Plant Spawn Full System Design (PBE)
EDIT: System changes are in the 10/25 PBE build, click here!
Cross-posting from the PBE thread :
Before I begin: most players won't need to read this. I'm going to go into A LOT of detail. The target audience for this post is people who really want to understand the system design, like theorycrafters and Wiki editors. You shouldn't need to know most of these rules to play with plants well. We expect the vast majority of players to get familiar with plant spawning behavior just by playing a few games.
And that's not to mention that this system could change a lot in the next few weeks! This is a long PBE cycle, and we'll be listening closely to your feedback. We're particularly interested in how you feel about spawn rates, plant locations, and the experience of scouting them.
(Info here should be up-to-date as of the Oct 19 PBE build.)
Spawn System Goals
The spawn system has several goals:
- Enrich map and vision control by providing mini-objectives for teams to scout and plan around
- Provide interesting combat situations and reward players who adapt to them
- Make League more fun to play and master by challenging you in ways that avoid solvable routine
- Ensure individual plants appear at the location and time when they'll have the most positive impact on each phase of the game
- Make Summoner's Rift feel more alive
All the details and mechanics described in the rest of this post exist to deliver on these goals. We'll be listening closely to feedback and observing game results to make whatever changes are needed to ensure that they do.
#Where Each Type of Plant Spawns There are a handful of fixed locations where plants can spawn. At any of those locations, only one kind of plant is possible. Within a couple games, you should have a good sense of where each kind of plant can spawn.
http://i.imgur.com/R0DuPhT.jpg
Plant types by region (green river Honeyfruit, blue ramp Scryer's Bloom, red jungle Blast Cone)
Rules of thumb for plant types by location:
- Honeyfruit spawn in river
- Scryer's Blooms spawn at a few specific locations near river ramps
- Blast Cones spawn in the jungle quadrants
#Early Game
http://i.imgur.com/jcxnpG6.jpg
Map of plants that always appear shortly after game start (red Blast Cones, blue Scryer's Blooms)
During the very early game, like your first jungle clear, plants have reliable spawn locations and timings. We want to avoid jungle success and failure being determined by RNG. You should have a good sense of which plants spawn during your first clear after a couple jungler games. Over the course of the game, more spawn locations become available, and their spawns will be less predictable.
#Plant Life Cycle
When a plant spawns, it first appears as a seedling that takes 30 seconds to grow into a usable plant. This gives nearby players a chance to notice it and plan around it before it becomes usable -- we don't want plants magically appearing underneath people's feet in the middle of encounters. Additionally, plants leave a corpse for 30 seconds after being destroyed, so you can tell if a plant was recently used even if you didn't see it happen.
Your team only knows about plants that one of you has seen, so you may want to scout them. If you get vision of a plant during its lifetime, it will be visible to you and your teammates in its "last known state" even after reentering fog of war, similar to a structure in a traditional RTS game, and appear on your minimap.
- While it's in fog of war, if an opponent destroys the plant, your view of that plant will not update until you get real vision of its position. Only then will you know it was destroyed.
There are two exceptions to this partial reveal rule:
- If you get real vision of a seedling, your view of the plant will get an update as it becomes fully grown, even if you don't have real vision of the plant at that moment. Likewise, if you get real vision of a plant corpse, it will clean up from your view at the accurate time.
- If a plant still appears in your view after it's been dead for 3 minutes, it will update and remove the plant from your view (we feel, at that point, the value isn't worth the clutter).
Respawn Rules
Fair Warning: This is the part that gets particularly gnarly and technical. It's also the part most likely to get changes during the PBE cycle.
The early spawns during your first clear are a reliable sequence, but after that, different locations have different respawn systems (called "Gank," "Ramp," "River," and "Deep", explained below). Because of the unique nature of these different map locations, each respawn system has its own logic and tracks its own respawn timers to ensure the desired amount of reliability, fairness, and unpredictability.
Under the hood, each quadrant has a separate "respawn time list" for each of these respawn systems (the lists get generated during the game). When it's time for a quadrant to spawn its next generation of plants for a given system, it looks up the expected spawn time for that new generation in the relevant respawn time list (or generates a new time if the list is exhausted).
- So when a Scryer's Bloom "Ramp" plant in the west quadrant says "Let's start the spawn sequence for generation 9," it will look up entry 9 in the respawn list for "west quadrant Ramp plants." If entry 9 doesn't exist yet, the system will generate it, add it to the list, and use it.
Plants have four different respawn systems: two for Blast Cones ("Gank" and "Deep"), one for Honeyfruit ("River"), and one for Scryer's Bloom ("Ramp").
"Gank" Blast Cones
http://i.imgur.com/yhTXoMT.jpg
Map of all "Gank" Blast Cones
- Gank Blast Cones let you jump into the epic monster pit and into the side lane river brush. Because of their strategic importance, we want these to be reliable and fair between teams and across games.
- These use the most reliable respawn method. The game rolls respawn times for north-south quadrants together and east-west quadrants together, so both blue and red teams have precisely the same respawn times.
- Each quadrant has exactly one possible spawn location (see map).
- Currently, the respawn time range is between 3 and 4 minutes.
- Respawn time begins after the plant corpse has been cleaned up.
"Ramp" Scryer's Blooms
http://i.imgur.com/okOytYl.jpg
Map of all Scryer's Blooms. Blooms labeled 'S' spawn shortly after game start. Limit one living Bloom per quadrant.
- Scryer's Blooms help you control map vision by revealing enemies and wards. While both teams should have equal access to this vision control in any given game, having a bit more or fewer blooms between games won't create unfair advantages.
- When a quadrant exhausts its respawn time list, it rolls three new respawn times. It then takes these same times, shuffles their order, and assigns them to the mirrored quadrant on the opposing side of the map.
- This means that if the west quadrant (home to the top side blue buff) is going to get two fast respawn times and one slow time for generations four through six, the east quadrant (bot side blue buff) will also get two fast times and one slow time for those same generations, though the order might be different.
- Each quadrant has exactly two possible spawn locations, which are mutually exclusive (if one is present, the other won't spawn).
- Currently, the respawn time range is between 4 and 6 minutes.
- Respawn time begins after the plant corpse has been cleaned up.
"Deep" Blast Cones
http://i.imgur.com/ZEsE8xl.jpg
Map of all "Deep" Blast Cones. Cones labeled 'S' spawn shortly after game start, those labeled 'L' are late-game-only. Connected spots won't spawn a second plant if one of them is already occupied.
- "Deep" Blast Cones make it faster to maneuver around the jungle. They let players optimize travel and make plays in late game jungle fights. Since their value is less strategic than other plant types, their spawn rules are designed to make them fair over the course of a game but allow moment to moment differences across the map.
- When a quadrant exhausts its respawn time list, it rolls six new respawn times. It then takes these same times, shuffles their order, and assigns them to the mirrored quadrant on the opposing side of the map.
- This means that if the west quadrant (home to the top side blue buff) is going to get two fast respawn times and four slow times for generations 13 through 18, the east quadrant (bot side blue buff) will also get two fast times and four slow times for those same generations, though the order might be different.
- Each quadrant can have at most two Deep Blast Clones at any given time, one per group (see map).
- Currently, the respawn time range is between four and six minutes.
- Respawn time begins immediately after a plant becomes fully grown, at which point a random group in the quadrant is selected to spawn a plant. If the group is occupied, no plant will grow for that generation. This means that a "Deep" Blast Cone is less likely to spawn in a quadrant if one already exists there. If your team gets unlucky in this way more often than your opponents, the spawn system will compensate by speeding up future spawn times.
"River" Honeyfruit
http://i.imgur.com/Dmdg8pw.jpg
Map of all Honeyfruit. Spots labeled 'L' are late-game-only. Limit one living Honeyfruit per grouping.
- Honeyfruit's combination of heal and slow provides sustain if you're willing to spend time in river, a contested area. Since it's accessible to both teams and most useful when it's most dangerous to take, Honeyfruit doesn't need complex respawn rules to ensure fairness.
- Each half of the river selects its own spawn times independently.
- Each half of the river can have at most two Honeyfruit at any given time, one per group (see map).
- Currently, the respawn time range is between 4.5 and 6.5 minutes.
- Respawn time begins immediately after a plant becomes fully grown, at which point a random group in that half of the river is selected to spawn a plant. If the group is occupied, no plant will grow for that generation.
- Note: The initial Honeyfruit first spawn happens much later than the other plants (in the 4:30 to 5:00 range).
http://i.imgur.com/DWrenTX.jpg
Composite map of every single possible plant position (see previous maps)
#Closing As you can see, there are a lot of rules governing how plants spawn. The system is pretty complicated. In a sense, this is by design. We want the system's overall shape to be learnable: which plants spawn where and in what phase of the game. And we want the system to be fair: both teams have equivalent access to all plants. But to ensure that we're actually rewarding map control, scouting, and tactical skill, we have to use more than just timers that you can memorize or calculate.
You can get your hands on plants now on PBE. We're looking forward to your feedback on them. We're especially interested in how you feel about spawn rates, plant locations, and the experience of scouting them. And just in case you thought we couldn't make it a whole post without a plant pun: we'll leaf it here.
