A Rune System Design that Players can Love
Foreword
Hello fellow Summoners. Name's Cardi. You might remember me from some of my previous posts. Before I begin I must bring up the impact of our involvement in the League of Legends community – we as players directly influence the future of League of Legends. Our needs and wants do not exist solely as hopes and dreams in another dimension. Just look at what’s coming in Season 7: they’re all parts and bits of the game that we’ve requested from Riot for so long. Knowing this, we can safely say we play a direct role in the evolution of League of Legends moving into the future. Thus, this post is dedicated to the unwavering spirit of the player. Come along Summoners - forevermore may we march forward together in the many years to come!
Runes, the Five Points of Freedom
https://lolstatic-a.akamaihd.net/game-info/1.1.9/images/content/gi-runes.jpg
When I started working on this concept, one of the first images that popped into my mind as I mulled over the unnecessary degree of complexity that runes burden the player with was a star. A five-pointed star, you know, the kind that you drew as a kid. With each click of my mouse button, each insertion of a rune into its slot, I imagined a new point being added to the star – and after a while it became clear that I couldn’t even picture it anymore. I couldn’t even fit the damn thing inside my imagination. And that inability, my inability to imagine the star with thirty points, led me to the surefire conviction that the system simply didn’t need that many slots. Thirty rune slots and over a billion different potential combinations of runes, and yet only a few optimal solutions to the whole thing? Design blasphemy. Runes promise the player a ceaseless path to mastery – one that involves making preemptive, customizable playstyle adjustments that set the entire stage for numerous games to come. And yet, after all that IP grinding, that theorycrafting and online League guides consulting, lay a solved problem not perturbed in the slightest by the desires of the player who holds the reigns? It made no sense. But being a diamond player, I admit to the sin of having fallen into the pit of optimization myself – there are only so many good rune choices for the champions that I play. Where the heck are then all the other combinations of runes? Are they entirely ineffective? Is that why no one uses them? There are more combinations of possible runepages than people on the planet, but I kept seeing and using the same pages over and over.
Five points. I decided. Five decisions to be made. That’s it. No more, no less. You’d have your primary rune type, your secondary rune type, and your single Quintessence. It’d be design heaven. And it was. It was everything I could imagine wanting, but I didn’t imagine I would desire those things in the first place. You see, what drove the entire design path of this new system was something I strongly believe every player faces, but hardly ever talks about directly – core player frustrations. And no, I’m not talking about chat-related functions where people throw the word “toxic” around like a hot potato. I’m talking about gameplay-related frustration. Frustrations, that at their very core, are all too common and under-addressed. Unlike my past works, this one would be more utilitarian in its approach. Instead of tackling the problem from a purely creative perspective, I decided the main focus would be solving two specific problems: the lack of “customization” that runes really offer for their level of complexity, and the lack of tools players can access to reduce their gameplay frustrations. It would be these frustrations in particular that would guide me the most towards this new rune system – a rune system where the player’s choices would lead to profound changes in the way they deal with undesirable gameplay.
#"...something I strongly believe every player faces, but hardly ever talks about directly - core player frustrations."
Offering Decisions Based On… Unwants?
I came up with a list of four core player frustrations: the inability to survive meaningfully in lane (being heavily outmatched), the inability to contribute when ahead (being unable to carry with a lead), the inability to create opportunities alone (being “stuck” to teamfights and teamplay), and the inability to gather teammates for however good a cause (being unable to administer proper cooperation amongst teammates). Within these four frustrations lay two categories: laning-oriented and combat-oriented. The frustrations of survival and carrying with a lead relate mostly to not dying in lane and taking early objectives, respectively. Therefore, they’re in the laning category. The frustrations of being unable to work alone and working in the absence of one or a couple of “solo carry” minded teammates were combat oriented – they apply mostly to the mid and late game, where teamfighting and/or split pushing and/or skirmishing become most prevalent. Since every player would pick a primary and secondary rune type (with Quintessences being the third “rune type”), I needed another type of rune that would properly fill in the gap opened up by the presence of a fourth frustration: Quadrants. And so, pairing each frustration with its rune type, I had my list…
Laning Oriented Rune Types Marks (Objectives): Decrease frustration of being unable to take early objectives. Seals (Survival): Decrease frustration of being outmatched entirely and being unable to last-hit or farm monsters.
Combat Oriented Rune Types Glyphs (Solo Carry Power): Decrease frustration of being unable to outduel opponents in an even fight. Quadrants (Team Carry Support): Decrease frustration of being unable to win teamfights while outnumbered.
With each of the four rune types properly matched to a frustration that can be alleviated or soothed, I finally set the tone for the balancing of rune effects. I could begin to decide on how to go about granting the proper effects to particular runes. A player’s playstyle would then differ based on the rune type chosen for the primary rune slots (grants extra bonus effects) and secondary rune slots. A Marks/Seals approach would give a ton of laning and structure felling power, while a Glyphs/Quadrants approach would create a devastating PvP machine of a champion. A mix of laning and combat rune types could possibly be a more balanced approach. The main objective that was achieved, however, was that from whichever angle you chose to look, the player would still be able to make a meaningful choice of combinations based on playstyle preferences (shaped by the frustrations the player enjoys the least) as opposed to a needlessly large number of arbitrary number stat boosts. Oftentimes we can forget how much contentment there is to be had from just addressing root causes of problems as opposed to taking temporary relief as bait. This is in fact one of those situations. Instead of introducing choices players could possibly desire to make because the effects added an entirely new mechanic, the goal was to introduce choices players could desire to make based on mechanics or situations they’re least fond of and that already exist.
#"Oftentimes we can forget how much contentment there is to be had from just addressing root causes of problems..."
Once the themes for the rune types were set, I could begin detailing the effects granted by individual runes of a certain type. For example, here we have two potential runes of the “seal” type (these are not the only seals, but I’m only using these two in the example) …
Ex. “Seal of Respite” Description: Grants stats that help your champion survive in lane and earn gold during the early game even when your opponent(s) have placed you into a lose-lose situation on multiple fronts. Conditional effect: Gain massive amounts of increased base health regeneration, cooldown reduction on your Summoner Spells when you’re within a certain distance of an allied turret. Also earn slightly increased gold when you kill enemy units that are near your turret (not more than once every x seconds and reward upped for champion kills).
Notes: The actual stats granted by the rune can be tuned by the balance team – how much the Seal of Respite grants is unimportant in our discussion, because numbers can always be adjusted. The important thing to take away from this is that Seals as a category of rune specialize in decreasing player frustration that comes from being dominated in lane and being unable to leave lane (at the risk of losing a turret) or earn gold in lane (can’t approach the minions to last hit).
Ex. “Seal of Futures” Description: Grants scaling stats that help your champion survive in the mid and late game. Grants extra gold earned from slaying neutral monsters or stealing enemy camps even when your opponent(s) have created a situation where you cannot afford to protect your turret safely, much less score killing blows on enemy minions. Conditional effect: Gain massive amounts of tenacity, movement speed moving away from enemy champions, and gold earned when you slay neutral monsters in the enemy jungle. Gain massive amounts of health regeneration while attacking neutral monsters in your team’s jungle.
Notes: Conditional effects apply when you place the rune in your primary rune slots – once placed however, your other primary rune slot must contain a rune of the same type (ex. two seals or two marks, but never one of each in the primary rune slots).
Instead of outright listing the number values of stats granted, each individual rune would summarize what the effects granted would help the player achieve. “Stats that help your champion survive” include things like armor, health regeneration, flat health, magic resistance, and potentially damage reduction – whose values are all chosen at the discretion of the balance team and hidden from view to the uninquisitive player (average player doesn’t read into the numbers, but the numbers are to be available if one so chooses to expand a “details” button on the rune). Seal of Respite was created with the woes of the suffering laner in mind. When you decide in champion select that you may end up on the losing side of a matchup, Seal of Respite actually grants you a potential respite from an impossibility of scaling properly into the mid and late game. Hug your turret and be rewarded for doing so – at the cost of whatever your opposing laner decides to do in their downtime of course (if they win lane, the freedom to roam and make cross map plays hould be theirs). When you’re finding yourself going into gray screens more often than not, having decided upon at least one Seal of Respite before the game began becomes your beacon of hope and avenue to a comeback. Way more meaningful than extremely tiny and arbitrary stat boosts.
But soon enough we run into a problem when we consider combat-oriented runes, such as in the case of a potential glyph as shown below…
Ex. “Glyph of Elimination” Description: Grants stats that help your champion come out ahead in a 1v1 duel. Grants a bonus multiplier to lethality earned from other sources. Grants relevant offensive stats. Conditional Effect: Upon scoring a kill with less than 25% of your maximum health remaining, instantly restore some of your missing health and restore another bit of your missing health over time.
The term “offensive stats” is really vague and specific to individual champions – Zed would prefer to deal more physical damage as opposed to magic damage most of the time, for example, and wouldn’t benefit much from gaining ability power as a stat. Here’s where it gets nitty-gritty (for those of you who want to learn the details). Instead of burdening the player with information, it falls to the balance team to make sure each rune offers valuable stats and effects unique to the rune’s theme specific to each champion. Each player will have a “champion playstyle preference” button in the upper left corner of the screen once a game is entered, before the minions spawn. During this time, a player can select their preference for certain playstyles as depicted in my crude illustration below.
http://imgur.com/a/jC3hx (One of my early sketches before I decided to try my horrible artistic skills at Paint)
The player can also select default playstyle preferences for their favorite champions in the client outside the game, of course (with the new client update). If the player selects a physical preference on Annie, for example, the Glyph of Elimination would grant offensive stats on the physical side (ex. Attack damage) even to Annie. Players that decide they want to play off-builds like AD Annie aren’t punished in the new rune system – they just gain the same number boost in certain stats the same way a champion that scales well in that regard (ex. Zed) would gain if they indicate a special preference for that playstyle at the start of a game (or before a game). If the player decides to select a magical preference on offense, the Glyph of Elimination grants AP. In either case scenario, the theme of the rune is not compromised - Elimination. The power to eliminate your opponents from the game by killing them is the playstyle reinforced by the Glyph of Elimination, regardless of how you decide you want to play your champion, by selecting the relevant playstyle preference.
The job of the player isn’t to record numerical values and do number crunching – Riot can do that for them, effectively eliminating the barrier to entry of League of Legends that was the old rune system. Raw stats granted by runes are handled entirely by Riot, mostly invisibly. The side effect of being able to truly customize and tailor your champion to suit your own needs (based on the core frustration(s) you find least desirable) with this system of runes is the bonus awarded for elegant design. Complexity exists within this system as depth – the playstyle that’s rewarded most in game is the one that your chosen runes reinforce.
Quintessence, the “Keystone” Rune
Once you’ve chosen your primary runes and secondary runes based on your preferred playstyle, you can go ahead and add the finishing touch to your rune page (you can still have more than one page of course). The Quintessence that you choose grants an effect that can be based off a playstyle unrelated to any of the core frustrations. Some of these effects could potentially be entirely novel and unrelated to just stat bonuses alone. Because there’s so much potential room for ideas to be formed on Quintessences, I’ll leave it up to you as the readers to come up with ideas for the “finishing touch rune” in the comments below. Here’s an example of one of mine.
Ex. “Quintessence of Liquidity” Description: Grants a boost in the amount of gold retrieved from selling an item in the item shop. Conditional Effect: Earning five assists causes the next item that you sell to refund its full gold value.
Introducing: The Future
Of course, the fact that there are a limited number of runes and “set of effects” that each individual rune grants in this new system means there’s always room for improvement. That’s where patch updates come in. Not so much unlike new champions, this new territory is expandable and can be improved upon repeatedly, iteration after iteration. Alongside balance changes, runes can be fine-tuned and properly adjusted behind the scenes to ensure that the playstyle promised to players by the description is accurately reinforced in game. Can you just imagine? A future where players can get excited over a new set of runes that they can finally spend all their saved up IP on? Oh boy.
Summary The complexity of runes can be dramatically reduced by lowering the number of rune slots from thirty to five. Of course, the sheer complexity of a system is insufficient reason to lower the complexity of the system. The reason we lower the complexity of runes in our case, however, is that runes in their current form don't really impart the player with any customization choices at all (there are only a couple of optimal rune builds for each champion). If the player opts into choosing runes that aren't optimal for their champion, they lose out on necessary stats to keep up with their competition. There's a serious lack of depth.
Once we lower the available rune slots to just five (where the player chooses two runes of a primary type (ex. Seals), two runes of a secondary type (ex. Marks), and a single Quintessence), the impact of each individual rune has just shot up - runes can grant sets of various effects that reinforce a particular playstyle. The playstyle of the four basic rune types (Marks, Seals, Glyphs, and Quadrants) are designed based with gameplay related player frustrations in mind. For example. a Seal of Respite is designed to help your champion survive in lane - stats such as armor, health regeneration, and health could possibly be some of the stats granted by such a rune. Regardless of what stats the people working behind the scenes (Riot) decide are pertinent to "survival in lane", the burden of complexity on the player is further reduced. Instead of focusing on numbers, players can focus on the playstyle that's important to them - do they want to feel "less bad" for losing lane for example, or would they perhaps prefer to endure a possible losing lane situation in favor of a scaling effect that boosts teamfighting power in the mid game? A mix of both? And so forth.
TL;DR
- Thirty rune slots > Five rune slots
- Impact of each rune increased
- Each rune grants multiple effects and/or stats (even conditional effects)
- Runes are separated into four types: Marks, Seals, Glyphs, and Quadrants
- Each type of rune is designed to specifically reduce a certain gameplay-related player frustration (ex. surviving in a losing lane)
- Quintessences grant unique, nowhere else to be found, effects unrelated to player frustration
- Actual values granted by the runes are obscured (unless a player chooses to click details) in favor of emphasis on the description of the rune involved instead (focusing on the playstyle reinforced by the rune instead of the numbers granted by the rune)
Much thanks to all players reading this post as well as Ghostcrawler for his design blog post on Nexus, http://nexus.leagueoflegends.com/2016/10/dev-on-depth-vs-accessibility/ , which inspired me to tackle this challenge.
