A reply to riot blastoise on creativity and skuttle crab

Zoe and Pyke example of being daring and creative. Creative camp bonuses like the wolf spirit or gromp poison armor is be daring and creative. Hell even plants had levels of creativity, the only ones we hate for the most part is the blasting plant.

Making skuttle crab spawn at random places, while making it worth a shit load of exp, which completely makes pathing as a jungler a living nightmare to figure out in what we should be prioritizing. While also defeating the whole purpose of jungle which is to maintain secrecy of your pathing...

That's just out right stupidity.

Their is a huge difference between the first examples I listed, and a RNG major objective that spawns on random places of the map.

Riot you made a mistake just own up to it and say.

"this was a bad idea"

PERIOD

[riot blaustoise]I’ll still talk about it. I can definitely see how a lot of our design can be seen as “full random” these days. Not a designer myself, but I think a lot of that is due to what it takes to actually change and innovate league while making it better longterm. This game naturally has tons of variance, replay-ability, and amazing moments, and adding champions or game systems that enhance and create new moments without ruining old ones is tricky.

We have 140 champions, so if you look back at some of the recent ones they’re way more “wtf” than the initial offering in league. Permanent transformation, summoner spell stealing, hyper mobile supports, etc.

Even with systems design, I saw jungle plants get roasted by early sentiment from players. Not just on Reddit, but a lot of our data across the broader NA playerbase showed them not going over well. Tbh I thought we were high as fuck when we made them and I did a double take when they were first in our playtests. A month out, they were one of our best received system changes. Global sentiment was super in favor of them.

I’d argue things like plants, Kayn, and even item changes like Redemption resulted from some more whackier or out-there designs. I agree with Meteos actually, but I’m not sure I’d say it’s because our designers are looking to just do weird full random stuff to make their mark. Rather I think it’s because the design space in league is really challenging, and to change the game, keep it fresh, and not ruin the core experience is very difficult.