Quick Gameplay Thoughts: October 5

Hi 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 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

Some things we'll be looking at in 8.21

Not a comprehensive list, but a few champs we already know we'll be looking at in 8.21:

• Kai'Sa nerf - One direction is giving her clearer weaknesses. Another is making her upgrades a bit harder to unlock, given the original intent wasn't that she'd unlock all 3 this reliably.
• Tank Pyke nerf - While keeping AD Pyke around its current power level. Potentially involves some degree of kit effect changes (e.g. modifying the HP -> AD effect on his passive plus additional scaling changes?)
• Corki buff - Didn't make it into 8.20, aiming to have it in 8.21 as a result.

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OMW Ping improvements in 8.21

We should also have some improvements to the OMW pings in 8.21. The big change is that the sound of the pings themselves will now communicate a couple of extra pieces of info:

1. Processing applied to the sound will represent distance between the user of the ping and the pinged location. The further that distance, the more echo there'll be. Basically it's a representation of how long it'll take the pinging player to get there.
2. The further the ping is from the listening player the quieter the ping will be played. If someone's pinging that they're on the way to your lane, you'll hear a loud ping. If they're pinging they're on their way to the other side of the map, it'll be comparatively quiet.

We'll also be putting a chat notification of the OMW ping being used back in team chat. Looks like that got accidentally broken at some point when this approach was being developed.

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Why we don't use adaptive effects in game

Since we added both adaptive damage and adaptive stats to the pre-game with Runes the question's naturally been raised as to why we're not using them in game as well. Things like why not have items just grant Adaptive AP/AD so more champs can use them, or having damage on champ abilities or from items change types to be more optimal all the time. Some thoughts on why we haven't been doing that below.

• Adaptive Damage

By which we mean damage that can change its type. Easy example being Arcane Comet, which deals magic damage when you're building AP and physical damage when you're building AD. With Runes we were almost always aiming to design effects that could be added on to any damage pattern. Offering the damage type that would make sense with the sort of pen you were likely to build was more appropriate as a result. That also means it's easier to pick defensive options against a specific champion, since their pregame damage contributions will generally be matching their kit damage type.

For in game effects by contrast our concern is that adaptive damage makes it much harder to predict what sort of damage you'll be facing and therefore purchase/play against it. LoL's got a lot of champ abilities and other damage sources already to understand/track, so making it so you also need to assess someone's build all the time to understand whether an ability has flipped damage type is something we generally want to avoid. Possible we might make the occasional exception, especially if it's a strong fit with a champion's theme and really well communicated through art/audio etc, but even then would expect it to be a rare thing if done at all.

• Adaptive Stats on items etc (or abilities that scale with either stat)

As in stats that just give you whichever you scale best with of AP/AD/whatever. Again with Runes we wanted things to be really open, particularly to avoid having to make additional runes that were basically just duplicates with different scaling. With items by contrast there are quite a lot of cases where limiting the pool of users can be really important, particularly from a game health perspective. Which stats an item offers is a really good way to skew its value towards different users it's intended to serve well (e.g. pushing Zhonya's towards primarily mages and other heavy AP users, or skewing Black Cleaver towards health so we can keep it in a good spot for juggernauts and other tankier fighters). Additionally items changing which stats they offer also contributes to difficulty understanding and reacting to enemy damage output, especially if it flips back and forth during the game. We've been very hesitant about adaptive stats in game as a result, given the degree to which that would privilege offense over defense, unless making defensive stats adaptive as well. There are some cases where it might be a useful tool (e.g. opening up the Spellthief's line to AD users). Possible we do use it a bit in circumstances like that at some point, also might just solve the issue in other ways though (offering other power rather than AD or AP specifically).

http://ddragon.leagueoflegends.com/cdn/6.24.1/img/champion/Ziggs.png