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: **
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)
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.
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.
