@Riot, The Fidelity To Visual Clairty

I'm going to start off by pointing out that this is PBE feedback, but since not all of us have a PBE account, I am going to leave this here.

Periodically, throughout the past two years Riot has been trying to remove as much “burden of knowledge” as possible, and to reduce “visual clutter.” Although the burden of knowledge issue is evident in not only how turrets function, especially in the early minutes of a game, but it also exists with killing sprees, calculating stats, openeing-minute kills, and now, worst of all, the Dragon buff.

I get that Riot is trying to make objectives more interesting, but at the same time the levels of information that are being added to the game make it nigh-impossible for a new player, or even a casual player, to keep up and learn these things. Even simple things like the change of cursor color when trying to place a ward in a bush indicating if it is or isn't in a bush, is an example of poor design as far as player knowledge is concerned.

Visual Clutter also exists with this new dragon buff, where champions begin to glow (almost like they have a sunfire cloak) and each level of intensity is to signify a new tier of stacks. It is nice, and massively important that the number of stacks also shows up on the champion buff bar, but honestly I think that is sufficient. There is NO reason that a champion should have a glowing effect, that is similar on cursory glance to a number of other things.

Look, I get it, it is cool and quickly glancing at a champion you can get a feeling for how strong their dragon stacks are. But considering all the textures that have been taken away from champion's models to “remove visual clutter and improve visuals” something like this should never make it out of the PBE, and I hope you guys end up changing this and keeping to simply the icon on the buff bar as an indicator. Hell, even Feral Flare was easy for players to notice how strong a champion was.

So here's to visual clarity, and to taking the burden of knowledge away from the player, because there is already enough things in the game that take a wiki to learn about.

For those who haven't seen the PBE changes, feel free to swing over to S@20 to read up on them, and for those even lazier, here is a link to the “glow” to which I was referring.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lxe08n9ilgI#t=47

Let's talk Riot.