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PBE Feedback: Plants aren't as thought-provoking as Riot seems to think they should be

IlexAlderwood·10/24/2016, 11:57:08 PM·53 votes·3,084 views

So, I'm not a fan of RNG in any form in League. I don't like crits or random dragons, so it goes without saying that I don't like the plants by extension. That's neither here nor there though. Right now, jungling on the PBE has left me feeling very disenchanted with the plants system for one major reason - they don't really encourage you to make careful decisions like the smite buffs did.

Say I'm playing a control jungler, doing my jungle rotations, and I come across a blast cone or scry plant. Yes, I've seen it spawning there 30 seconds earlier. My first thought is to stomp it immediately on sight, not because I want to make use of it, but because I DONT want any of my opponents to make use of it.

Leaving these plants alive in the jungle just screams for that enemy Lee Sin to come in and outplay you. Yes, you could use the plant to outplay him, but the chance of him outplaying you with the same plant is always there. Why take the risk? I imagine this is even more true in highly organized play, where you want to remove as many potential failure variables as possible from a match.

This means that any time I come across a plant that happens to make an impact, it's because I didn't know it was there and just happened to stumble on it while doing something else, usually running from a gank or counterjungling. NOT because I cleverly scouted the plant beforehand and planned around it. These plants are popped in a single auto attack, and considering how easy it is for a mobile jungler to enter your jungle, attack something, then safely leave, they aren't an objective that you can easily contest. Even control wards are more contestable than plants. A roaming support will stride up and take your honeys, then leave while shrugging off any CC you throw at them before you have time to gather your team and react to the invasion. Plants don't feel like a strong, reliable presence that players can base decisions off, just an annoyance that you either destroy on sight to avoid giving your opponents tools to play with, or outright ignore which is also very easy to do.

It's also insanely easy for anyone in the game to outright sabotage the plants if you are trying really hard to utilize them. Say you're a jungler who really wants to actually make use of these plants and carefully wards around them to make sure they aren't contested and so on. All it takes is for one tilted teammate to roam your jungle and pop all the blast cones/vision plants/honeys and completely ruin that strategy. Doing this is far easier than simply stealing jungle camps from a jungler in order to grief them, as junglers have always been able to use smite to secure camps they really want, even from their own teammates.

This leaves the overall balance of plants kind of sketchy. They can't offer too much of an impact due to how easy they are to sabotage from both sides of the field, but if they're not impactful enough, they feel tacked on and more of a nuisance than a feature. Right now, to me, they are a nuisance and not something that I really feel compelled to want to interact with or utilize.

I really liked the smite buff system. It rewarded people who took time to learn the nuances of each buff, and offered very distinct identities and value to each jungle camp. Most importantly though, it was RELIABLE. Something you could integrate into your playstyle and plan for. The plants don't feel like part of a jungler's arsenal of tools,

I'm looking forward to seeing how the system evolves as it's tweaked and balanced further, but right now it's just not doing it for me and a lot of other people too it seems.

17 Comments

Pæan10/25/2016, 4:50:17 AM6 votes

Watched a Yi chasing an enemy support thru the jungle, hit the knock back plant to get boosted over the wall, and get perfectly in range to alpha strike for the kill.

Gotta say it was hilarious and cool to see, but It could be used as a free disengage by any derpy ADC that was out of position and that's not ok.

Marshbouy10/25/2016, 12:09:35 AM5 votes

{quoted}

I read through that Reddit thread yesterday. It's got a lot of strong sentiment in it that's valuable feedback. It's pretty light on discussion from in game experience with plants though (few actual PBE testers commenting), so it’s not a complete picture.

As with the other pre-season changes on the PBE plants are a work in progress. We’ve got some changes coming this week that should address a number of issues that have become apparent since the last set of changes (which occured just before PBE last week). Key details on those below. We’re also working on some backup plans for other possible issues that have been raised. For those sort of cases we want to have follow up plans ready in case they’re needed, but don’t want to make changes before things have been validated in game. Summary of those below too.

The biggest concern about plants themselves we've seen expressed overall is that they're random and that randomness has no place in a competitive game. Can fully understand the concern there, given randomness can make for pretty miserable experiences in game at the expense of player skill. We don’t think randomness is automatically a bad thing in a competitive setting though. We see it as more a tool that, if used in the right way, can create good tests of skill and emergent play or, if used badly, can nullify skill and create a ‘that was bullshit’ feeling. Examples of what we feel falls into each of those two categories:

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** Controlled Randomness in LoL at present we think is good for the game: **

  • Elemental Dragons

Heavily telegraphed, rewards that support different strategies and counter them, system creates healthy game to game variety of experience. Equally available to both teams.

  • Kindred passive on enemy jungle camps

Creates a series of risk/reward trade offs for the Kindred player that they’re free to engage with or not. Enemies can choose to try and counter or not.

  • Scuttle crab’s exact location

You know roughly where Scuttle will be, and what the reward will be, but not the exact location it’ll be before getting there (assuming it’s up in the first place). Again, also equally available to both teams - it's a fair system, rather than one that biases in one direction or the other.

  • Draven axe landing location

There's some randomness to where an axe could land forcing an adaptive responsive. Possible locations are from a limited pool and, when appropriate are effectively non random (e.g. when chasing)

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** Randomness in LoL we think is or was bad for the game: **

  • Low % crit rates (higher % crit rates are also heavily debated, though a less clear argument)

Small amounts of crit (runes in particular) have a small chance to skew a lane pretty strongly without any engaging gameplay. Crit’s much less problematic once champions have a moderate amount of it (becomes consistent ish), though even then there are arguments it should be removed. Avoiding getting into details of that since that’s a different topic and this is already a long post already. Should talk more about it sometime though, especially since it’s a subject we need a better consensus on internally too.

Regarding crit runes, we’ll be removing the ability to start the game with crit when we do work on runes (hopefully sometime next year)

  • Old Phage

Chance to slow on hit (mini, unreliable Frozen Mallet for anyone that didn’t play back then). Sometimes really lethal, sometimes completely ineffective. Did have some counterplay (e.g. only flash if the slow procs), overall though too much a case of randomness deciding situations rather than creating decisions.

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** Next iteration base off feedback from PBE testers and internal playtesting: **

  • Fewer Blast Cone locations

We’ve been testing a pretty wide variety of Blast Cone locations recently, especially compared to early iterations of plants which only had a few. Conclusion there’s that some of those locations are good fits, others feel more abusive than interesting though and the large number of possible spawn points makes it hard to predict likely Blast Cone locations resulting in a more random than intended result.

  • Limit of 2 Blast Cones per quadrant

When it happens 3 Blast Cones in a single jungle quadrant has been resulting in too much Blast Cone chaining, given the proximity between them that creates. Chained Blast Cones are much harder to respond to and the second use seems to be less deliberate by the user as well.

  • Seedling time to 60s (from 30s)

Increasing telegraph time on upcoming plants to improve ability to plan around their presence.

  • Reduced overall plant spawn rates

Plant frequency has been too high in the version of the system currently on PBE, resulting in more frequent interactions than intended and therefore a greater overall impact on the game than desired. We’ll be reducing frequency of plant spawn a bit as a result.

  • Visual Polish

On the art side there’s also still some stuff yet to come (minimap icons that are clear but less dominant, icons for individual plants when clicked on, etc)

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** Other concerns we're tracking and preparing follow up changes if needed: **

  • Ranged versus melee discrepancy

We haven’t seen it demonstrated yet, but it’s definitely possible plants will be too advantageous for ranged champs over melee. Fallback if needed’s to make them operate like Thresh lantern where it’s proximity to plant the allows interaction, not basic attack.

  • Randomness deciding outcomes,

We want randomness to create a range of situations where player decisions and execution can then decide the outcome. If randomness is instead deciding situations however we’ll then want to add additional telegraphing, both to spawn times and locations until players are able to recall possible plant locations and play around the possibility of them being up in an informed manner.

  • Plant interactions still too frequent

Upcoming changes might still leave plants too influential to the game and place too high an interaction burdern on players, junglers especially. Response there would be to continue to adjust spawn rate, maximum number possible per quadrant.

Apologies for the wall of text, lot to cover. I’ve to run off to a thing now, I’ll be back later though to post a bit more.

Warlord Zudane10/25/2016, 4:48:01 PM1 votes

Random idea: Make the plants known, but with few exceptions, make it so you need 2 champions within a certain range (say within sight or something reasonable) to be able to attack it. This way you can't prematurely stomp plants unless you have someone with you, which is a tactical decision because they can't be laning if they are stomping plants.

Of course like the health plants and maybe vision plants can be done without that limit though (I don't know what all plants there are). Imagine seeing the blast cone on the ground and it suddenly lights up as being able to attack. Either way it would limit the counterplay you mentioned.

Leon Etoile10/25/2016, 6:06:29 PM1 votes

Make plants only smite only

The Space Cowboy10/25/2016, 7:31:35 PM1 votes

Make plants defend themselves and have hp, then turn into a right clickable spell. Wouldn't that make them more of a strategic element if they cost something other than themselves to activate? (Time/HP)

Jet Sett10/25/2016, 7:35:32 PM1 votes

Don't forget all the Jhin Teemo Shaco traps you'll find when trying to use them.

warpenguin55510/25/2016, 7:36:29 PM1 votes

When i play PBE i just kill whatever plants i see, not really caring too much about its effect. Granted i play more custom games by myself so i can fuck around more but i'll probably just end up mindlessly killing the plants on live too without caring about what they actually do.

SpecterVonBaren10/26/2016, 2:37:21 AM1 votes

What if they made them like Skarner's rock crutches and had them captureable and unusable until captured but if not used in a certain amount of time then the enemy could capture the plant for themselves?

The Yetii Rider10/25/2016, 2:44:45 PM1 votes

Blast Cones allow junglers without mobility like Warwick, Olaf, Rengar, Nunu, Skarner, Udyr, Trundle and Nautilus to cross the walls of Baron and dragon pit to contest the objective.

That's very important. Otherwise those champions have to hold flash just for a chance to steal.