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@Riot How do you catalog the strengths and weaknesses of a champion?

El Dez·11/14/2014, 10:07:35 PM·6 votes·9,279 views

Once a character has hit the ground, be it in internal alpha, PBE, or live, how do you keep track of the peaks and valleys of a character's game play? How do you present these things for you or someone else to digest and how do you archive it so that certain issues are accessible? There's a character that has less counterplay than I'd like and has few meaningful fallback strategies when doing poorly. How do you communicate those issues to other designers on the project in reference form (i.e. documentation) so the problem is always clear?

While I'm at it, do you feel that every champ needs a fallback strategy. Why or why not? I've read that you consider Yasuo a well designed champ in terms of the "levers" that can be pulled to keep him in line while also having a strong defensive tool (his Wind Wall) to keep him relevant in teamfights when he's doing poorly. Does every champ need this or should certain champs stay behind if they don't secure an early lead?

Finally, what are ways in which you attempt to create counterplay where there's very little?

27 Comments

RiotMeddler11/14/2014, 10:28:31 PM11 votes

Internally we work with a combination of documented strengths/weaknesses, both in terms of intention and observed, that are kept in a shared file on a per champion basis, and a bunch of discussion/consensus building. Generally we're focused on the conceptual level (e.g. Braum should be strong against ranged threats and work well with auto attacking allies, weaker against divers etc). That's all very much a perpetual work in progress, not a rigid locked down set of laws though of course. As new information comes in, from player discovery, changes to game systems/meta etc it's often necessary to revisit existing assumptions and then sometimes adjust the approach you'd been taking.

Fall back patterns are something we generally want to offer to champions. Being behind should put you at a significant disadvantage, but shouldn't effectively remove you from the game. There are some champions where that's not really the case and that's something that's occasionally worth tolerating if it lets you do enough other valuable things with the character (game design's a series of trade offs basically).

Adding counterplay's all about giving other players ways to interact with a skill, champion or whatever. Some of the most common approaches we'll look at include range limits or changing abilities to skillshots (positional counterplay), requiring buildup or expenditure to use abilities (resource costs, whether mana, buff building, ammo etc), substantial CDs (windows of strength and vulnerability), dependency on other elements like extra enemies/other allied champs etc.

Squey11/19/2014, 3:56:05 AM1 votes

Id say out of thousands of games played that playing tryndamere verse quinn is the most impossible match up ever. Nothing you can do in lane. There are many horrid match ups in this game but this one makes me hate playing. Sadly these days top lane has very little selection due to lack of counter play. it