Introduction

This is also posted on Reddit.

First of all, for those who don't know what the word "tooltip" refers to, they're the little information box that comes up when you hover over, say, an ability or item, that tell you what that thing does--how much stats it gives, how much damage it does, etc.

If you'd like an example, here's the tooltip for Zoe's Q, Paddle Star. We'll be coming back to this as an example of a tooltip that, in my opinion, needs work.

When it comes to tooltips, I like to adhere to a mantra: "tips are tools." Clever, I know. I base this philosophy on three core principles:

• Readability. You can't expect everyone to read every bit of a tooltip or description, so it needs to be useful at a quick glance, conveying the information you want to know in a quick and efficient manner.

I put this first because it's the most important--the two principles below are important, but need to leverage their qualities while also making sure they don't turn a tooltip into an unreadable mess.

• Descriptiveness. Tooltips should leave as little ambiguity as possible regarding how an ability/item works or interacts with the rest of the game.

• In-Depth. This is sort of an extension of descriptiveness, but as it pertains to League, I'm talking about how scalings (AP, AD, Health, etc) are shown. For better or worse, League is a game of numbers and how to make your numbers bigger than your opponents, so tooltips should provide those exact numbers so that people can crunch them if they so desire.

Aside from those three qualities at the core, there are other aspects that are valuable when approaching tooltips as a whole, most notably consistency (how something is phrased in one tooltip should be similar to, or ideally the same as, how it's phrased in another tooltip).

The takeaway at this point is thus: tooltips are important. Whether you use them extensively or not, they provide a clear and concise source of information that can be relied upon since, after all, they come from the game itself. As such, in order to convey this information effectively to users both new and old, tooltips need to meet certain standards.

Before we proceed, I want to be very clear that all of what's reflected in my post is my personal standards for tooltips. That said, I find my standards reasonable (and I'm biased, of course) and worthy of sharing with you all, so that we can perhaps improve the game and how its information is conveyed to the player.

A Base Game Example

Okay, talking about this is all well and good, but how the hell do we put it to work? As an example, let's put all this into practice with the aforementioned Zoe's Q.

First of all, what does it do right?

• It's simple, short, and to the point. This is also where it, as I see it, does several things wrong.

• It includes some exact detail about the scaling below the ability description itself.

That's what it has that's good. Two things might not seem like a lot, but those two things are important. However, they are outweighed by what it, in my opinion, does wrong:

• It obfuscates exact ability damage. This is common in almost all League of Legends tooltips. I'll expand upon this in a bit, but it comes down to whether you'd rather see 58(+13) or 71.

• It's vague. How long does the missile last after landing, for example? It also doesn't even mention that the missile does slight area damage.

• As far as I'm aware, it's misleading. This is the cardinal sin of tooltip design. I don't claim to know exactly how the ability works, but from everything I can tell, its damage has nothing to do with More Sparkles (Zoe's passive). I don't know why it mentions it at all.

I could be misunderstanding how it works, so anyone who knows better is free to tell me so, but the point of avoiding this misleading nature wherever possible still stands. If I'm wrong on this point, then the problem instead falls into the "vague" category, because the fact in either case is that it should be much clearer, to the point where I shouldn't even be unsure of how it works.

Now that I've laid out what I find wrong with the tooltip, let's work on fixing it.

"Tips are Tools" Put into Practice

Numbers are about to change, so I'll lay some groundwork: in the following tooltip, we're assumed to be working a Zoe that's Level 11 with 200 AP and Rank 5 Paddle Star. I'll get into why these numbers changed a bit later, but suffice it to say that they're easy to work with.

Here's what I would rework Zoe's Q tooltip to be.

Numbers taken from the League Wiki.

Let's break this down a bit:

• No addition necessary in determining exact ability damage. The game calculates damage and presents it to you as one consolidated number. Instead, exact scaling details are moved to the bottom of the tooltip, for anyone concerned with exactly how the ability calculates its damage.

This provides easily accessible important information, on top of more detailed information that League has often obscured and relegated to the League Wiki or web page. In that way, it's useful at both a quick glance, and for analysis by number crunchers.

• Very little vagueness or ambiguity. The distance scaling is vague, but that's by design, since including its exact scaling every step of the way would be a nightmare to read. However, we know the ability does damage in a small area, and we know the star lasts for 1 sec after landing. We even know that both casts proc Zoe's passive.

  Could you have figured this out on your own? Yeah, sure, of course you could have, but the point is that the information is available to you without any testing necessary. You should go into using the ability knowing exactly what to expect (or damn near it).

If it turns out I was wrong about how Paddle Star interacts with Zoe's passive, such a detail wouldn't be difficult to include by adding its damage to the scaling details at the bottom.

The point is, by the end of reading this tooltip, you should know more or less exactly how the ability acts, how much damage to expect it to do (without having to do any mental math), and if you so desire, have access to exact numbers so you can get to crunching.

Moving Forward

I mentioned earlier that I was working with a Level 11 Zoe with 200 AP and a level 5 Q. I didn't just pull those numbers out of thin air for the purpose of making an example.

As it turns out, this has been a project I've been working on for a few days now. I'm slowly but surely reworking every single Champion ability tooltip in the game. My example was a screenshot from the document I've been writing up. I finished up Zoe for the purposes of this post, but otherwise I'm only done champions that start with letters up to F (proceeding alphabetically).

If you want to see a more varied set of examples for how my proposed rework would pan out:

Here's a Google Doc with the most up-to-date changes I've made.

Obviously, since it's a lot of work, large parts of it are unfinished.

You might naturally ask that if so much of it is unfinished, why am I posting this?

Well, for feedback, of course! I'm fully willing to fess up that my standards are not everyone else's standards. The best way to construct good tooltips are ones that will meet the majority of people's standards, not just mine. If I did every single champion in the game and posted this only to find no one agreed with what I did... well, that's a lot of edits to make. Even as I post this now, it would be a lot of edits to make.

If you dare read all of this and even some of the document and see something you think could be done better, speak up, and I preemptively thank anyone who gives me some input, even if it's to say my standards are totally wrong and to apply them to League would be ridiculous. Seriously, I'm just one guy--I need some other perspectives.

To anyone who read this far, and to anyone who goes on further to the document, thanks a bunch! I hope this gets some of you as worked up as I am, despite it being such an ultimately minor ordeal.

If this gets a decent amount of feedback, I'll continue working on my big bad list of ability tooltips and come back when it's finished.