What made me a true believer in Riot's design philosophy

Riot's dedication to a few key design pillars is what's kept me loyal and interested in League. The team wrote numerous articles that converted me to a complete and unapologetic Riot fanboy, and I still hold onto those lessons in my own design work.

The arguments that Riot made for emphasizing focus on clarity and counterplay are some of the most influential ideas I still believe in to this day. It really all makes sense when you put this design aspect to words:

For a given ability to have counterplay, a response to it must be

• Possible
• Clear
• Interesting

To me this makes complete sense, and when you design something from the ground up with this particular pillar in mind, you create something that adds value to all the participants of your game. It creates a dynamic dance between the players where both the attacker and the defender have to consider their decisions carefully.

When Riot publicly shared the design pillar of counterplay with the community, most of us interpreted it as something of a binding contract that is offered to any customer that purchases a product or service. Some of us developed the expectation that counterplay would be central to the experience of playing League of Legends. These players visualized what the game would start to look like over time, and we saw that imagining get reinforced when we started to see things like the removal of silence from LeBlanc and Talon, or when Riot proposed placing higher visibility markers on Zeds shadow clones.

At some point, for these players (including myself), League's design trajectory seemed to shift, and that came as a shock to us. I can't remember when it specifically felt like counterplay was becoming less of a priority, but my I remember feeling like the biggest marker for this change was the release of Yasuo or Azir.

To me, here were two earlier examples of champions that felt like they were experiments in trying to create the exact opposite of what a champion with good counterplay looked like. And since then, we have seen it happen again with champions like Zoe or Irelia.

Whenever playing against Yasuo or Zoe or Irelia or Talon or Shaco, (if you aren't playing one of their counters) there aren't many decisions available to you when they are taking offensive actions against you. There isn't much agency there when you have a champion that's able to 1 shot you from a screen away, or can pocket extra flashes, or have near "infinite" dash potential.*

*[Near "infinite" dashes meaning that the potential exists to have a dash mostly be off cooldown for the entirety of a given fight]

These kinds of champions create a one-sided experience where other champions are forced to wait and observe the other person play their own league of legends mini-game, and simply hope that they fail in that execution. The onus isn't on you to outplay this one-sided experience, it's on the actor in messing up mechanically.

Baiting a misstep from your opponent is fun, but it's boring when your only available response is to remain on standby and hope that your opponent trips over themselves.

Now I'm sure that there is no other power fantasy that rivals playing champions like Yasuo, Irelia, or the like, but that's because the opponent's experience wasn't considered in those champion's design. That power fantasy experience comes at the expense of everyone else playing against that champion.

Those kinds of champions are perfect for a game like Bayonetta or Devil May Cry - but in league, it just creates frustration - especially when some of us have developed the expectation that we would see more counterplay get introduced as the game continued to mature.

So yea, I used to be a true believer in Riot's core design values. Nowadays, it feels like there are huge departures from those values, and it's only going to continue to grow over time. Hopefully I'm wrong, because I really do want to keep playing this game.