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It's like this game is balanced like a PvE action RPG...

deadlychuck··4 votes·2,657 views

Where you have low health and high damage, but the enemy mobs have low damage and high health.

When you look at them relative to each other, it technically wouldn't matter how you do it for the PvE situations, where if you reversed it, giving the players high health and low damage while the enemies have high damage and low health, then it would feel exactly the same for the players.

Yet when you translate these two to PvP, only one of them really holds up. The low player damage, high player health... why? Well for one thing, it ensures that even if a player is ahead, the opponent gets to play the game. It's not split second fights leaving the other player on a gray screen. Which means that players aren't always forced to take the most optimal choice, if they can play around setting up the conditions for a less optimal choice without the fear of instant punishment.

There's just one thing that I can't understand. Why would you make this change in an almost exclusively PvP game? More succinctly, if you have complete control over the meta, why would you make the meta picks low time to kill, but the niche off-meta picks high time to kill?

At least if the off-meta is low time to kill, then the off meta picks still have a chance to play their character before they might end up on a death screen. If you just shut out the player from playing off-meta picks, then where's the incentive to innovate and experiment if every failed attempt just means you're wasting 20 minutes at a time going through slight iterations of the same things and provides virtually no opportunity to gain experience playing the thing that you're not well versed in?

This doesn't even just apply to off-meta builds. Why is it that simply picking a champion you've never played before gives you zero time to get experience with the champion when you're spending most of your time on a death screen as a result of clunky mechanics? Doesn't this just drag out the time it takes to gain experience on a champion/build at the expense of player enjoyment and patience?

Like I see no reason to even play the game if you're not going to just scrape the best builds from the most popular website, because if you don't then you're just going to spend hours, if not days, getting slaughtered trying to practice with the champion, but gaining almost useful information because you only managed to activate 1 of your 4 skills in the time it took for the other guy to kill you. And don't give me the "play against bots" bullshit, because that's no more useful than watching the spotlight or just reading the skills.

5 Comments

KFCeytron2 votes

But it was so fun being a Zealadin in Diablo 2 and getting cursed with Iron Maiden by an Oblivion Knight right in the middle of an uninterruptible quintuple-swing.

thwack bonk Iron Maiden Sound "OH NO" whack clonk Death Sound

Śhunpo1 votes

I mean, Ghostcrawler WAS the lead Gameplay Designer, and he WAS responsible for destroying WoW PvP...sooooo makes sense...

Lovelle II1 votes

This is why I miss Dominion. It was one of the best maps for experimenting, being creative, and just generally fast games. Everyone reached full build by the 15-20 minute mark. No matter how hard Riot tries, neither SR or TT will ever be that fast in terms of gameplay, they both just become more snowbally when Riot tries to make them faster.

For the past 4 years, Riot has been aggressively trying to make SR games faster and more exciting, even going so far as to gut champions with defensive/methodical approaches to combat. Nerfing defense and giving everyone damage seems to be their answer for everything these days, essentially making every game nothing but a glorified DPS check (for all roles).

chipndip11 votes

Like, look at your analysis and see all the holes. If this was a fighting game, where the round ends after dropping your hp to 0, then yeah, people would be more resilient, but it isn't. Also, this game borrows HEAVILY from RPG elements. When's the last time you've seen a tanky Raichu? Never, because Raichu isn't tanky. Since everyone LOVES playing the squishy play maker in this game, why SHOULD you not go down in a few hits? You didn't build the hp you're complaining about, and you DID build full damage (not you specifically since I didn't look up your op.gg to know, but just generally speaking). Seeing people complain about damage in the game, only to see them main Gangplank or Zed or some marksman...Idk how you guys do it, really.

League is balanced assuming you actually play the game right. The issue with solo queue, and asking for balance around it, is that people rarely play League right in solo queue unless you make tanks absolutely busted to the point where everyone wants to play tanks. If people actually built smart team comps, you'd see that the game isn't THAT explosive. It CAN be, but it doesn't have to be if you make the choice for it not to be. People actively choose not to, then get mad. Even most support players play nothing but early game play makers and mages atm. Who's gonna live when no one's opting for defense? It's crazy.

Like, this whole post is just pseudo-intellectual belly-aching that aims at nothing in particular, with a few buzzwords like "high damage" so a few upvotes can drop in.

deadlychuck1 votes

Naw I was pretty much ranting about the similarity in the game design that are shared between the genres, but there's history of this not working in the other genres, so it's reasonable to assume that the design falls flat in a game which borrows a lot of RPG elements.

Idk where your fighting game comparison came from though.

League is balanced assuming you actually play the game right.

The issue is how narrowly they define "right". No, if two players build pure damage, then even in that case you probably shouldn't see players blowing up in split seconds before you can reasonably be expected to use your kit.

And just as you like to throw out opinions as facts, then the same could be said that the game is designed wrong to be played.

Yes, league is balanced, but balanced is a relative state. Which is exactly what I said in the post. You can have a balanced PvE game be just as much fun to the players regardless of their absolute HP and Damage, so long as relative to the mobs it will be perceived the same. But even if you have relative balance in a PvP game that doesn't mean that the absolute balance is in a healthy spot.

Two tanks shouldn't be slap boxing for 20 minutes to bruise the other person, while two marksmen are in the other lane shooting each other with recreational nukes. Yeah that might mean a tank against a marksmen is a balanced exchange for both players, but anything outside of that is made dissatisfying by the lopsided balance of that fight. But remember, league is a progressive game which you will be fighting players of different roles throughout the game. Mostly the same role while you're in the laning phase, but generally other roles in the mid-late game.

Now if a game is balanced around all fights being balanced, then a coordinated team can actively weigh that balance to either extremely high damage or extremely high defense. But if the game is designed around the team as a whole being balanced, then the individual fights of uncoordinated players are almost never going to be balanced. Unless the players agree to the same degree of handicap, which never happens unless they're both taking the absolute optimal picks. But even then, it pigeonholes players on a team into a checklist of necessary components for a viable team. Tank? Here! Marksman? Here! Support? W/ the Marksman!...

Now, this kind of oversight is excusable in a primarily PvE game where the primary concern is player power relative to a particular mob they encounter, as opposed to another player. How this same design flaw slipped into a game that's almost entirely PvP is mind blowing.

Also, I only mentioned "high damage" in reference to the design decisions of PvE gameplay in action RPGs no league. Talk about pseudo-intellectual.

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