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I figured out how riot needs to divide their community...

deadlychuck··1 votes·812 views

At this point is pretty clear that riot can't appeal to everyone who plays their game simultaneously, so if they want to keep their entire audience without neglecting parts of it, then they need to split the community. How should this be done though? Well I just remembered this videos and it lays out pretty well where the divide needs to occur.

Riot needs to design one game mode for high risk players and one game mode for low risk players, each with different pacing and different design philosophies.

https://youtu.be/tqG74aI9t3Q?t=634

It's pretty simple. Some people enjoy the slow grind of making progress and some players like the excitement of rolling the dice to get a massively one sided result. These two kinds of players can't both have it the same way when their in the same league of legends match...

Riot, y'all made the mistake of changing target demographics in your game design, but trying to stick with the same fundamental structure throughout and now that's actively hampering your ability to adapt sufficiently. I'm just saying if you can't cater to both subsets of strategic rational decision-makers, then just split them up into their own groups of strategic rational decision-makers and create systems that best cater towards both of them then other group doesn't have to put up with the other's preferences.

4 Comments

macspam1 votes

So true. Why they can't just have a couple different game modes, eludes me

deadlychuck1 votes

Probably because they only have a single development team who's stuck in the mindset of "high risk high reward"...

Full Brain1 votes

Eh well the mindset that video is talking about with high risk vs low risk would apply high risk to say Dominion players who didn't give two shits about dying repeatedly in shorter games and low risk to SR players who lose their shit if you die once in longer games. The thing about that though is Dom was a much fairer game mode that allowed for comebacks with strategy and SR has been snowballs always and forever. So the expected results are different in this game for the mentalities being cultivated and when you break it down like that it isn't any real surprise that the SR playerbase was so much more toxic than the Dom playerbase while they were both active. One is being rewarded while having a low stress mentality reinforced and the other is being punished while burdened with a high stress mentality.

This isn't fortnite. You don't get to feel like you beat 90 people because you spent 20 minutes hiding and not dying. You get to feel like shit because you spent 30 minutes trying hard not to die and then you become a loser as you watch the enemy team destroy everything you protected that entire time in 40 seconds.

I don't know how fixable this even is really at this point. People can rail about no comebacks now but it has always been this way it just took 40-50 minutes to get to it before. The only way you ever really got comebacks were baron steals and base races with split pushing monsters like Nasus/Trynd. I think people like to pretend comebacks were happening in games where a macro advantage was never really gained only a KDA advantage when back then both teams getting max level/build wasn't unusual.

The issue is kind of the map. It leads to irreversible linear gameplay. Meaning you take these towers that are always in these places and they no longer exist and never come back. The layout of the towers is also very limiting for strategy as well. SR has a very rigid gameplay by design. Changing what people are talking about being the problem with the game right now wouldn't remove snowballing it would just make the games take longer. If you aren't actually increasing the amount of strategies you can use to win or what the win conditions are then you are just changing the timer on the snowball.

deadlychuck1 votes

People can rail about no comebacks now but it has always been this way it just took 40-50 minutes to get to it before.

Yes, which is why the game use to be much lower risk and lower reward. It would take 40-50 minutes of winning plays and strategy pilling up to lead to your win. Where as now it's a far few decisions over a smaller time frame. The only way that the static linear nature of the map comes into this is the fact that we can see it play out relative to one another. So when a game ends at 25 minutes, you can feel the difference between how high risk the decisions were in that game compared to the 40-50 min game, as it's a pretty well isolated factor.

The towers aren't the thing limiting the strategy it's the stat scaling. Offense scales substantially harder than defense, despite defense having a natural disadvantage. The result has been that the only viable defensive strategy is a better offensive strategy, but the best offensive strategy overshadows the second best.

However, this is precisely why riot needs to split their community. You can build systems that don't completely obliterate strategy to facilitate high risk play, but you can't have both strategic low risk gameplay with the tactical high risk gameplay. One will always win out. The history of the game also demonstrates that both of these designs are possible on the SR map. Just look at the older players since season 1, these kind of low risk compounding rewards players that came over to mobas from the RTS boom. Where as the newer players are coming in expecting high risk large reward gameplay, I'm not going to speculate as to why this mindset has become more common in the game. It's hard to say which way a causal relationship might go...

Now another option would be to have different maps with different mechanics. This could be done with nexus blitz, which is a far better paced gamemode than SR right now. But if they were to release blitz as the high risk gamemode, then they need to slow down and lower risk in SR. Again, they have too wide an audience to only appease the high risk players if they wish to keep all of the players.

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