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Let's Talk About Design Values and Runes

gamezzs·8/1/2014, 3:49:02 AM·6 votes·1,136 views

Runes, one of the most important behind of the scenes power in League of Legends yet also one of the least talked about. With Riot developers finally deciding on a set of public design values I think now there can finally be a good discussion about the future of runes in the game.

While there are several problem with runes I'm going to focus only those that I can directly link to the values of Mastery and Meaningful Choices

First let's take a quick recap about what Riot has said about their values

  • Mastery: League of Legends is about the pursuit of mastery and challenge. A player can grow in skill, teamwork, decision making and adaptability, but being the best means learning all paths, not just picking one. We'll always find new ways to reward and support a player’s developing mastery of the game

    • ** Adaptability:** Adaptability is both your ability to learn and respond to new ideas, new threats and new changes, along with your ability to play in a variety of styles.

  • Meaningful Choices: A meaningful choice requires tradeoffs. If it's a no-brainer, it's not interesting. If nobody understands the consequences of their decision, it's not engaging. If there's a better choice rather than a different choice, players become followers rather than pioneers. We support new strategies by ensuring that tradeoffs exist for the game as a whole.

As runes currently stand I see 2 major issues that relate to these values: runes must be bought and runes cannot be adjust in champion select. Obviously there are other issues such as tier 1 and 2 runes, but that is beyond the scope of this discussion(maybe a meaningful choice issue?)

Purchasing Runes: Runes are expensive, in fact buying enough runes to make a full page is the amount of IP as buying several champs. Yet, buying runes doesn't really give a player that much, nor should it. Runes are a level of customization that give players different options about how to a play a champion. It brings a new level of mastery for players, or rather it should/could. Building a rune pages let's a player add there own play-stlye to any champ. Perhaps you run full dmg runes because you like to be aggressive early or maybe you bring mana regen because you like to play safe and spam spells. While the options might be somewhat limited, runes should allow a player to build their style and strategies. Having runes being prohibitively expensive, especially to newer players, preventing this level of mastery from happening. Mostly players simply will not or ever have the amount of IP to get unlock all the runes with the current pricing. Obviously, you can't be playing without any runes but if you are can only select a handful of options you no longer customize but instead generalize. The runes that can fit any situation will always be taken and the is hardly a meaningful choice. That's be before you take into account that by default a player only has 3 pages to take into champion select before they even see who they are playing or playing against. Which leads nicely into the next point:

Runes and Champ Select: As I claimed several times runes should how a player customizes their play style to any situation. In a similar way that masteries are customized depending who you are playing, runes should be a tool of adaptation. The inability to customize runes to fit a team, a strategy, or a lane leaves runes as customization tool that can be customized to any situation. It's hard to adapt with runes because they are planned before hand and "no plan survives contact with the enemy." Perhaps you didn't get the role or champ you wanted or maybe you hate who the other team picked, runes pages are missing that level adaptability that Riot claims comes with mastery. While yes more rune pages can be purchased but that just brings us back to the point above and is missing the big idea that runes should not be about planning before you even get into champ select. Runes should be about how I want to play this champ this game and in this way. While this issue might be limited by technical issues with the client, ideally runes should be editable in champ select much like masteries.

Or perhaps I just missed the point of runes and they're aren't a form of mastery or customization? Thoughts?

17 Comments

Cloud Potato8/1/2014, 6:51:32 AM6 votes

The problem that prevents runes from being changed is economics. Historically, runes (and rune pages) have been prohibitively expensive due to the strain it put on Riot's servers to store them (they've been there since you could only have 2 mastery pages), and while it could probably be done away with today, two things need to be considered:

The big one is that the whole IP economy has been built upon runes being as expensive as they are. They are the main IP sink in the game. If their cost is reduced or even removed all the IP generated has to be spent somewhere, and it will most likely go towards buying Champions, which will have an impact on the RP economy. The repercussions of this are very drastic but hard to predict, meaning that an attempt to pre-preemptively soften the blow will not likely keep the economy stabilized.

The other, relatively smaller issue is refunding existing players for their IP purchases. As mentioned earlier, the whole IP economy is dependent on runes being a huge sink for IP, and the fact that many players have spent a very large amount of IP on runes means that people will expect to get IP back on any large scale cost changes. This will leave players with huge amounts of IP, which will further destabilize the economy.

Now I would absolutely love a change in the rune system. I'm currently using 10 rune pages, and the only thing keeping me from experimenting with crazy stuff like full crit damage is the IP cost. However, even if Riot opens the floodgates for rune changes, that doesn't necessarily mean that different runes will get used. For example, the extra gold generation given to Supports didn't solve the problem that they were all forced into buying a small subset of items. While we might use the new system to screw around in normals and such, the metagame will probably drift to one rune set, although it would make balancing runes less punishing IP cost wise. Overall there is no simple solution, and the entire economy needs to be rethought in order to free runes from the stupid IP costs.

Pika3108/1/2014, 4:58:45 AM2 votes

I think runes are at a fine place, for the time being. Sure they cost IP, but that's obtained through effort and playing. Once you've bought a rune, it's there permanently, it's not like you're constantly bleeding IP into them. Same thing with pages and having more pages means more different customizations to choose from for different scenarios you believe you may be faced with. If rune pages were customizable in champ select, it would nearly defeat the purpose of having multiple.

If anything, I believe there should just be more options to choose from. Perhaps for a few examples: scaling runes that start super low, but grow incredibly high late-game. Or the reverse, runes that start a little lower than flat and slowly grow to slightly higher numbers near the end. Sort of an exponential-growth type of thing, rather than just a steady growth-rate.

Tyverus8/1/2014, 12:48:15 PM2 votes

I do agree with your first argument to a limit. Yes runes are expensive but there's the counter argument that you then need to put a bit more thought into if these specific runes are REALLY what you want. do you go with the unique, "my-style" runes that may fail a hundred times before you feel they are worth the ip and learn where they shine? or do you go with the tried and true armor seals that majority of players/roles still require to stay at the baseline but are lackluster? Another counter argument is found when you look at it from a different perspective: If i'm playing against you and you completely steamroll me, i have to make a conscious effort to change my runes to either match or counter your plays. Much more thought that merely moving points around such as with masteries.

To your second point: I believe your definition of adaptability is different than riots and here's why: with the current design you cant say "well shoot, there's a Teemo.. guess i'll change my runes make my life less hell.." and band-aid your champions weaknesses to force your own playstyle and build to work. You have to actively adapt by changing your play/build styles in the game where meaningful decisions are made such as "do i buy all the dmg's? or do i need to go against my normal thought to better serve my team and build different?". Following the first option (changing runes in champ select) doesnt fall into my definition of adaptable since it's a passive decision and how do you truly know that Teemo is going top until you're at the loading screen? you may screw yourself more if you find out that it is actually riven top and support Teemo. Following your train of thought a step further (bit extreme but bare with me) we would need to allow the first 2-5 minutes of a game for rune & mastery changes.

"This favors the player who has invested in both runes and rune pages simultaneously,"

This saying here is nullified by the matchmaking itself since normally you are matched with enemies of similar level, experience & mmr so odds are if you're thinking one way, majority of your enemies are too and have invested in runes similarly unless their influenced by builds or friends on what purchases grant the greatest returns (which once more are still generally the most adaptable runes such as armor seals)