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What Parts of LoL Design Ushered Me Out

shletithappen·1/23/2015, 10:44:45 PM·4 votes·878 views

I uninstalled LoL a while back. Probably about 2 months ago. I've played about 1,000 hours on about 30 games since I was 10 on WCI. I just wanted to share why I uninstalled.

  • **Individualism **- The game is a team game, but literally none of the rewards are shared in an intelligent, team-based manner.

A good example of this is last-hitting an enemy accidentally, and having the gold go somewhere unintended. Another good example is how they literally have to rebuild entire sections of the item shop to make support's complete gold desolation a viable position.

  • Snowballing - There is a constant "fix" for this or that champion's snowballing, but in fact they end up being simple power nerfs.

They don't address the core issue, and that is the fact that getting matched up 1v1 in lanes, with no gold sharing and no exp sharing results in completely warped gameboards in every level of play. "Well, Team A has a great comp and is doing well to stick together and approach properly, but WAAAAAAAAAA THERE'S FED YASUO JUST Q-E SPAMMING INTO A HELLISH BLENDER, SOMEONE GET A MOP"

When you put these two together, your results are predictable. People fighting over last hits, fighting over gold / neutral buffs, fighting over roles, fighting over losing lanes. Because you having means I go without, put simply. If we both pick carries, and you steal all my money, and carry, then most players would call that "justified". The problem is when a player does that, it makes my game miserable. They and the other 3 players will consider it worth it, and perhaps I will too. But that brings me to my third point.

  • Gross Time Wasted - When you play a game, you play for fun, or to get better. Otherwise, if you don't play for these two reasons, all things equal you would simply pick another game.

In LoL, when someone is snowballed and taking all of the gold, it generally starves other players. It can be worth it if you win, but if you lose it's literally time wasted playing a useless champ because you gambled (or lost) all your potential on boosting (or having it taken by) someone else. And many times, win or lose you end up losing both of the real reasons for playing. I am not having fun playing an underfed champ or waiting for someone else to carry, and I am not learning anything; there is only so many times you can play passive and farm before you've hit the upper skill limits of right-clicking jungle creeps.

This scenario is greatly exacerbated by losing. If you get thrashed by the enemy team, or your carry loses to their carry, you sit there for however long trying to get back into the game. And many, many times, there is little to do but try to refocus away from the fact that you're wasting your time playing a game that has been decided by a clearly snowballed player, and instead try to find something to learn. Things like "Winning teams use aggressive counter warding to make my jungle completely impassible!" "There is no way to 2v1 or 3v1 a fed Yi without a significant means to stunlock him!" So you drag your butt back to base and camp a turret and force a stalemate for another 10 to 20 minutes until they are so overfed they can kill 5 of you and a turret. Or maybe you win the game in some freakishly stupid mistake, and try to tell yourself that 1 win you salvaged out of 50 losses makes the time wasted worthwhile.

When you combine all three aspects of these, it quickly generates all of the social problems in LoL in a maelstrom. You have people fighting over neutral buffs, last hits, champ kills, strategy, minion exp, roles, on and on. Because each person's gains have a relative priority depending on their perspective (ADC>ADC>jung>Tank>Supp is one such view) and in those scenarios my loss is literally your gain. Riot says they have a team game, and they want strangers to work as a team in a social context, but the frank fact is the game is not designed around the social tenets of team play (equality in team benefits, clear roles, team successes) outside of neutral bosses. And even then, there is often more disagreement motivated by players who find that the risk vs. reward analysis for THEIR CHAMP is not worth pursuing boss buffs. "Help me with Baron!" "Bad timing, we'll get ganked." "Are you joking? Two are bot lane and two including jungle are dead." "Not worth risk. Farming."

It is by far the least favorite of my interactions with companies that Riot interprets the results of these disagreements to be unilateral problems with the people that are buying their products, not the way that they have set up their rewards systems. In terms of reward, it is simply not a team game.

4 Comments

g07h4xf001/24/2015, 1:34:27 AM3 votes

One way to address this issue is by making all gold rewards global for your entire team. Top laner takes a tower? Whole team should get gold in equal amounts. All cs gained by one person gives gold to everyone on your team. That way it doesn't matter who last hits everyone gets part of the bounty. Same with kills. Do kill bounty + assist gold and divide it up equally among the team. Perhaps this should make the game feel more like a team game and less shitty when you are with random people.

There are so many games where I'm just like "wow fuck this mid laner I wish I could give him like half my gold so he would suck less"

shletithappen1/24/2015, 6:41:14 PM1 votes

Well, that's exactly it. For a team game, the game is remarkably slanted towards rewarding individual performance. And that isn't such an issue when you're not dealing with PSR / Power Champs.

Power Champs are the champs who, after Koreans play a good 100 hours with, find some item / ability combination that is offering super-optimal rewards compared to other Champions. Then you start seeing these champions trend very highly in Ranked Matches, because the same skill, same player nets better game results over time. Typically these champions are high-mobility, high-burst with little counterplay options. They are champions like LB, Lee Sin, Riven, Fizz, Yasuo, etc. Nobody wants to lane against these champs, or in the case of Lee Sin, deal with his ganks and unstoppable early game.

Those champs that do want to lane vs. Power Champs are generally PSR champs, or Paper-Scissors-Rock Champs. Like Syndra into a Heimerdinger pick. Now that Heimerdinger picked a champ he likes and enjoys to play a particular role (APC), he is now puckering his butt trying to figure out how he is going to contribute to his team for the next hour. The answer is, unless there is a significant skill or experience gap, he will not. He will have to try to survive for ~10-15 min without feeding and no gold, so that he might be worthwhile in the team-fighting phase (with no items).

PSR is usually illustrated by the Team Captain immediately banning all three of his counterpicks. Because he is rewarded for doing so, since he has first pick and his entire game will be affected (individuality). The team may get screwed, but as long as he generates enough of an individual advantage to carry (snowballing), the decision is justified. Or not, depending on whether or not you enjoy spending 45 minutes giving every available resource to a single player in a "team" game (gross time wasted).

shletithappen2/11/2015, 4:32:54 PM1 votes

It's actually kind of remarkable. These points have borne out in every point - counterpoint discussion I've had or seen about LoL in the past 3 months.