strategic diversity

I don't know how to find the video again, but I watched a video where riot was talking about worlds with a guest pro from one of the teams at worlds.

and I was very frustrated... riot brought up strategic diversity, and the pro talked about making strategic decisions during the game or creating team comps that try to go a certain strategy in game. he said how basically, there's siege comps and split comps and engage comps or something along that line, and said how it was at first dominated by siege comps but then people defeated that by wave clear. and to him that dynamic is when "strategic diversity" is at its best, basically that if you see teams adapting to one strategy by finding another that counters it, that's what it means to have strategic diversity.

but riot responded by saying some nonsense about how midlaners are slightly different and that's what strategic diversity is.

and that really showed me, how very different the window is with the designers from with the players. the designers look at the champions as kits and gameplay, but the players look at the champions as something that works towards winning the game. that, riot seems to me to be oblivious to what it means to siege, engage, poke, etc. that they know these concept exist but don't really have the experience playing the game to understand what their changes to the game enact on the game's strategic diversity.

so I'm hoping that a riot member reads this, and thinks about it, and trys to encourage there to be change so that riot better understands how their changes effect the game. that it isn't about creating nomenclature and strategies to develop with, but rather listen to the players and try to find nomenclature that reflects their understanding of the player's perspective.

that, as a developer you develop and don't play. so when you come up with "developer speak" all you do is emphasize the barrier between your window and the players' window, that instead the way you try to find to discuss your process should be directly reflective on the feedback you get from these interviews with players. that instead of using these interviews to share what you are doing, you should use these interviews to listen to how the players are reacting. that rather than say "let's move on" you should say something that acknowledges their thoughts, and then after the published interview spend some extra time really working with that interviewer to understand their thoughts. and when someone for example talks about how strategic diversity to them means having games that are strategically in depth, you should think about changing your definition to better match that thought the player has. because it isn't about midlaners having slight differences. it's about how the differences of the midlaners have the potential to have a dramatic effect on the game. it's not about having kits that are slightly different, it's about how those differing kits enable an entirely different gameplay. and if that isn't reflected in the deffinition for your developers, they'll forget what that means, and obsess over minor irelevent details rather than spend the time to think about what those details mean for the game, much like how my hairdressers always spend ten minutes at the end of the cut trying to get everything just perfect when by the time I walk to my car and drive home my hair will dry and those precise points where they fall will be so dramatically different that fussing over the precise length is meaningless... xD