Is the viewers experience more important than the players experience ?

MOuHahaHAhahaaaa·Jul 7, 2018·88 votes·15,634 views

No but seriously this is something that is relatively important because Riot admitted that they don't want to change and buff the turrets because games would last too long for the crowd watching the lcs... The damage thing it's the same story.

So is this a game or is LOL becoming a video on demand entertainment ?

Guys don't playing and watching asking : i want it to be more speedy and with more plays

Riot : OK !

Players : Meh...

What is wrong in this world ? Greed and Money destroys the world...

51 Comments

Attticus FinchJul 7, 201839 votes

Riot has said on more then one occasion that, yes, muh views in pro play is more important to them then the player base.

Makes me glad the pro play scene is slowly dying, honestly. E-sports has destroyed every game its ever touched.

y0r1ckJul 7, 20185 votes

Source?

KVbqbFsC8eJul 7, 20183 votes

There is no source. Just typical Boards circlejerking.

y0r1ckJul 8, 20182 votes

Yeah ur right. It's why I don't go on here as much as I used to. The bias is disgusting.

charge attackJul 8, 20182 votes

They want to believe that the game is dying because they no longer like it. Same is true for OW/Dota/any game that’s ever existed.

DoozkuJul 8, 20183 votes

Downvoted for asking for a source. Yikes!

DoktorKaiserJul 7, 201814 votes

Funny, people are slowly quitting LCS because it is actually boring, tank metas had interesting gameplay but now everyone is so scared of the 1 shot that the games are boring as hell. I have never seen less views on Twitch and other streaming media. Meanwhile the playerbase, myself included, is quitting daily. From 100 people I have on my friends list only 10 of them play regularly, mind you that I added most of them in season 6 and 7. This game is in serious danger of destroying itself and RIOT being stubborn idiots may lead them to bankruptcy.

Death by GlamourJul 8, 20187 votes

On twitch yes, lol has collapsed in viewership drastically, a major lol tournament gathered less viewers than some random fortnite streamers and warframe.

Even if they are increasing the playerbase in the east that will only last so long, tencent will push fortnite into those markets

DrCyanideJul 8, 20181 votes

Ironic that you should bring up Twitch, since Riot catering to viewers should include catering to Twitch viewers. Evidently that hasn't panned out so well.

SõnaJul 8, 20184 votes

That was why they unbanned tyler1 just to get some views back.. its all about popularity and money..

LatetotheRaceJul 10, 20181 votes

The eastern playerbase also only lasts until the next big thing takes over.

Snowman ArcJul 8, 20183 votes

I don't think professional scene is dying. It's only North American streamers and teams that kinda move away, because honestly, they are huge bandwagoners. I will probably get downvoted for speaking bad things about most people's idols, but that's the truth. Just because some famous old streamers and pro players may have quit or just not tryharding anymore doesn't mean ANYTHING. Watch what happens in Korea. Watch what happens in China. Arenas are filling up more and more with each passing season, fans become passionate and invested, and that's the main target area. China and Korea are the big video-game target countries, and those are rising.

Good thing that NA is dying, by the way. Bad teams, bad players, meme streamers and stupid cosplayers. Good riddance, took long enough.

SõnaJul 8, 20183 votes

I disagree with you, as I am players from China/Singapore, playerbase there are getting lesser and lesser. I have some Chinese friends that I have added since season 6.20+, right now, out of 60+ friends on my lists, only 3 were online while all of others have quit. You get what I meant? it's not merely just player here (EU/NA) feels frustrated about this meta, while other server encounter the same problem as well. China top server, currently has player number decreased even though it looks like a lot. Forum there pretty much the same as here.

China ,Taiwan, and Singapore's servers, their forums are all about how assassin shove their skill off someone and causing frustrating gaming experience. Thanks to that I have also quit because I have no more people playing with me anymore, even my bf

Snowman ArcJul 9, 20181 votes

Did you take the time to ask those friends why they quit? Because I also have a big friend list that is 95% offline PERMANENTLY. I talk with the ones I have close to me, and they said that they quit the game, because of the toxicity, not the game play. I will bet that most of your friends also quit because of that.

Also, we're talking about professional scene and players, and high level streamers, not your random soloQ friends. Your randoms and my randoms quit the game for various reasons. Some of them might do it because they genuinely do not enjoy the game anymore, some of them might be pissed at the game state, others quit because of toxicity, and others quit for real life reasons. I don't see how this is relevant to what I said.

Back to my point, it's only NA streamers and pro players who quit the game, or talk bad about how it's dying etc. Do you know why? Because they are not good enough to be successful at it. Look at Shipthur. The guy doesn't really care about soloQ anymore, he just plays for fun, joking with qtpie about how he hit diamond or w/e. Do you know why he doesn't care? Because he gave it a shot to become a pro player, achieved nothing at it, and now he just doesn't care. Qtpie is the same, as are so many other ex-pros. Like it or not, those are the unsuccessful players that tried and failed. The regional successful players are still playing the game regularly. Bjergsen, who has had a lot of success in NA still plays passionately. Same for Jensen, DL etc. Same for EU players.

SõnaJul 9, 20183 votes

Unfortunately, majority of my friends quit because of how insane snowball and damage creep in this game. They played league of legends for fun, not the stressful experience. Some of them even consult to me and tell me stop playing. But I didn't really quit because I did believe Riot was going to do something about it. Probably me and my friends are just 0.001% of playerbases which literally zero. But it's fine I get it. As long as Professional players enjoy the game, it's a success to gameplay balance right? Good luck and have a nice day.

SerevasJul 7, 201820 votes

Riot has a tremendous amount of resources tied up in LCS. Sponsorships, staffing, etc. It's a big deal for them.

As someone who watches the LCS I appreciate faster games.

As someone who plays the game I hate losing both my lane towers to rift herald because I got ganked once and died.

I don't know what their income from LCS looks like, but given what I've spent on this game I feel like their player base would be a larger source of income.

remakoroJul 7, 201818 votes

If im playing the game i might watch LCS. If im not playing the game i could not care less about LCS. Is there anyone watching LCS that aint playing league? So if they ruin this game for common players to make LCS more exiting - who is going to watch LCS?

charge attackJul 8, 20183 votes

Yes there are a bunch. In the end of the day, people WILL get bored of League, as most people do with any game. However watching LCS is low effort compared to actually playing.

I have multiple friends who haven’t played for years but still follow LCS - and I will follow LCS after I quit too.

Snowman ArcJul 8, 20182 votes

There are quite a lot of players who watch more competitive than play the game. Well, if you don't play the game, you probably don't like it, which means you won't watch either. You gotta play the game to understand it and like it, so that you can also watch it, unlike real sports, where you might not have access to playing it, but you can watch.

Honestly, I have moved away from playing the game, and like it more when watching it.

Mast3rShakeJul 8, 201810 votes

I find faster games to be boring. There is no strategy to them, one team just snowballs and since Riot destroyed stall mechanics the game juat kinda ends. I’d much rather watxh one interesting 50 minute game than two boring 25 minute games. League is suppose to be like a chess match and what Riot has done is take all the pawns off the board to make it go quicker

SoarinJCJul 8, 20182 votes

I like the chess analogy, but I feel like they only left the pawns in. All you can do is hope you get the first move and then snowball off of that.

Snowman ArcJul 8, 20181 votes

Well, you need to be rewarded for good early game playmaking and strategy execution, because, as much as people want to deny it, there is still a lot of strategy, rotations, pathing etc and need to be executed correctly to snowball a game. If you watch LCK or LPL you will understand. I understand if you call NALCS or EULCS boring though, those regions are really hard to watch. Very bad teams and very bad players.

SoarinJCJul 8, 20181 votes

I would like to agree, but at this point in the game and patch cycle I really cant. Earlier today I lost a game simply because an enemy Diana (20/8 or something) carried her team by just pressing q and r on everyone while we were distracted by a mundo and fiddle ult. In the same game, They took one of our towers at 12 minutes by having 3 people auto it to death from half hp without minions (morde, mundo, and fiddle). After Diving 3 of us under it. None of them were even fed or had a full item. Screw wanting a scaling team comp, right? Whoever is tankiest and does the most damage early just flat out wins unless you manage to have a perfect team that never misplays.

Snowman ArcJul 8, 20182 votes

I feel you. I recently tried playing VIktor to see how he fairs in the mid lane. Holy shit it felt bad. I managed to do most damage from my team (imagine how bad my team is), but I still felt like I was so useless. Very slow ramp-up, very little agency over the early game. The only thing I could do for the first 25 minutes was stay mid lane and perma shove waves, while trying to draw pressure on me to indirectly help my other lanes. Felt horrible not having kill pressure or roaming potential, while knowing that the slightest positioning mistake could lead me to get CC'ed to death.

TwitchInMyPantsJul 8, 20181 votes

{quoted}

Riot has a tremendous amount of resources tied up in LCS. Sponsorships, staffing, etc. It's a big deal for them.

As someone who watches the LCS I appreciate faster games.

As someone who plays the game I hate losing both my lane towers to rift herald because I got ganked once and died.

I don't know what their income from LCS looks like, but given what I've spent on this game I feel like their player base would be a larger source of income.

Games aren't really faster when if you aren't running snowball tactics you're running funnel comps and trying to stall to get a giant farm lead or you draft tons of waveclear so that pushing isn't doable so you can actually make it to late game

It's only faster in scenarios where the absurd snowballing happens (In disorganized solo q its way more often) and it basically promotes either really short or really long games

SoarinJCJul 8, 20181 votes

Personally, I would like to see a comparison or analytic of the average pro match time for patches 8.11-13, compared to the end of season 7. I guarantee you that the average for recent S8 patches will be shorter than those of S7

TwitchInMyPantsJul 8, 20181 votes

{quoted}

Personally, I would like to see a comparison or analytic of the average pro match time for patches 8.11-13, compared to the end of season 7. I guarantee you that the average for recent S8 patches will be shorter than those of S7

I don't doubt that but cutting the average doesn't stop those long games and that's entirely the point

If they're worried about people needing shorter games, they totally failed their objective given the long games still happened. They're basically fucking solo q for a change thats unimpactful on pro play which is what people are watching. Plenty of pro games are short, but plenty of them are also incredibly long. Even if more are short and long and the short games got shorter they're barely earning any time for the viewers while hurting the player experience.

Snowman ArcJul 8, 20181 votes

Nah. You gotta understand that most people do not spend money on this game, which is why Riot introduced the Hextech Chest system, so that people have another way to spend money. Most little kids won't spend money on this game, most adults won't either. I haven't spend much either, and I have a fair amount of skins. Sponsors, arenas, etc produce way more income than the random 13 year olds that might buy the new Riven skin once a year.

HeeroTXJul 7, 201820 votes

If Worlds is any indication, Riot needs China to be good and then the #1 concern is Chinese viewers. I'm not sure what kinda money they're getting/expecting from Western viewers, but they're simply NOT gonna get numbers in the US or EU on par with what they had in China for Worlds. That said, I think its really telling when you have someone like Perkz just the other day say that US solo-Q is absolutely awful to play in. Too many years of neglect has made the US playerbase pretty awful regardless of the theoretical game state.

Bob the ToastrJul 7, 201815 votes

Also along that line I bet they make games faster to cater to PC cafe players.

Mast3rShakeJul 8, 20181 votes

[{quoted}](name=Bob the Toastr,realm=NA,application-id=3ErqAdtq,discussion-id=8hvE4efP,comment-id=00010000,timestamp=2018-07-07T20:23:30.292+0000)

Also along that line I bet they make games faster to cater to PC cafe players.

PC Cafes are cheap to sit at. They sell other stuff that makes them money, like stadiums do

Snowman ArcJul 8, 20181 votes

NA solo Q is just probably the worst experience you can have in League, I assume. And this is why:

Too many streamers are from NA, naturally (english language), which means many of them will try to appeal to the fans and the viewers with random things like meme plays, troll plays etc. How many times has someone blew flash for that 10$ donation? How many times has someone run down mid so that they can get views on their stream? And guess what, those people are trend-setters, like it or not. And guess what, it only takes 1 streamer to ruin the experience of 9 other challenger players, which makes it so hard to play.

NA soloQ, and NA tradition in general, is just that. Memes, appealing to the crowd and showboating and anything that helps them do that will happen, even if it ruins the experience for others. I remember Faker saying how Korean soloQ is also kinda getting boring nowadays and no Korean pro is actually tryharding, but that's for all difference reasons. The reasoning here was that matchmaking is actually bad, that low elo Master players are matched with high elo Challenger players and the skill difference is insane, which makes the games so unfair, to the point that the pros are just not giving a shit.

saltranJul 7, 20189 votes

Is this meta enjoyable at all?

I can only speak for myself but I went for watching most of the LCK and EU games and a few from NA to literally only watch the KT Rolster games so they can let me down once again.

Lotus BloomJul 7, 20188 votes

Personally I dislike how the game is so badly that I only watch LCK, assuming I'm up for it. NA and EU aren't even fun to watch anymore.

flibitydooJul 8, 20185 votes

If they want to worsen the experience 100k+ players to the point where they quit the game in favor of 100- live studio audience then who are we to stop them?

It's there business directive to lose than many income streams even if it is objectively wrong

KrytoricJul 9, 20183 votes

The best part is, is that the shorter games are worse for watching imo.

The best games were the 40-50 min close games where every play mattered, instead of the 15 mins waiting to watch one team just roll over and die.

IainG10Jul 8, 20182 votes

What I don't understand is why they can't split the builds, even if it's only on numbers. Just like they have the PBE, can't they have a server that has a pro-friendly balance that teams can access for practice, and an actual healthy play build on the main server for 99.99% of their playerbase (and revenue source).

Hong Kong AnnieJul 8, 20182 votes

As somebody who used to be big into LCS I can honestly say I don't care about it anymore. I used to love to watch the pros build up to that decisive late game fight, or seeing them fall behind early and try to stall out the game until they could reasonably win a fight. Now the games just snowball out of control and that's not fun to watch or to play.

YuGiHoJul 7, 20181 votes

that sucks, i hat the idea of any game that is more fun to play than it is to watch.

Yets4240Jul 8, 20188 votes

You fucking what?

You hate games --literally activities that require and are supposed to encourage PARTICIPATION that are more fun to play as in PARTICIPATE IN than they are to watch? as in sits passively and do literally nothing, and have no effect whatsoever on the outcome thereof

In what world does that make a shred of sense?

YuGiHoJul 8, 20187 votes

hmm. i think i meant i hate games that are more fun to watch than they are to play. i must have gotten that mixed up in my head when i was writing that. haha oops

Yets4240Jul 8, 20187 votes

Okay, sorry for flipping out a tad, I wasn't angry or anything, but completely blown away.

RyrynounetJul 8, 20181 votes

imo I took this has irony :v

DanjengJul 8, 20183 votes

That's the very concept of Youtube gamers. I don't understand it all. Why would people actually watch someone (especially someone so loud and obnoxious) play a game? Sometimes I think that perhaps I have been in a coma, and the last 6 years are a figment of my imagination.

Beacon AcademyJul 8, 20182 votes

tbh, I do find it enjoyable to play the game first.

But I have what my friends tell me is a "Resting bitch Face"

So even if I feel something from a certain moment in a game or show, it looks like I'm "meh" about it.

I like to watch videos of people who experience them for the first time just to watch their reactions

Probably because I don't make them myself :/

Shazzbot69Jul 8, 20181 votes

{quoted}

That's the very concept of Youtube gamers. I don't understand it all. Why would people actually watch someone (especially someone so loud and obnoxious) play a game? Sometimes I think that perhaps I have been in a coma, and the last 6 years are a figment of my imagination.

Well for me at least, some of the gamer youtubers that I watch makes me laugh and I enjoy their personality. (Russian Badger, Markipler, Vash12349, sunnysplosion) and for others, I watch it just to get an idea of what the game is like (zero punctuation, gggmanlives). Other times I would watch a walkthrough with no commentary just to see what a game that I don't have or plan on getting is like to help me decide if i am gonna get it.

In terms of MOBAs I only watch Purge a highlevel dota 2 player and caster to try and improve my game and learn from someone as skilled as he is. Aside from doing real time streams, Purge also does replay commentaries where he takes a game that he has played, and watches and commentates the replay, explaining how to play that hero and what he did right or wrong and the like.

Snowman ArcJul 8, 20181 votes

Honestly, I have moved from playing this game to watching it lately. I don't know if the gameplay changes are the reason for playing less or watching more, though. What I can say for sure is that the player behavior and matchmaking have pushed me away from playing a lot. I can handle gameplay changes, if anything, I like change, but I just can't stand having a troll / feeder / AFKer in one every 3rd of my ranked games.

On the other side, I like watching League as well. It is relaxing, it's something I can do that requires no effort and fill time, and I have also kinda invested in it now, after watching for almost 2 years now. I have come to support teams and feel invested in them, same as I do for football, for example, so yeah, I'm kinda hooked to watching lately.

LCK is exciting! Let's go KingZone!

x Wyvern xJul 8, 20181 votes

League is a Game, not a Movie, but they build the patches around it like if it was a Movie.

Shazzbot69Jul 8, 20181 votes

It is a game, so I would say player experience is more important. But I am pretty sure Riot makes a lot of their money from people going to tournaments and buying merch and tickets, so I doubt Riot would do anything to upset that.

OnlyYouCanHearMeJul 9, 20181 votes

I am not watching LCS or LCK because they don't play on the live patch. If they are 'pro' it means they are the best and can play on live patch, not 1-2 patches behind.