Champion Respawn Timers Too Long

Zhak·Jan 19, 2019·11 votes·4,398 views

So, I've noticed this being an issue in the past month or so, but I chose to ignore it. What I've noticed is that respawn timers are way too long. Past the 25 minute mark, your respawn time can be anywhere between 30 seconds to 45 seconds, which is enough for a team that is incredibly behind to win. It's ridiculously unfair. Not to mention that the towers themselves are very, very weak. Even a mage can just chunk away a tower without much effort.

You can be absolutely crushing the enemy team, but as soon as you lose one team fight, it's game over. It shouldn't be like that at all. It doesn't feel like anyone made a comeback. It just feels like knowing how to play the game doesn't matter anymore. If the enemy team doesn't really get any objectives but you lose one team fight at, say 30 minute, you can lose because the towers are so weak, and you won't respawn for another 30 seconds.

17 Comments

SyrileJan 19, 20194 votes

This is just tied to the idea of making the game as fast and flashy as possible. I.e. ruining the game.

PolarEclipseJan 19, 20194 votes

Death timers are fine as is if you ask me, dying is not something you should be doing and you should be punished by it the later the games go.

Besides, If you are "crushing" the enemy team, but then you lose a team fight and lose the game, I don't really think you were crushing the enemy to being with.

SEKAIJan 19, 20192 votes

{quoted}

Death timers are fine as is if you ask me, dying is not something you should be doing and you should be punished by it the later the games go.

Besides, If you are "crushing" the enemy team, but then you lose a team fight and lose the game, I don't really think you were crushing the enemy to being with.

The problem isn't the death timer, at least not by itself.

The problem is that when you die the enemy takes 2 turrets and 1 dragon, because every objective is made out of paper, while you sit in grey screen for over half a minute to a full minute; and that how you even died in the first place was you getting """outplayed""" and got blown up in 0.5 seconds and occasionally dying faster than humans can even possibly react (I've even died to 0.00 second damage time frame before).

PolarEclipseJan 19, 20192 votes

So the problem is the objectives themselves, towers, dragons, baron and not the death timers?

I think we've all died to a fed rengar or what have you and lose a tower or whatever in the process, but that's just them capitalizing on your death, your team is weaker, they are stronger so they have more options open.

Like when you kill their jungler when dragon is up, You have a high advantage in taking that objective, or if you kill their only champion with wave clear.

I think the death timers are fine, and I think that the objectives durability is fine.

They killed one or two people on your team, and they took advantage, and got an objective, that's 100% fine.

SEKAIJan 19, 20191 votes

{quoted}

So the problem is the objectives themselves, towers, dragons, baron and not the death timers?

I think we've all died to a fed rengar or what have you and lose a tower or whatever in the process, but that's just them capitalizing on your death, your team is weaker, they are stronger so they have more options open.

Like when you kill their jungler when dragon is up, You have a high advantage in taking that objective, or if you kill their only champion with wave clear.

I think the death timers are fine, and I think that the objectives durability is fine.

They killed one or two people on your team, and they took advantage, and got an objective, that's 100% fine.

Death timer is valued proportionally with game flow, which is made up by many factors such as objectives, item cost, gold and xp income, Time-to-Kill etc etc.

When people say death timer is off, they generally mean the balance between death timer and game flow is off, and it can be a result of any number of things being broken at once within that scope to cause the situation.

When people die to the current pervasive 1shot that's so fast it is sometimes physically impossible to even react to it before kicking the bucket and neither can it be really foreseen due to how restricted vision is in the game atm, and then they have to be punished in extended respawn time which is ALREADY big enough of punishment but then Riot has to rub it in by making objectives super easy to take and so 1 death (that as said, comes cheaply these days) can easily translate to any number of objectives being lost.... ofc people are going to have an issue with it. Because the balance of the game flow and its risk and reward scale is completely off.

League, a strategy game with various and a large variety of objectives, item build, and moment-to-moment play that all contribute to the ultimate goal of destroying the enemy nexus, is balanced almost as if it's a round-based twitch shooter with a single objective like defusing the bomb in CSGO. And it's completely unfitting for the title, and subsequently the game flow is broken.

Riot probably did this because tournament matches are matched in best of 3 or 5 (let's not go into Riot's super emphasis on pro play has more or less been killing the game... that's for another day), but that's not what happens in regular play. Even in promos that does have best of 3 and 5, you are matched with randoms every game, and let's not even mention how much of a mind-fuck the matchmaking is during promos. So essentially outside of tournaments the game may as well be completely faulty with a completely wrong and nonsensical game tone and flow, as the non-tournament players are playing a game that's balanced as if it's another game of another genre. And that's a big problem.

PolarEclipseJan 19, 20191 votes

I see where you're coming from, but again, I have to disagree.

At the extreme fundamental core of league of legends, the goal is to destroy the enemy nexus, that's it. Then you have certain functions that can help you achieve this.

Dragons
Baron
Taking turrets (but this is pretty much tied in to the main goal, lets be real)
Surrender votes, in case you believe that the enemies are too strong to stop.

Now if we go way back in time, the objectives (and lets be real, the champions did not do as much damage as today) didn't do anything. "Yes they did" you might say but compared to today, no.

Dragons then gave your entire team gold, that's it. Dragons today gives you either: Out of combat move speed, Out of combat regen (I love that ocean so much), more pushing power, or just more damage.

Baron then just buffed your champions. Baron now buffs your champion AND minions, so you can actually push with it.

And of course the turrets that gives you gold, and opens up the map as you take them down, giving you more space to roam "safely".

the thing that has happened over the years is that you have more ways to win the game throughout just obtaining more "power" than back in the day, and I'm completely fine with all of this. I actually like the pacing the game has now over what it used to be years ago (and keep in mind I play dota from time to time)

All in all, I think all of this is fine, League does not have less strategy today then it had back then.

alanjrsmithJan 31, 20191 votes

{quoted}

The problem isn't the death timer, at least not by itself.

The problem is that when you die the enemy takes 2 turrets and 1 dragon, because every objective is made out of paper, while you sit in grey screen for over half a minute to a full minute; and that how you even died in the first place was you getting """outplayed""" and got blown up in 0.5 seconds and occasionally dying faster than humans can even possibly react (I've even died to 0.00 second damage time frame before).

or you know that you go 15/2/8 you die your third time and you get a 45 sec resepawn while the yi whos 3/9/2 gets to come back up in 35 sec even though you clearly havent died as much

Th3KindredSpiritJan 19, 20193 votes

I agree, especially because how fast you get nuked down by mages nowadays.

SEKAIJan 19, 20193 votes

Champ respawn timer is too long, dying is way too fast, turrets and structures also die way too fast.

Combine them all, you get some of the more frustrating gameplay experience you'll ever get. And somehow Riot doesn't seem to think this is a big deal.

IG ZikoJan 19, 20192 votes

They will nerf Baron early and increase the tankiness of inhib turrets which will make ending harder untill 35 mins into the game.

Deathtimers are low in my opinion. Especially early game. Many times we win a team fight mid snd we can barely get an inhib and then have to reset.

Teamfights mid and late game have to be punishing to lose, so if you all die, you maybe deserve to lose the game. This is how it was supposed to work since forever.

HerlgarJan 19, 20192 votes

Sometimes It seems some people want games to just go on forever with no winner because everything that enables a team to take the advantage is deemed "unfair".

If you're crushing the enemy team and they wipe you, it's on you. You chose a bad fight and lost. The longer the game lasts, the riskier it becomes so that it naturally draws to an end eventually.

SyrileJan 19, 20191 votes

The death timers are an issue when objectives can be melted instantly. Strategy is thrown out the window by a random person or lane feeding two or three kills, going into a 10% AD/AP dragon that takes 5 seconds to melt with almost no counter play. Adding to the gold and multiple turret plates they might even pick up as well. If a team is not coordinated against this, it happens by shear luck.

The game previously allowed for strategy to be setup. Kills were harder to get, fights were more punishing, objectives did not instantly end the game (taking a baron means game over mostly). Turrets dissolved before the plating and even now they just give more snowball potential for early kills, especially with the already absurd damage and excessive amount of overly safe champions that insta-kill you.

KreatorOfKhaosJan 19, 20191 votes

That's the whole point of the idea though, to make comebacks easier and mistakes more punishable.

IP MasquerenaJan 19, 20191 votes

Looks at Dota's 140s death timer looks at LoL's 40s death timer looks at Dota's 250s death timer with dieback and Reaper Scythe looks at the paper both game's objectives is made from

Yea...you kinda got no reason to complain.

And I main TA in Dota, so I know all about oneshotting people before they can even react since I do it a lot. Yes, that's a thing there as well.

Minimac2000Jan 19, 20191 votes

{quoted}

Looks at Dota's 140s death timer looks at LoL's 40s death timer looks at Dota's 250s death timer with dieback and Reaper Scythe looks at the paper both game's objectives is made from

Yea...you kinda got no reason to complain.

And I main TA in Dota, so I know all about oneshotting people before they can even react since I do it a lot. Yes, that's a thing there as well.

Uhhhhh, you're missing a few key details there buddy. Like the dota game lasting twice to three times as long as the lol game and since death timers partially time scale in both games.... also the fact that there is this mechanic called buyback in dota that doesn't exist in league which means death timers will be higher but that late in the game you'd get a few free instant revives before that point

IP MasquerenaJan 19, 20191 votes

You get a buy back every 7 minutes, and it also increases your next death timer by 25s.

Also, I am not sure what you're smoking, but hey, can I have so?

2-3 times longer games? In rare occasions, yea. Most of my Dota games end around the 40-45 min mark, with some games going around the 50 min mark and rarely going over that, while most of my LoL games end around the 30-40 min mark, unless they are stomps, but the same can be applied to Dota.

At least for me, the game avg between my LoL matches and my Dota matches is like 5-10 mins, that's nowhere near 2-3 times.

The buy back mechanic is balanced around the fact that it uses unreliable gold, and it costs a hella lot. Yea, it does makes some the games more balanced because you can have situations where you can save your team or the game with it, or at least, prolong the game.

But the main reason why games are longer in Dota is the unreliable gold mechanic. Unreliable gold comes from everything bar kills, courier kills, Roshan, Hand of Midas or Track and when you die, you lose 50 + networth/40 unreliable gold and since almost anyone who is a carry position needs to farm creeps as well, they lose that and get slowed down a lot in gaining their item spikes, hence even why if the game length isn't that much different (again 5-10 mins on average), they can afford the longer death timers as the game progresses slower. I had games where I had a Bottle (650g), Phase Boots (1550g), Blink Dagger (2250g) and Desolator (3500g)(total: 7950 gold) at 15 mins thanks to some niche kills and Ancient stacks and I knew that when that happened in those games, it was almost impossible for me to lose.

And as I said, in Dota, objectives aren't that much stronger either, I know I soloed Roshan a lot at around 20 mins while, while taking Baron at 20 mins isn't easy, and downright impossible solo.