disagree, but back in the day, League made the conscious choice not to go with the Strength, Agility, Intelligence model that Wacraft 3 originally used. The idea was that items were a bit more agnostic and any champion could use them. Was that the right call? I'm not sure. While there are still a lot of champ agnostic items, we also are jumping through hoops now to make sure e.g. Marksmen items are attractive to Marskmen but not necessarily to mages.

RiotGhostcrawler12/10/2015, 12:23:18 AM3 votes

Part 1 : If you could go back in time to take part in the A-Z design of any 1-3 games that you enjoyed (or not), what would they be?

Doom. Civilization. Ultima Online.

Part 2 : How do you feel about the video game industries' development. To me it feels like a lot of genres are becoming homogeneous where the difference between the various competing games are fairly negligible in a lot of cases. Would you agree that concurrent games are becoming more similar and, if so, how long do you think it'll last, or is it a permanent thing?

Big games are very expensive to make. This makes studios (and more importantly, their publishers who put their money up front) reluctant to take big risks. There have also been some spectacular failures of big games that were super high concept that just didn't resonate with players and lost millions.

If you look at indie development, you will see a lot more risk-taking and even spot some of the next new trends. You'll also spot some coming out of other regions, especially China. (I realize asking you to download a Chinese mobile game is a non-trivial ask.)

Long (long) ago, Zileas posted about his personal 10 design anti-patterns. Now, I won't hide that I kinda have an agenda with Poppy's rework where I think that it has a few design issues (mostly in term of false choices and unclear optimization. Sadly, my whole opinion isn't completely refined yet so I can't try to discuss it in detail). With that out of the way, I have a 2 questions pertaining to those :

Is there any points he made that you think isn't as bad as he thinks/thought it is?

Conflicted purpose. If you have an ability that is say both a shield and a heal, it can be an interesting decision about when to use the ability. You may need the shield now but you may need the heal even more a few seconds later. It is possible to screw this up, which was his point, but it's possible to make it work out well as well.

He is my boss, by the way, so I'd love to tear down his arguments in a way that could publicly humiliate him, but I actually agree with his list for the most part.

Are there other "implicit rules" like those that you highly regard (personally or as the design team)?

Probably a ton. As I mentioned earlier, this is a better topic for a dev blog later on this year. That will be a fun one to write.

What ability do you think is the worst outlier in term of glaring bad design (Old poppy is gone, you can't use her... otherwise that's too easy).

Anything on Yorrick.

With all the marine wildlife you got to see, which creature would you like the most to see be the inspiration for a champion? Still, Mantis Shrimp (and why?) or another?

I'm not sure taking various animals and turning them into champions creates interesting champions (and yeah I know we have a few). It would probably be something obscure, like a bristle worm.

How would you rate your experience with Ask.FM now that it's a bit more settled down? Can we expect you to keep that one running for a while, or do you still consider that it mismatches your needs and it's simply good enough for now?

I made some answers early on that were trite and weren't really getting at the point players wanted to discuss (which at the time was sandboxes). I think I'm on firmer footing now. As a medium it still has a lot of limitations. I have to ask for follow up sometimes, and there is no way to carry on the conversation. I don't know most of the time if players found my answers insightful or stupid.

What would you say is the biggest pros and cons of the current way PBE functions?

Pros: Great for "feels" feedback. Good at catching bugs. Good as a point of reference for players to discuss on boards and Reddit. Cons: NA only. Players don't know how to participate. Bad for balance data (sample size is so small that matchmaking suffers, and players aren't generally in tryhard mode anyway).

If you were ice cream, what flavour would you be and which of your 2 cat would eat you first?

Crab flavor. The Siamese would eat me. The diabetic cat is too old and slow.

RiotGhostcrawler12/11/2015, 2:07:40 AM2 votes

QUESTION: You addressed a question earlier about the purpose and intent for change. Do you feel the rate of change in LoL is too fast? When you talk about the evolution of the game, "evolution" implies very small frequent changes that have an impact over time as opposed to many (or very few) huge changes. If you feel the rate of change is in a good place, do you believe that rate is in healthy proportion to the scope? What do you think is ideal?

We ask players that question a lot to understand if we are hitting their expectations. From the most recent preseason, we found that players in most regions including North America and Europe felt that we were not changing too much, but wouldn't want to see this level of change during the ranked season. In Korea, there was a greater sentiment that we were changing too much, and we are working to dive into that point of view a bit more to understand it.

None of that is to dismiss your concerns. We know there are players who can't keep up with number of changes, or maybe they can keep up, but still feel like there are too many. I'm not at all trying to tell you the way you feel is wrong. I'm just trying to point out the difficulty we have providing sufficient change for players who want it while avoiding too much change for those who do not.

We will try to keep our larger changes to pre-season and mid-season.

RiotGhostcrawler12/9/2015, 10:29:03 PM2 votes

Just as an aside, I am answering questions pretty quickly, so I apologize in advance if anything comes across as confusing, trite or just plain stupid.

Also, the intent with these posts was to generate some discussion topics that we developers could use for dev blogs and other forms of content throughout the year. So while I'll answer a bunch of questions in this thread, some topics we will keep on hand to explore more further at some point in the future.

Merxamers12/9/2015, 9:17:31 PM2 votes

Hello! Cool to hear you worked on Age of Empires; AoE2 was THE foundational video game of my childhood! (Oh, the memories of building 40 fully upgraded champions + jaguar warriors and annihilating castle after castle...)

  1. Being attacked by a giant jellyfish is the most terrifying thing i can imagine. How did you survive?!

  2. In the last few years, it feels like LoL has gone in a direction of super-mobility, flashy plays, and super-powerful kits (just compare the most recent 8 champions or so to the ones released two years ago); has this been a conscious decision? Or a result of the direction the 'cool ideas' have gone? (sorry if this isn't your niche)

  3. Do you see League lasting another 10 years? How will it be different, in your opinion?

  4. Any funny Age of Empires story to share? :D

RiotGhostcrawler12/9/2015, 9:33:21 PM2 votes

What are your thoughts on the diversity of item recipes, or lack thereof? Does it bear any value to you?

We want the early items to be a little safer because you aren't locking yourself out of potential later items. You may not have enough information early in the game to know which items (or even in which order) you'll want at the end. This means some amount of similarity among the builds themselves. There probably are some opportunities for those mid-tier items to branch out a little more.

Being attacked by a giant jellyfish is the most terrifying thing i can imagine. How did you survive?!

Man-o-war aren't that giant, just very painful. People overall freak out about jellyfish too much (just like they do with sharks and snakes) but this is one of those jellyfish that is pretty bad. (I will also add technically speaking that they aren't true jellyfish before somebody corrects me -- they are more closely related to hydras. The little water hydra, not the 7-headed or Titanic variety).

In the last few years, it feels like LoL has gone in a direction of super-mobility, flashy plays, and super-powerful kits (just compare the most recent 8 champions or so to the ones released two years ago); has this been a conscious decision? Or a result of the direction the 'cool ideas' have gone? (sorry if this isn't your niche)

I think there is a tendency to want to design a champion that gets a lot of YouTube videos made because of flashy plays. Similarly, in a game with 130 champions, you can't just offer a kit of skill shot + shield + steroid. I've said before that I think the concern that too many of our champs lately have been on the more complicated end is very fair and something we want to combat. You can have champions that make strategically interesting decisions (or even big plays) without them having double passives and lot of gigantic tooltips.

Do you see League lasting another 10 years? How will it be different, in your opinion?

Easily ten years. It's not going anywhere. I think the biggest gains we have to make are outside of the core game loop. We can't ever take our eye off that ball, but it's pretty fun already and we don't want to bury it under tons of complex systems. On the other hand, some of our systems outside of the game are pretty weak. For example we have focused a lot on fixing player behavior problems but not as much on helping you play with your friends.

Any funny Age of Empires story to share? :D

I made most of the random maps for the Age of Empires games. In one of my favorite blunders, I accidentally caused all of the wildlife on the entire map to converge instantly on your fledgling town and level it. Another time I made a map called "Plano" (as in Texas where our office was located) that was nothing but endless houses with a single tree. It was never intended as something players would see, but some folks in the company got really scared that it would somehow get out and hurt our recruiting efforts. I could write a book of Age of Empires stories. There are many.

RiotGhostcrawler12/9/2015, 11:51:54 PM2 votes

I feel like this game could have more in regards to objectives/minigames. Things like skarner crystals and destroying meeps and grabbing crabs.

I agree we could have more, and we'll probably add more over time, but not toooo many more. Imagine a game with 10 "Skarners" and 10 "Skarner crystals" all over the map.

Jeddy01712/9/2015, 9:28:39 PM2 votes

Okay,care to comment on the other permanent game modes like Dominion,ARAM or Twisted Treeline?(Yeah,yeah "What's Dominion?" blah bla) Just general thoughts & opinions are all I need."Are these modes good to have in the game?","Any way we can make them better?","Would we add new maps/permanent game modes in the future?" etc.

Elastoid12/11/2015, 9:54:03 PM2 votes

Could you talk a little bit about counterplay vs. balance? For instance, a hypothetical champion:

{quoted} Let's create a champion, we'll call him Allan, the Bullshitter. Now, Allan is a very simple champion -- he has no abilities but his passive. His passive says "any enemy that's within 350 range for 2 full seconds instantly dies." Allan also has the lowest movespeed in the game.

This champion would have clearly defined counterplay -- don't get close, don't STAY close if he gets close -- but would still be incredibly unbalanced in his element. He'd be an instant counter to any Jax, Tryndamere, or... well, take your pick of melee champions. Thus, he'd obviously be overpowered.

How much does Riot focus on balance, as a separate notion from counterplay?

Pyro12/9/2015, 9:09:27 PM2 votes

When you guys designed items like Jaurim's Fist, did it ever occur to you to think about recipe as item's identity?

Currently we have an increasing number of items sharing the exact same building blocks. Phage and Jaurim's Fist, Serrated Dirk and Caulfield's Warhammer, Giant Slayer and Executioner's Calling (and Vampriic Scepter!). Even big items like the Kircheis Shard upgrades, or summa summarum the Last Whisper upgrades. And things like Aether Wisp/Fiendish Codex (or all the Ruby Crystal upgrades) have already existed before.

What are your thoughts on the diversity of item recipes, or lack thereof? Does it bear any value to you?

XxxLumberJackxxX12/9/2015, 9:25:55 PM2 votes

Hi GC! Please take these questions as constructive criticism!

Many champions get a lot of attention from Riot without a lot of reason I can tell. Biggest example of this is Taric. He gets reworked so often for awhile reworks were referred to as 'taric style.' Now he is in line for a major update.** Why are you doing him before you do someone like Warwick?** A champion who only gets nerfed and has one of the most outdated binary kits in the game? Is this actually part of a 'class' type update that you are hiding? Or do you just love gems?

In the past a lot of rioters have made comments to the affect of 'we dont like champions that are nothing but a bundle of stats with no counterplay.' This is why I HATED when you touched Mundo a few months ago. I saw his modifications as nothing but MORE 'free stats with no counterplay' and I really wanted him on the medium term radar for something more meaningful. Then of course you release Yasuo, who has 2 passives that are the definition of free stats with no counter play (double crit and free pen from ult). When I read his abilities I thought to myself 'this is ridiculous and counter to riots game play design' and I was not referring to his E- Why on earth would you do a champion who is only balanced through free stats? Especially 2 stats that counter the group of champions that are supposed to 'counter' him (tanks/fighters).

The message seems inconsistent to me. So I guess the question is : How/when are you going to handle the champions who have too many 'free stats' and give them more actionable stats?

Also- how many games do you play/week of league, and what are your favorite roles?

RiotGhostcrawler12/11/2015, 1:59:49 AM2 votes

A very difficult question, but I feel like it should be asked:

Do you think League is getting more and more balanced, and might there be a point where it will reach "full balance", where which champ you pick is only defined by personal preferences and to counterpick/synergize?

It's clear that balance is going with ups and downs (last World Gangplank and Mordekaiser were obvious downs), but I'd think there would be a certain point where you have so much data and experience you could almost completely predict the influence something like a new item has at the game.

I believe the game is becoming more balanced over time, if you look at the overall trend of champions who have close to a 50% winrate. That isn't the only measurement of balance, but it's an easy one to discuss. When we make big changes, we know we are going to hurt balance in the short term, but can adjust to get back to a better state.

I think it is possible to reach perfect balance. It makes a good goal from a conceptual standpoint. Realistically, I don't think we'll actually get there. But I think believing that there is a theoretical perfect state goes hand in hand with trying to make changes that improve the game, not just change it in random directions.

That being said, there is another important question I have about balance. In my silver level of play, Garen is still seen as one of the most powerful champs. At high level play he is very weak though, not appearing a single time at Worlds. Difference in skill cap is probably the reason for this. Question:

Do you think it's possible to balance champs for every level of play, and if not, which level do you balance for? Is a champ balanced if he is balanced in bronze? Platinum? Competitive play?

We think the ultimate solution for champs in that situation is to make sure they have a relatively low skill floor but a high skill ceiling. In other words, the first time you pick up a champ (or more realistically, let's say 5-10 games), you shouldn't lose every game. However, you shouldn't be able to hit your cap in 50-100 games either. You should be able to get better and better the more you play. We tried to introduce some of that with the Garen update, but we may not have hit it enough.

I don't think it is possible to balance for every level of play. You just can't come up with one set of numbers that will work for all skill levels. We focus the majority of our efforts on Plat-Diamond. At that level, player skill is so high that winrates are very sensitive to small number tweaks. At lower levels, your just playing a few more games with a champ will have a bigger impact on your success than buffs from us. At higher levels than Diamond we're just not affecting very many players. That said, we do address outliers from Bronze (or even bot games) all the way to pro when a particular champion or strategy is dominant.

RiotGhostcrawler12/11/2015, 2:03:55 AM2 votes

What are your design goals with the mastery reworks? I remember leading up to them Riot said it's design goal was to give you more meaningful choice. But in my personal experience for 95% of champions it's very obvious immediately which masteries you have to pick and any attempt to pick something else will be completely useless for that champion. Does your data support this? Do you see more or less unique mastery builds?

The goal is to give more meaningful choices. We know we still need to add a few more masteries to provide choices for some champions, and we are going to have to continue to tune masteries that end up too dominant (e.g. Thunderlord's Decree). I haven't seen data yet to know how successful we were. My guess is not very successful yet, but we have laid the groundwork to get there. By contrast, we have seen number of viable item choices for Marskmen go up for almost every champion. Hopefully that trend stays.

Almost 2 years ago now I was told riot was working on features for their long time veteran players. A few hundred thousand IP later and still with every champion/runes I'm still miss that sweet feeling of working toward unlocking my next reward with IP. Though we only represent a small percentage of the population we are also your most loyal and most supportive. The fact there hasn't been even a whisper of this leaves me feeling like rito has used me up and discarded me now that they have nothing left to gain. And a sense of broken trust like I was lied to keep me playing and hoping for the future (though this probably isn't your area I don't know who's it is). So can you at least tell me if anyone is working on this or has it been shelved.

I honestly don't know anything about a veteran plan. I haven't heard anything. But I can find out. There is a problem where some players have more IP than they can spend, while for others, IP is very precious. We talk about offering potential rewards for those wanting to spend more IP.

RiotGhostcrawler12/9/2015, 10:00:07 PM2 votes

What was the goal of the pre season changes with regards to bot lane, I feel like the new support items are largely irrelevant as most support players were used to just not having that extra item slot, so why not build the same anyway and not lose the actives on the items since you are typically on a massive gold deficit when compared to the rest of your team.

This is a better question for Fearless, since his team worked on that system. His thread is here.

Additionally it seemed like if your bot lane lost the laning phase you lost most of those games all through season 5, but at least there was a chance to come back in the game. Right now the snowbally nature of the game just seems to make the losing bot lane snowball out of control to the degree that you often lose 90% of the games that you have a losing bot lane, unless you group super early and make up for it with towers in both of the other lanes, in addition to making certain it's a complete stomp in those lanes. Even at that, the ADCs are so strong with the new items that the damage from a losing bot lane is almost irreversible once the ADC that won lane groups with their team.

So interestingly, our data suggests that games are no more snowbally than before the preseason changes or all of last year. We realize there is a common perception among players that it is more snowbally, so we are trying to unpack that and figure out why the discrepancy exists. Games are definitely shorter, but a shorter game that isn't more of a shut out would actually be a pretty good place for the game to be.

Finally, and possibly the question I most want answered, are there plans for real strategic diversity through season 6? I feel like it's something that term just gets thrown around all willy nilly, with no real strives towards any sort of diversity. It seems to me that there's all of 5 strong champions in any given role, and those are typically the only champions that get played there. I for one would love to see 10 different ADC champions across 5 games, or a lack of champions that are must ban champions to prevent your team from losing in champion select. This patch being very fresh I'm yet to see how the mundo changes came through, but last patch, you banned mundo or you lost most of the time because you couldn't deal with him once he got to a certain item threshold, and let's face it the team coordination to shut him down early is severely lacking in solo queue.

We also would like to see 10 different ADCs get played. Balance and strategic diversity play into that for sure. But it's not the only factor. Players (of any game, not just League) really hate to be wrong, especially in front of strangers. That can lead to a situation where everyone wants to know "Who should I pick?" by which they mean "Which champ should I pick that is currently considered the best so that nobody will get mad or make fun of me?" In other words, the perception can sometimes drive the reality. The perception that there is a best and second-best ADC can often cause players to choose those champs, even if their winrate would be better with a champ they've played a lot or really enjoy. Seeing what the pros pick can also have a huge trickle down effect on ranked queue champion choices. The difference between a "strong" and "weak" champion can often mean the difference between a 55% and 45% win rate. Think about that. That means you'd win approximately 10% more games if you picked the right champion. If you played 10 games, you might win 1 more because of your champion pick. Your individual experience with that champion can have a far bigger impact. Overall, League is a pretty well balanced game. That doesn't mean we can't do better, and we will strive to do so. But we're not talking about champions who are twice as likely to win a game as another choice.

Saixos12/9/2015, 10:09:54 PM2 votes

  1. I've held a volunteer position for an MC server with multiple gamemodes for a while. During that time I was one of the people behind most map-oriented changes and did a lot of level design, along with taking part in systems and gameplay design. Along with others of my position we pretty much took care of an entire gamemode by ourselves. How should I put this on a resume? If it was a paid position, I'd be happy to put myself down as a designer, but as-is I'm somewhat confused.

  2. When a champion change or rework happens, how oriented is Riot towards previous mains of the champion? If X% of previous mains end up dropping the champion, or Y% end up enjoying the champion specifically less, how much would it be to be a win or a loss in your eyes? Could an amount of new mains to the champion change it to a win? (My personal bias here is Quinn, although she now has a solid role and I understand why Riot made the choice, I don't enjoy her at all anymore and have been forced to drop her, and I feel her identity has changed significantly. I'd have classified her as Assassin then Marksman before, and Assassin was completely removed.)

  3. Nearly all abilities in league exist to limit the options that an opponent has in some way. Do you think there should be more champions that provide more options to enemies with their abilities? A champion that I feel does so already is Bard with his E, and he's often named as one of the most fun or least frustrating champions to play against.

  4. When designing a new champion, do you feel that looking for fun to play as, or fun to play against first is most important?

  5. How do you feel about additional gamemodes & maps? Do you feel Riot should balance more around other gamemodes as well? Do you think having a ranked queue, or an e-sports league or tournament around other gamemodes (ex. a TT LCS tourney) could boost their popularity?

  6. What is the best way for us as players to have a significant individual impact on changes or change directions made at Riot?

  7. Do you feel that it is really important or even possible for each and every champion in LoL to occupy a unique space? Or do you think it would be enough for two champions to have similar roles and similar power, but have significantly different playstyles? (Graves vs Lucian is a bad example because they shared playstyles)

NostolgicSkies1/13/2016, 2:34:28 AM1 votes

A while back akali was changed and given her passive at game start, i believe riot said this was in order to open up more rune choices for akali instead of having to force rune her passive if u wanted to survive the lane at that time. so my question is why does this concept not apply to evelyn. i am really confused why i have to rune for base stats just so i can survive jungle, the only viable role evleyn is able to play. is giving evelyn fair base stats and opening her runes up to more inventive and creative pages really that bad? i feel now that you can only buy pink wards(a universal counter to evelyn) that this would be a good time to give evelyn some love.

Red Ryu12/9/2015, 10:59:00 PM1 votes

First Question, Do you think Hybrid champions have more of a chance to be supported in the future? Such as Corki who while does mostly magic damage as a carry scales off of AD and works with it well.

How about others like Akali, Evelynn, Jax, Kayle etc? Who work pretty well with both stats. You think this is possible to work again in a Corki kind of style? Or maybe some new champion idea that likes items like Gunblade, Rageblade and the like?

Or is the idea kind of doomed from the start?

Second question, Does Sona have too much in her kit too little on each part to work or is she someone that might need deeper work to make into something healthier?

Third, Why so many pets? :O

thebubskee1/11/2016, 7:45:12 PM1 votes

Hey!

What's your favorite bit of writing (book, paper, blog, podcast, stone tablet?) on Game Design or Systems Design?

What champion elicits sound effects from you, most often? Bard Skarner?

Rate your onomatopoeia out of 10. :D