Are Keywords (Invisibility & Camouflage) the right way to go about thinking about stealth?
During the Pre-Season and the Assassin Update, Riot broke Stealth down into two categories: Camouflage and Invisibility. These were supposed to be Keywords to help them differentiate between the two different general uses of stealth in League. The one is more strategic, aimed at avoiding wards and maneuvering around the map; the other is tactical, aimed at dropping aggro, dodging attacks, waiting for cooldowns and attacks of opportunity. Short stealths are Invisibility, longer stealths are Camouflage.
Categorizing stealth in this fashion - using Keywords - was supposed to allow for different forms of counterplay to be developed and increase clarity and give Riot a better way to balance the stealth champions. Some champions had Camouflage, others had Invisibility. Camouflaged units could be seen by Control Wards, Invisible units couldn’t. The Sweeping Lens or Oracle’s Alteration soft-countered both forms of stealth. True Sight was now only on towers - the champions with Invisibility were no longer hard-countered by an instant-speed consumable 75g item. Riot also added a ‘shimmer’ effect when stealthed units were successfully damaged by enemy champions.
Some of these are steps in the right direction, others are problematic for reasons I'll list below.
The Good:
- Removing a cheap instant-speed consumable hard-counter (the Vision Ward) was a step in the right direction. It wasn't fair to be Akali or Vayne and just get trivially countered in such a way that took very little skill expression from an opponent.
- The Red Trinket (Sweeping Lens and Oracle's Alteration) effect is super cool and useful and we need more effects like this. Effects that grant us information and / or soft-counter invisibility is vital toward making League conducive to stealth gameplay.
- The 'shimmer' effect is a cool effect, it's very similar to the Red Trinket FX but looks different enough to be distinct. Like I mentioned above, we need FX like these to make League more conducive toward actual stealth gameplay.
The Bad:
- First, they haven’t added any additional means of counterplay beyond the 'shimmer'. The Vision Ward was replaced by the Control Ward, meaning that the one reliable counter to champions like Shaco, Akali, and Vayne no longer exists. The Control Ward counters the three champions with Camouflage: Rengar, Evelynn, and Twitch, but the entire purpose of Camouflage - the ability to dodge wards - is negated by the functionality of the Control Ward, i.e. the Control Ward becomes invisible if placed in brush. How can you dodge something that can’t be seen if it’s position is unknown to you? You can’t unless you already have information about its location, which requires you to have already warded the area or for the enemy to ward while you’re watching.
- Second, the idea that categorizing stealth into two forms increases clarity. There are three big problems with this alone.
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- The word invisibility means ‘cannot be seen’ literally ‘not visible’. Camouflage is invisibility with proximity as a parameter, which would seem to make it a subtype of Invisibility if anything.
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- If Invisibility is a champion specific Keyword, then what do we call a champion who runs into brush or one who runs beyond your field of vision? What else can we call them but invisible? Invisibility is a status state: players begin the game invisible to enemy champions. Brush provides invisibility, as does the Fog of War, enabled by terrain and our heroes limited fields of vision. Some champions can have invisibility applied to them, others can’t.
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- Every champion can utilize stealth: trying to categorize and Keyword stealth (thereby relegating it to a handful of specific champion mechanics or a class of champions) increases confusion for new players who are very likely to intuitively use stealth regardless of which champion they’re playing because League's systems allow them to engage in stealth gameplay: namely the Fog of War, enabled by terrain and our heroes' limited fields-of-view, and also brush, which, again, functionally renders champs invisible. But Riot doesn’t emphasize this idea of stealth (because think of stealth solely as champion mechanics or a class of champions) so players gradually get trained out of using stealth. This is most evident in Bronze and Silver, where players telegraph their movements and intentions to the enemy team - not with any attempt to mislead their foes but because they lack the stealth mindset.
- Finally, the idea that categorizing stealth into two forms is going to help Riot balance stealth. Stealth will only be balanced once we have actual clarity around the mechanics and elements that enable stealth, grant us invisibility, our ways of gaining information. Currently, there are:
- Multiple icons for True Sight, and the one icon that people most expect, the Pink Eye, is now only on an item that doesn't grant True Sight! (Duskblade) with those icons not telling players that it's True Sight even when you mouse over the pic in the buff bar. (It's usually: "______'s team can see this unit.")
- Several instances where the icon for 'revealed' is shared between True Sight (Cait's W traps, Lee's Q, Zyra's W plants) effects AND Standard Sight FX (Corki's W, Jinx's W, Kalista's W).
- Wards themselves being things that players want to avoid, but are invisible meaning they can't - unless they have prior knowledge of the ward's placement. This violates Riot's own stated philosophy about clarity:
Players should fight their opponents, not the game. We strive to present information in a clear and precise way so that League can be about dominating opponents with skill and teamwork – not through bookkeeping hidden information.
Clarity means we want distinct, transparent mechanics in everything we design. When the outcome of a game hinges on a player’s ability to quickly assess the situation, information needs to be clear and accessible. This doesn't mean we tell players the best play to make, but we should make sure they have the right info to make calls as best they can."
--- Ryan "Morello" Scott, Dev Blog: The Design Values of League of Legends
What's most frustrating about all of this is that we can't talk about stealth and invisibility because Riot's definitions - their Keywords - are not accurate.
Stealth is cautious and surreptitious action or movement; behavior intended to allow one to escape notice. Every player can adopt the stealth mindset and every champion can engage in stealth gameplay because Riot's systems (mostly) allow it. Stealth is not a status state - invisibility is. It is entirely possible to move and behave stealthily, only to be visible to a predator (often the predator is even stealthier than the prey its hunting!) This is what happens in the natural world. Likewise, it is entirely possible to be invisible and not be stealthy in your movements or actions. The two terms are related by not synonymous, not interchangeable.
And stealth_ed_ is not a real word. It doesn't appear in any dictionary, save for Urban Dictionary which doesn't count. You can use stealth, behave stealthily, be stealthy, but there is no such thing as stealth_ed_ outside of the gaming community, which uses the word to refer to the status state of being invisible.
Solution(s):
Every game that wants stealth gameplay as part of its core experience gives players a number of tools for scouting and getting intel, misleading or distracting guards, and maneuvering around the environment and game-space. The best stealth games are the ones that create a dialogue between the player and the game-world and it's inhabitants. We need wards that are more less static and more interactive. The entire ward ecosystem is based on a handful of items designed to hard-counter the others. We need more ways of scouting and getting intel - and these acts need to be as valuable or more valuable than just clearing wards. We need wards that simulate the fallibility of guards in other games - wards that can be mislead or outplayed by virtue of a champion's abilities and a player's own skill. We need wards that grant different forms of information, that express vision in different ways, so that no ward is strictly more powerful than another and that give players the information they need to avoid or outplay it without needing a specific anti-ward counter item.
