My Observations on Hitboxes

We all know hitboxes, those little invisible squares responsible for judging every skillshot and range in the game. But here on the rift, there's a problem; these hitboxes are almost always inaccurate.

I would guess that part of the inaccuracy is that Riot has--for the most part--gone about working the game as if it was a 2D image, which isn't a completely bad thing. However, It's not. We have leaps, skillshots that trace along the ground or fly in midair and even the rift itself is build with differing elevations. As a result, the mental idea of everything being 2D is left behind because of this. Consider Jinx's ult: we see the rocket as a 2D rocket and the hitbox considers it as such, but the animation itself is that of a 3D rocket. As a result, seeing your champ get clipped by topmost edge and having the rocket detonate is confusing, as in 3D--as the animation and game suggests--you not be in contact. Basically, by rendering the game in 3D but by treating hitboxes as 2D, players are misled as to how the works.

The second part is the size of the actual hitboxes. For example, there exist only 3 different sizes of hitbox in the game. Now, this does indeed sound tempting to say that they took the smart way out, but this really only works if one is referring to spending less time. Remember, the champions are quite diverse in form, even across similar sizes. Gragas vs Nasus, Cho vs Sol, Viktor vs Syndra all are similar in size, but have drastically different body forms. This results in some bizarre interactions. On the ability side of the aisle, we have still more examples of poorly-matched hitboxes: Ekko's timewinder, Blitz's/Thresh's/Leo's hook and yes Morg's root are all well known examples. Part of the problem here may well be that the champion and ability hitboxes are both incorrectly sized and thus lead to these incidents.

Lastly are the bizarre inclusions in what Riot's design team decided to set up as hitboxes. For example, did you know that many champions have part or all of their shadow included in their hitbox? Even more interesting is that the same is true for some abilities, which means that one could have an incident of shadow-on-shadow contact (go home Zed, not you) somehow registering as an actual hit. Then we have the weird stuff: for 'jumping' or short dash/blink manuvers, the champion hitbox does not actually move until they complete, which is why Thresh can flay Kha out of his jump by doing so at the point where the jump began and how Blitz can hook Vayne by going for where her Tumble started despite her visually being not there.

So, what does this all mean? Well, we can't really call this a bug, as its actually coded into the game and not due to error (though lag will make the issue worse). I wouldn't want to call this lazy programming, since I'm not huge on playing the lazy card in general. A long shot would be to say this would come about due to a disconnect between the visual and behind the scenes teams, but that just sounds far-fetched.

The actual impact of this issue is a little more visual than some might think. As we well know League is not a game that suffers newbies very well, because they have to learn the this misrepresentation of hitboxes and visuals, which leads to embarrassing misses and rage upon getting hit with something that really shouldn't have hit you. Remember, players enter a game with the assumption that everything is going to match up accurately and realizing that there are some large discrepancies they are forced to spend time to learn around.

As my final point, I'd like to say that this is a fixable problem, though not small. Ideally, each skill and champion would have the hitbox and visual match with a high degree of accuracy, either by tweaking the hitbox or visual to suit the intended difficulty to power ratio of the ability.

From my experience, the majority of the playerbase has done one of two things about it; either they learn the inaccurcy and abuse it, or they learn it and give in to complacency or apathy. The majority of the discussion I've had and seen on this has boiled down to the ever-entertaining phrase 'git gud', so I'm bringing this here in the hopes of getting this problem some attention and perhaps the notice of a Red or two.

Regards, Sarcastic

Source+Examples: http://www.team-dignitas.net/articles/blogs/League-of-Legends/6419/League-of-Legends-A-Game-of-Hitboxes-Skillshots-and-Dodging https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QXPyIrejTWg https://youtu.be/HU1QUSrgp4E?t=168 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LqwKL6WDUuM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B-xZqZ6TZAU