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Ghostcrawler et al on the Trinity Force Podcast

McNaulty··5 votes·5,397 views
Episode 214 - "Ghostcrawler, Khoopa, RoamingNumeral Discuss Patch 4.20, Season 5, and More!" - Trinity Force Podcast - League of Legends Podcast

I recently listened to the above podcast and it has some interesting insights into the minds of the game designers at Riot games. The whole thing was great, and I like that developers give us these insights. However there are a few points that I wish had been discussed a bit more, because I don't feel like they gave full and coherent answers.

At minutes 5-15, they discussed that there may be too much vision in the game. However, even in S4 gaining vision around just around Baron or Dragon is an investment of all your vision resources. Now lategame you really need to have vision on both (already difficult), but we want to reduce vision?

Another concern, discussed a bit, Minute 40 is Riot's goal for increased jungle diversity. My concern here isn't that this is a bad goal, but that it has been the stated goal for seasons 3 and 4, both of which had less diverse jungler champion pools than season 2. It seems that in every season since S2, the jungle has been made harder, and jungle items more important, and diversity has decreased. S5 is an even harder jungle, with even more important jungle items. How is this a coherent strategy?

Lastly, pick bans, was discussed (too briefly) at 74 mins+. Here I think the devs simply were wrong about how picks/bans affect champion diversity and composition diversity. Their first stated concern is that players can't play niche champions. Sorry to say, but that is true 100% of the time if you allow for bans, it should be a non-factor in designing the system, because you can't avoid it without just going to pure blind pick in competitive. More concerning, however, was that a dev stated that DOTA style pick/ban meant you could shut down whole strategies with 1 ban. The fact is, this is a fundamental misunderstanding of DOTA. You can OPEN UP entire strategies with a ban in DOTA, and thus they have a far more diverse competitive champion (and strategy) pool in competitive DOTA. If anything, this is where I would love clarification, because it seems to me that they are making their decisions on this based on conclusions that are the opposite of what actually happens in another game.

Cheers!

24 Comments

RiotGhostcrawler9 votes

Thanks for the feedback, McNaulty. We don't always know what kinds of questions we are going to get in an interview like that, so I apologize if any of our answers were hard to follow. (And kudos to the Trinity Force team for giving us the opportunity.)

I'll try and clarify our opinions on some of the points you raised.

  1. We did add some additional options for vision for preseason in the jungle, but we didn't take away vision from anywhere else (like wards). This means that players just overall have more vision now than they did before. If we make vision too easy to manage, we take away one potential avenue for game mastery. In other words, if you get a lot of vision just for playing the game, then players who go out of their way to ward every brush don't feel rewarded for doing so.

  2. We believe we failed to meaningfully improve jungle diversity previous because it just came down to buffing or nerfing champions. The problem with that approach, as I'm sure is obvious to most players, is that you're just shifting who is the best, not really providing multiple opportunities for different champions to be the best.

I'll risk using an analogy, that like all analogies, isn't going to be 100% perfect but might get the point across. If two teams participate in a foot race, then the faster team is probably going to win. (This doesn't happen all the time in real life where there are a million factors affecting performance, but it's more likely in a video game where movement speed is just represented by a simple stat.) However, if you change the foot race to a triathalon with foot, cycling and swimming legs, there is more opportunity for differentiation. You can have the guy who is really good at swimming or the guy who is really good at cycling.

Previously in League, we worried that jungling came down to who could gank the best, since clearing came down to patterns that could be predicted and mastered with enough games. Our hope with the preseason changes are that there are other avenues for who can be the best, such as the best invader or the best farmer. By adding more variables to the jungle (which yes, does make it harder) we hope to create different variables that allow different champions to be strong or weak. As an example, strong burst damage might take out the scuttler before it scuttles away or let you get a clutch dragon steal, but strong sustain might let you clear quicker, or finish clearing with enough health left to go gank.

  1. I'd prefer not to get into a comparison between which game has a better pick/ban system, because in my experience those tend to devolve quickly into a lot of different tangents about which game is better (as well as just getting heated in general).

Instead, let me just talk about the flaws we see with our current pick/ban system. Ideally, the bans are a release valve to handle situations where a champion is just OP or the other team is so good with a particular champion that you want to level the playing field. The pick system tries to be fair about which team ends up with which champion as well as giving teams the opportunity to counter opposing picks. (We don't want League to be won at champ select, but we don't want champ select to be irrelevant either.)

However, when players fear that the linchpin champion for their entire strategy might get banned, it tends to push them towards using more generalist champions, in which they can more readily shift to another generalist champion rather than risk all of time they spent practicing a particular champion-dependent strategy getting shut down. Allowing more or fewer bans doesn't seem to change that calculation too much on the side of the banning team -- you just move down the list of the next perceived overpowered champion or champion you don't want to play against -- but it does increase the chance that the champion you really want to play is removed from the game. Another problem is that picks are used as an additional ban. Players choose champions not because they necessarily want to play them, but because they absolutely don't want to have to play against them.

The way I view it personally is when I am watching a video of a game, I sometimes skip over the pick/ban phase and just get to the action. That's because you can often predict which champs will get picked and banned (which, to be clear, is our fault and responsibility to fix). But, when you get one of those exciting pick/ban phases, it can be really exciting. These usually happen when unusual champs or strategies get chosen and we'd like to develop a pick/ban system that doesn't try to squelch those strategies.

Does that make more sense?

We don't expect redesigning pick/ban will be a magic bullet to solve champion diversity. We also think we need to support more strategies in League (which is part of what the preseason changes are all about), update all those champions without meaningful strengths and weaknesses, and just fix champions that are severely overpowered or underpowered. But we do think we can come up with a better pick/ban solution than the one we currently have. We don't have anything to announce and given that, my suspicions are you won't see any changes to pick/ban this season, but it is something we'd love to improve.

Fed by Snu Snu2 votes
  1. We did add some additional options for vision for preseason in the jungle, but we didn't take away vision from anywhere else (like wards). This means that players just overall have more vision now than they did before. If we make vision too easy to manage, we take away one potential avenue for game mastery. In other words, if you get a lot of vision just for playing the game, then players who go out of their way to ward every brush don't feel rewarded for doing so.

Saying that the crab and smiting the wolves add too much vision is, honestly, an overstatement. First of all, both of offer vision on the same exact spot, every time, with no flexibility. There's already one disadvantage there. Secondly, noone smites the wolves until really later in the game, if then, not to mention that smiting them is only worth it if you invade. Smiting your own side's wolves is absolutely never worth it, because the team should have deeper wards in baron at all times. Quality in vision is more important than quantity. The crab is the only addition in the game to add some quality vision. And you removed the free wards from SotAG and feral flare, so in fact you didn't really increase the vision.

  1. We believe we failed to meaningfully improve jungle diversity previous because it just came down to buffing or nerfing champions. The problem with that approach, as I'm sure is obvious to most players, is that you're just shifting who is the best, not really providing multiple opportunities for different champions to be the best.

I'll risk using an analogy, that like all analogies, isn't going to be 100% perfect but might get the point across. If two teams participate in a foot race, then the faster team is probably going to win. (This doesn't happen all the time in real life where there are a million factors affecting performance, but it's more likely in a video game where movement speed is just represented by a simple stat.) However, if you change the foot race to a triathalon with foot, cycling and swimming legs, there is more opportunity for differentiation. You can have the guy who is really good at swimming or the guy who is really good at cycling.

Previously in League, we worried that jungling came down to who could gank the best, since clearing came down to patterns that could be predicted and mastered with enough games. Our hope with the preseason changes are that there are other avenues for who can be the best, such as the best invader or the best farmer. By adding more variables to the jungle (which yes, does make it harder) we hope to create different variables that allow different champions to be strong or weak. As an example, strong burst damage might take out the scuttler before it scuttles away or let you get a clutch dragon steal, but strong sustain might let you clear quicker, or finish clearing with enough health left to go gank.

But you didn't add more variables, you only increased the damage. Also, saying that high burst champions can steal a dragon makes you seem really oblivious, because there's a reason why noone does dragon with their summoner 11 down. There's only 3 things that will outdamage smite, Nunu's Q (if he has it leveled up only), Cho'gaths R and Kalista's E. Kalista's E obviously will never be on the stealing side of the coin as well, since it requires stacks. The other 2 have to walk to it and are disruptable.

  1. I'd prefer not to get into a comparison between which game has a better pick/ban system, because in my experience those tend to devolve quickly into a lot of different tangents about which game is better (as well as just getting heated in general).

Instead, let me just talk about the flaws we see with our current pick/ban system. Ideally, the bans are a release valve to handle situations where a champion is just OP or the other team is so good with a particular champion that you want to level the playing field. The pick system tries to be fair about which team ends up with which champion as well as giving teams the opportunity to counter opposing picks. (We don't want League to be won at champ select, but we don't want champ select to be irrelevant either.)

However, when players fear that the linchpin champion for their entire strategy might get banned, it tends to push them towards using more generalist champions, in which they can more readily shift to another generalist champion rather than risk all of time they spent practicing a particular champion-dependent strategy getting shut down. Allowing more or fewer bans doesn't seem to change that calculation too much on the side of the banning team -- you just move down the list of the next perceived overpowered champion or champion you don't want to play against -- but it does increase the chance that the champion you really want to play is removed from the game. Another problem is that picks are used as an additional ban. Players choose champions not because they necessarily want to play them, but because they absolutely don't want to have to play against them.

The way I view it personally is when I am watching a video of a game, I sometimes skip over the pick/ban phase and just get to the action. That's because you can often predict which champs will get picked and banned (which, to be clear, is our fault and responsibility to fix). But, when you get one of those exciting pick/ban phases, it can be really exciting. These usually happen when unusual champs or strategies get chosen and we'd like to develop a pick/ban system that doesn't try to squelch those strategies.

Does that make more sense?

No, it's not about which game is better. It's about which system opens up more strategies. Stop having a complex with dota and adapt the superior pick/ban system for competitive venues already. Solo queue can remain the same, since it doesn't involve as much strategy in picking.

We don't expect redesigning pick/ban will be a magic bullet to solve champion diversity. We also think we need to support more strategies in League (which is part of what the preseason changes are all about), update all those champions without meaningful strengths and weaknesses, and just fix champions that are severely overpowered or underpowered. But we do think we can come up with a better pick/ban solution than the one we currently have. We don't have anything to announce and given that, my suspicions are you won't see any changes to pick/ban this season, but it is something we'd love to improve.

Sure, go ahead and spend 2 years in order to just use the dota system in the end, instead of using it right now and not having yet another boring LCS year.

Chespin20131 votes

hey gc y did u leave blizzard?

Earl Eulrich2 votes
  1. We did add some additional options for vision for preseason in the jungle, but we didn't take away vision from anywhere else (like wards). This means that players just overall have more vision now than they did before. If we make vision too easy to manage, we take away one potential avenue for game mastery. In other words, if you get a lot of vision just for playing the game, then players who go out of their way to ward every brush don't feel rewarded for doing so.

I think this is a missunderstanding of the situation...yes, there is more vision now - but it only affects the winning team. Crab-Vision belongs to the team that controls the map better, same for wolves, as they only get smitten by invaders. So all you did had been making vision more snowbally than before. And frankly spwaking...it had already been too snowbally in S4. What you really should try is to give each team some "save-vision", like an indestructible/visible ward with limited utility (like e.g. reveals Champions that pass around in y radius for x seconds, but doesn´t grant any vision besides that). This way Teams could still keep up at least some vision on strategically important areas once they fall behind, instead of being prone to run into an ambush or just get outrotated by the team that is in control.

  1. We believe we failed to meaningfully improve jungle diversity previous because it just came down to buffing or nerfing champions. The problem with that approach, as I'm sure is obvious to most players, is that you're just shifting who is the best, not really providing multiple opportunities for different champions to be the best. [...]

This now is a really complex topic....though I´ll try to outline the most obvious problems:

  • in a gank-situation dmg always beats anything else, as you want to kill someone as fast as possible before he can escape. Tankiness doesn´t grant you anything in a 2v1 Situation when the opponent usually tries to flee instead of attacking anyway. Dmg is Also always sperior for farming the jungle...so it´s a win/win situation for any aggressive jungler compared to everyone else (-> Heart of Gold filled the niche of being a tanky-item that helps farming in a way, thus making Tank-junglers more viable during S2).
  • Tanks are generally in a terrible spot, as they just get ridiculously outscaled - so they become either irrelevant when they fall behind or when the ADC has 3items finished. You can´t turn around a game by tanking in any cicumstances, but you can very well do it by catching someone off guard and blowing them up. Tanks need a major overhaul to ever become somewhat viable again, especially in the jungle when you fall behind by default as long as you don´t snowball.
  • There´s no real fallback-pattern for junglers. Once the opponent is strong enopugh to invade your jungle and take it away there´s nothing you can do. Lanes will eventually push to a relatively save farm-spot, but the jungler just suffers. Another thing where Heart of Gold and similar things really helped out big time there during S2.
  1. I'd prefer not to get into a comparison between which game has a better pick/ban system, because in my experience those tend to devolve quickly into a lot of different tangents about which game is better (as well as just getting heated in general). [...]

Now here I disagree strongly. The more you can ban out, the more niche-strategies will have to be prepared in order to make sure you won´t get banned out. If you have seen S4 worlds you´ll have noticed that all strategies had been pretty similar, and most players Champion-pools had been fairly low (~3 top priority champs and that´s that). And most of that is not due to a lack of balancing, as there are plenty enough strong Champs if you pick your Comp around them - but it´s due to the lack of need to learn how to play more specific things as you wonßt ever get banned out on your generalistic comp currently. There´s absolutely no denying that DOTAs superiority in terms of strategic diversity mostly stems from their vastly better pick&ban-phase (and that´s comming from someone that really doesn´t agree with most of DOTAs design besides that).

Mediocre Joe3 votes
  1. We did add some additional options for vision for preseason in the jungle, but we didn't take away vision from anywhere else (like wards). This means that players just overall have more vision now than they did before. If we make vision too easy to manage, we take away one potential avenue for game mastery. In other words, if you get a lot of vision just for playing the game, then players who go out of their way to ward every brush don't feel rewarded for doing so.

I really liked the oracle lens buff you gave to the chickens/old wraiths. You did take away vision from other places such as jungler items like ancient golem and wriggles lantern/feral flare which came with a ward that could be placed and was removed really forcing junglers to either buy a sightstone or wards which since conservation passive was removed the jungle yields less gold and isn't made up for it with buffs to an actual fight anywhere but to jungle creeps. You either buy wards or buy a sightstone, I think we should take another look at these jungle items I am not saying we revert I just think factors such as warding comparison and gold comparison should be taken into account. I feel like these items were rushed because of a few factors;

1)No conservation passive and jungle minions were never worked to make up for the lack of gold. ( so it is longer clear time/tougher monsters with the same gold just shifted to the smaller minion in the camps.)

  1. Only 2 viable smite options (skirmishers being the third but only a few champs actually use it and its getting nerfed) Ranger's is great for clear time and helps out the tanky junglers. stalker's blade/chilling smite is decent for ganking but with a 60 sec cd on smite you are always faced with the choice of whether to save it for ganking and get your butt beat in the jungle. or use it on a champion and possibly lose it for something like dragon or baron. It should have a reduced cooldown when smiting jungle camps and full duration when smiting champions. The fourth smite Poacher's knife/scavenging smite is just useless 20 bonus gold for having the balls to go into their jungle? it is not worth 20 gold. If you reduced cooldown or smite or gave a lot more gold I could see it working.

  2. no longer having wriggles/golem, this issue makes it so junglers either have to buy all their wards or buy a sightstone and since their is no conservation passive you pretty much need to buy a sightstone.

I have no complaints about the enchantments because I like them but that wasn't the hard part because they were pretty much taken from the old jungler items. I just really hope you guys sit down and really look at the jungle before the new season starts because it still needs a lot of work and you probably made more work for yourselves by making all these changes.

KesslerCOIL1 votes

Previously in League, we worried that jungling came down to who could gank the best, since clearing came down to patterns that could be predicted and mastered with enough games. Our hope with the preseason changes are that there are other avenues for who can be the best, such as the best invader or the best farmer. By adding more variables to the jungle (which yes, does make it harder) we hope to create different variables that allow different champions to be strong or weak. As an example, strong burst damage might take out the scuttler before it scuttles away or let you get a clutch dragon steal, but strong sustain might let you clear quicker, or finish clearing with enough health left to go gank.

I understand this, but currently roughly half of the junglers can barely clear.
I dont mean "barely clear" as in "cant clear fast enough", I mean they take so much damage that until they get a core item to hit roughly lvl6+, they are unable to do more than 3(sometimes 2) camps without coming close to death. This sounds excessive to me and seems to be a core reason that high sustain junglers are so popular. Junglers like Amumu, Nautilus and Rammus have all dropped in winrate by 2% - 5%, I find this extremely concerning since these are my favourite archetype of jungler and I am unable to play them without feeling like I am heavily handicapping my team.

KesslerCOIL1 votes

Previously in League, we worried that jungling came down to who could gank the best, since clearing came down to patterns that could be predicted and mastered with enough games. Our hope with the preseason changes are that there are other avenues for who can be the best, such as the best invader or the best farmer. By adding more variables to the jungle (which yes, does make it harder) we hope to create different variables that allow different champions to be strong or weak. As an example, strong burst damage might take out the scuttler before it scuttles away or let you get a clutch dragon steal, but strong sustain might let you clear quicker, or finish clearing with enough health left to go gank.

I understand this, but currently roughly half of the junglers can barely clear.
I dont mean "barely clear" as in "cant clear fast enough", I mean they take so much damage that until they get a core item to hit roughly lvl6+, they are unable to do more than 3(sometimes 2) camps without coming close to death. This sounds excessive to me and seems to be a core reason that high sustain junglers are so popular. Junglers like Amumu, Nautilus and Rammus have all dropped in winrate by 2% - 5%, I find this extremely concerning since these are my favourite archetype of jungler and I am unable to play them without feeling like I am heavily handicapping my team.

I really REALLY hope there are some balance changes headed to the jungle,
Low-damage ganking junglers arent really worth picking up atm since they NEED reasonably early ganks or they fall behind in gold due to extremely slow clear and being prone to jungle invades.
Are there any plans to nerf the damage of the Razorbeaks? They're a favourite of tank junglers since tank junglers do mostly AoE damage.

Kobold1 votes

I find this quite interesting to read and I would like to comment on section 3.

  1. I'd prefer not to get into a comparison between which game has a better pick/ban system, because in my experience those tend to devolve quickly into a lot of different tangents about which game is better (as well as just getting heated in general).

Instead, let me just talk about the flaws we see with our current pick/ban system. Ideally, the bans are a release valve to handle situations where a champion is just OP or the other team is so good with a particular champion that you want to level the playing field. The pick system tries to be fair about which team ends up with which champion as well as giving teams the opportunity to counter opposing picks. (We don't want League to be won at champ select, but we don't want champ select to be irrelevant either.)

However, when players fear that the linchpin champion for their entire strategy might get banned, it tends to push them towards using more generalist champions, in which they can more readily shift to another generalist champion rather than risk all of time they spent practicing a particular champion-dependent strategy getting shut down. Allowing more or fewer bans doesn't seem to change that calculation too much on the side of the banning team -- you just move down the list of the next perceived overpowered champion or champion you don't want to play against -- but it does increase the chance that the champion you really want to play is removed from the game. Another problem is that picks are used as an additional ban. Players choose champions not because they necessarily want to play them, but because they absolutely don't want to have to play against them.

The way I view it personally is when I am watching a video of a game, I sometimes skip over the pick/ban phase and just get to the action. That's because you can often predict which champs will get picked and banned (which, to be clear, is our fault and responsibility to fix). But, when you get one of those exciting pick/ban phases, it can be really exciting. These usually happen when unusual champs or strategies get chosen and we'd like to develop a pick/ban system that doesn't try to squelch those strategies.

If I may a TLDR of this would be that Riot needs to develop more diversification in the present champions and Summoner spells and to encourage the strategies that they bring about. (Split push, Siege, Turtle, Counter Offensive, Tower Crush, etc) My thoughts on Split pushing and Tower Crush strategies would be to increase tower HP or Defenses and have it so that if more than one player is attacking a tower it would take more damage from the champions attacking it. Another thought is to create a summoner spell that deals damage to a tower similar to smite but a DoT and has restrictions on its use such as the spell stops its ticks if enemy minions are nearby. This would power up split pushers but they pusher would also be giving up a summoner spell for it.

Does that make more sense?

We don't expect redesigning pick/ban will be a magic bullet to solve champion diversity. We also think we need to support more strategies in League (which is part of what the preseason changes are all about), update all those champions without meaningful strengths and weaknesses, and just fix champions that are severely overpowered or underpowered. But we do think we can come up with a better pick/ban solution than the one we currently have. We don't have anything to announce and given that, my suspicions are you won't see any changes to pick/ban this season, but it is something we'd love to improve.

From my understanding about this, the problems we are facing is the same problem LoL has faced before but not much progress has been made on, Power creep, mobility creep, and love tap nerfing to popular picks instead of addressing the issues the champion has. Riot also has discouraged the Multi smite on a team which is another strategy that could have brought more diversity which is why players are reluctant to try new strategies because riot has in the past nerfed them into the ground as they are not the "normal" strat.

These are my takes on this, I'm not sure if I hit the mark or not but it gives minor food for thought.

IonDragonX1 votes

We don't expect redesigning pick/ban will be a magic bullet to solve champion diversity. We also think we need to support more strategies in League (which is part of what the preseason changes are all about), update all those champions without meaningful strengths and weaknesses, and just fix champions that are severely overpowered or underpowered. But we do think we can come up with a better pick/ban solution than the one we currently have. We don't have anything to announce and given that, my suspicions are you won't see any changes to pick/ban this season, but it is something we'd love to improve.

I agree that the pick/ ban phase needs improvement. Here's why : Each choice made by any party has two effects instead of one. Two effects because both teams are effected. Currently, Blue side is more likely to win just by winning the coin flip! There's a lot of details extrapolating why but the situation needs to change. Here's the sort of changes that I'd like to see :

  • Flip a coin at the start of the game.
  • A) The winner gets to choose : either play Blue side of the map or get the first pick.
  • B) If the winner chose first pick, the loser gets to choose : either play Blue side or get an extra ban.
  • C) If the winner chose Blue side, the loser gets the first pick.
  • notes: Currently winning the coin flip gives FOUR advantages to the winner. The winner gets first pick. The loser effectively suffers an extra ban because of the first pick. The winner gets the advantageous side of the field. The loser effectively suffers larger blind spots because of Red side UI. My suggested coin flip should break up all four of these and distribute them evenly between the two teams.

One off the subject kind of thing : Please rotate the screen 90 degrees clockwise on Red side. Bot lane would still be on the bottom. Top lane would still be on the top. Red side would actually loose the blind spot disadvantage.

Fed by Snu Snu2 votes

They always say that dota and valve do things wrong, then they just copy that 2 years afterwards.

Same thing with low priority queue. Go back to older threads and you will see how they were calling it a system that isn't productive at all.

They only try to sound original, then they fail at it and just go for the correct choice.

MadCast VoShay1 votes

They always say that dota and valve do things wrong, then they just copy that 2 years afterwards.

Same thing with low priority queue. Go back to older threads and you will see how they were calling it a system that isn't productive at all.

They only try to sound original, then they fail at it and just go for the correct choice.

The low priority queue in DOTA targets both leavers/afkers and toxic players. Riot has stated numerous times it does not consider Low Priority Queue (known in Game Theory as 'Prisioner's Island') to be a solution to toxic gameplay. The Low Priority queue implemented with Leaverbuster targets only AFk/Leavers and not toxic players. It is in no way the exact same thing, and they have not changed their stance.

Fed by Snu Snu1 votes

Erm. no.

Dota 2 also hands over mutes that stop you both from chatting and using the voice chat.

And yes, it is the exact same thing, even it was only half of it.

Howldoom1 votes

Erm. no it isn't.

The LPQ in DOTA targets both leavers/afks and toxic players, clumping them together into the same extremely toxic environment. Prisoner's Island assumes that everyone who is placed in there will eventually change their behaviors to get out of it; in the case with toxic players, this usually isn't the case, as the rage atmosphere merely encourages continued toxicity.

In League, the intention is that toxic players get chat restrictions and bans to limit the rage that enters the game. This fits in conjunction with the Ignore and Block options that everyone else can use. LPQ only targets leavers/afks solely for the numbers disadvantage their leaving makes, while retaining the above options to filter out negativity.

Fed by Snu Snu1 votes

Please, keep on insisting on being wrong instead of actually checking that Dota 2 indeed also has a mute system as well.

Keep on yip yapping. It's a copy of the dota system, only coated differently after waiting 2 years in order to seem original.

McNaulty1 votes

I certainly appreciate your response to this because I really enjoyed some of the insights into game design that you provided (such as how the crab moves, that was interesting). Also, your response to my vision concern is perfect and makes sense.

I just really would have two follow up questions/comments to clarify:

  1. Did you try experimenting with removing jungle items/a trivial jungle where everyone could clear it (I remember you could clear safely and in a decent amount of time with boots even with Katarina, Alistar, or Twitch)? If so what were the positive/negative impacts?

  2. I love pick/bans (particularly when you have someone like Monte or Kobe commenting). In LoL, I think the reason I'd skip over them is I can predict them so often (which you know). I did really like the idea one of you mentioned off hand of experimenting with new pick ban strategies in challenger, or some custom game modes. I think that is a great way to get meaningful data.

Gixia1 votes
  1. Did you try experimenting with removing jungle items/a trivial jungle where everyone could clear it (I remember you could clear safely and in a decent amount of time with boots even with Katarina, Alistar, or Twitch)? If so what were the positive/negative impacts?

I imagine this would just result in the same problems as before, where the only type of jungler that matters is how good they can gank. If anything, it might make the problem even worse. Afterall, who cares how good a jungler can sustain or how good they can farm if the jungle so easy that absolutely anyone can do either of those things without any problem?

McNaulty2 votes
  1. Did you try experimenting with removing jungle items/a trivial jungle where everyone could clear it (I remember you could clear safely and in a decent amount of time with boots even with Katarina, Alistar, or Twitch)? If so what were the positive/negative impacts?

I imagine this would just result in the same problems as before, where the only type of jungler that matters is how good they can gank. If anything, it might make the problem even worse. Afterall, who cares how good a jungler can sustain or how good they can farm if the jungle so easy that absolutely anyone can do either of those things without any problem?

Well, the thing about your statement is that it is untrue. IN S2 Worlds (the one where we had basically a jungle that anyone could clear) we had Lee, Skarner, Mundo, Maokai, Shyvana, Cho Gath, Nocturne, Shen, Xin, Udyr, and Amumu all in the jungle, and thats only counting the knockout stage.

With that spread you have the ganking bruisers (Xin, Lee), you have the powerfarmers (Udyr, Shyvana), the farm-to-six (Skarner, Nocturne), Utility tanks with great ganking CC (Shen, Maokai), meat walls (Mundo, Cho), and the teamfight wombo guy (Amumu).

The issue in S2 wasn't jungler diversity, it was that even though almost every type of jungler was represented (aside from the Yi-type) they were all extremely poor. It was 1 GP5 >Oracles >2nd GP5 if you are lucky >Wards >Wards >wards > maybe Shurelias. And that if you died with Oracles on, you were screwed (but if you didn't die you basically turned the map into a black hole of vision for your opponents).

Gixia1 votes

You are misremembering S2 jungle, because not everybody could clear that. S3 was when the jungle was toned down so far that virtually anybody could do it, and once that happened is when you started to see the gradual shift towards gank heavy junglers. It started with tanky/CC heavy junglers who could do fine despite the jungle still not really giving all that much gold, which they fixed in S4 with the addition of the jungle items, which in turn eventually lead to the more aggressive but slightly more gold demanding gank junglers taking over.

If you go back to the S2 jungle, it wasn't as hard as S1, but it was still harder than S3 and S4 and the difficulty made it so some characters simply could not jungle, but in exchange, like you said, multiple different jungling styles were viable. Kind of like what they're doing right now.

McNaulty1 votes

You are misremembering S2 jungle, because not everybody could clear that. S3 was when the jungle was toned down so far that virtually anybody could do it, and once that happened is when you started to see the gradual shift towards gank heavy junglers. It started with tanky/CC heavy junglers who could do fine despite the jungle still not really giving all that much gold, which they fixed in S4 with the addition of the jungle items, which in turn eventually lead to the more aggressive but slightly more gold demanding gank junglers taking over.

If you go back to the S2 jungle, it wasn't as hard as S1, but it was still harder than S3 and S4 and the difficulty made it so some characters simply could not jungle, but in exchange, like you said, multiple different jungling styles were viable. Kind of like what they're doing right now.

Yea, you are totally wrong about the S2 Jungle: http://www.lol-patch.com/preseason-3-patch-notes.html

Initial difficulty of all jungle camps has been increased Camp difficulty and rewards have been re-distributed more into the large monster in each camp Scaling difficulty and rewards of the primary jungle camps have been significantly increased

Plus a change to leashing that made the "1 autoattack from mid means you take almost no damage from blue" no longer a thing.

Gixia1 votes

Hmm, I swore S3 jungle was easier than 2... Then again, I do know that the jungle was nerfed just a few weeks after that patch buffed it by funneling a lot of the health out of the smaller monsters and into the bigger ones, which, at least on all the junglers I played, had a huge impact on the jungle's difficulty, so... I can no longer recall which jungle was actually more difficult.

Kharn Skyshatter1 votes

Better question is going to be is Nunu going to be addressed before he becomes a counter jungling monster again? He isn't popular now, but he may need a refocused design besides making the other jungler's life a living hell.

GG Beers1 votes

I for one really appreciate you going and answering questions on something like a podcast. I've never really liked wading through AMAs and long posts as you can pick and choose the questions you answer. Pure bonus that it happened to be on the podcast I've been following for over a year. NJ and keep it up.

McNaulty1 votes

Yes, they buffed single target clears early S3. However, even single target champions still took more damage and cleared more slowly. It just improved them comparatively to AOE.

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