Why is Animation Canceling part of the game?

Crocodiletears·8/15/2016, 1:18:48 AM·9 votes·1,110 views

it seems like the only reason it isn't patched or removed is to add another meaningless skill/knowledge hurdle to separate new and experienced players.

on other forums i've heard the argument that animations you're stuck through make for poor game play and clunky feel, but then why not have short animations?

for example, if 's attack animation takes X seconds, where (A + B = X)
if her arrow is launched after A seconds, B seconds is the extra cancel-able animation,

why not just make the whole animation A seconds long, and fire the projectile at the very end of it? why does there need to be extra animation after the arrow is fired?

9 Comments

Give Me Trophies8/15/2016, 1:35:16 AM10 votes

{quoted}

it seems like the only reason it isn't patched or removed is to add another meaningless skill/knowledge hurdle to separate new and experienced players.

on other forums i've heard the argument that animations you're stuck through make for poor game play and clunky feel, but then why not have short animations?

for example, if 's attack animation takes X seconds, where (A + B = X)
if her arrow is launched after A seconds, B seconds is the extra cancel-able animation,

why not just make the whole animation A seconds long, and fire the projectile at the very end of it? why does there need to be extra animation after the arrow is fired?

WHOA WHOA WHOA

did you just say "meaningless" about a skill and knowledge hurdle? Thats why this game is losing the more experienced players, they are taking away skill and knowledge hurdles. How do you improve at a game without these?

These are a part of MECHANICS that make the game INTERESTING. Every champion would be just as easy to play as every other champion, game would get stale, and you would definitely quit if they started getting rid of these.

Animation cancelling is very important to the mastery of a champion and helps the game feel more responsive and allows better players who are more comfortable, knowledgeable, and skilled at their champion do better than someone who picked up for 5 games.

Short animations would make the game look worse, play worse, and melee champions would have extensively bigger advantage than they do now.

Lets take ashe for example, and give her an animation that lasts 1 second. Normally, her animation would be 2 seconds and you could cancel 1 second of it (hypothetically), so if you were absolutely perfect at cancelling the animation you would get the exact same effect of someone right clicking then going to go get dinner. This is fine (although it separates really good players who are masters of that champion's auto attack from someone who is worse at it, giving them an advantage because they improved on something important and they now get the benefits)

Lets take a melee champion though, like tryndamere. Tryndamere's animation is 1 second normally, but you can cancel .8 seconds of it. New tryndamere animation is .2 seconds now and he clicks on someone and without him doing ANYTHING at all is able to be impossibly sticky to the champion hes trying to hit, and normally this tryndamere player is only able to cancel for about .5 seconds of it, allowing .3 seconds of movement to be allowed for the victim. Now, the skill gap has been lowered CONSIDERABLY for tryndamere, forcing Riot to make changes to the rest of his kit to allow for the normal .1 to .3 seconds of free movement for the victim, nerfing him for the high tier players, buffing for the low tier players. Skill gap lowered EVEN FURTHER by Riot in the change meant to fix balance.

This is why the community is not taken into consideration very often in terms of balance and game design. It's 99.999999999% an awful idea.

To answer the title's question. Animation Cancelling is part of League of Legends, in the same way that you don't automatically get gold for creeps that die around you, and the same way all abilities are not point and click. Difficulty makes the game, and removing difficulty will ALWAYS take away from the game. The only exceptions are when the base difficulty prevents people from playing the game. All content is accessible so adding difficulty will always add to the game, as long as it is reasonable. (Reasonable being not nonsensical and trivial, but mechanical difficulties are welcomed as long as they don't subtract from the controllable feel.)

Hope that was easy to understand, I'm actually in the industry so it can get a bit complicated, but theres a reason for everything. Unfortunately, they listen to the community as of late a bit too much and as a result, are taking AWAY from the game, rather than adding to it. They feel that raw content and adding items to the game helps to add skill gap and it doesn't. Riot wasn't skilled or experienced enough to allow Item choices to truly exist since the core game's mechanics do not allow for it when the math and design was formed in 2009. They are trying to force that to happen by taking away other advantages and putting them into items. Doesn't work sadly.

Now, if you've been playing a while, you probably notice how big of a difference in map vision it is in high tier play (if you've ever played in it, or seen others.) The map is MUCH more dark, and that is because players now simply do not have the tools to ward everything. Before, you could choose to invest money in wards rather than get items a bit faster in order to play safer or allow your team to get a much bigger advantage. Warding added difficulty to the game because you had to use a lot of critical thinking to decide where the best possible ward should go to get the most out of your 75 gold. Supports had to be extremely good at this due to their lesser income and their ability to get rid of wards on top of placing them. This made support a very very difficult and important role in higher levels, and could almost solely cost your team the game if your support didn't understand the vision game.

That very interesting back and forth game of placing wards to gain vision over objectives, removing wards to grant your team vision control over an area for a huge advantage but also a gold investment... WAS COMPLETELY AND UTTERLY REMOVED. Now, wards are free (taking away the balancing your investment in wards and the gains) and also you and everyone else have a fixed amount of wards and MUST MUST MUST have them. No more skill hurdle of remembering to get the wards, managing your time and safety in how you placed them, where you placed them, and how many you placed, everything was removed.

They deliberately and solely just took away from the game. The game became worse. The only boon from this was that the support was not 90% responsible for map vision, but now its harder to carry as support than it used to be because you cannot by yourself ward every important spot on the map and take away all your enemy's important points of vision. You matter less, everyone else gets your tools, and then Riot makes you do a bit more damage and be more tanky and gives you more money to just make it up to you. It sucks.

That is why this game is getting worse in the eyes of everyone that played this since the beginning, and we knew what it used to be like, and know more about how it is now. Its worse. Trust me. The more they start getting rid of these hurdles, the worse it will get, you can't create a new core mechanic 7 years after the game's inception, it will always be less complex than an original mechanic due to how everything being built on top of the core mechanics, instead of new shitty ones Riot puts in.

Removing the vision game shook the entire game's gameplay more than all of the other season changes after that combined. Stop taking shit away.

SwiftKitten888/15/2016, 1:21:12 AM3 votes

idk its dumb.. i agree..

MunchCrunchLunch8/15/2016, 1:41:20 AM2 votes

animation canceling is put so that when you hit a button things happen. unfortunately its not the same for all champions and for that reason its clunky. however. there are some things that shouldn't be canceled. and some things should be. riot prob never gonna fix it or anything. its part of spaghetti code. its not intended. and will probably take too long to repair.

Urf Mode Is Life8/15/2016, 1:23:13 AM1 votes

the worst is when you accidently cancel attack animations when you mean to actually last hit something.... everyone should be like kalista where you CANT cancel an auto

xBushx8/15/2016, 2:14:32 PM1 votes

It's really a strategic part of A LOT of games.

Even Diablo 2, Wow, COD (Reload cancel)

It provides a slightly elevated skill ceiling.