Change in League of Legends
Everywhere I look when I'm reading comments about change or preseason in League of Legends I find overwhelming negativity, springing from something as small as plants being added to something as large as class reworks. I remember people saying they were going to quit when Riot added shields to Tier 2 towers and made Inhib towers shoot lasers that slowed. I've been playing since Season 3 and I've got to say that the ONLY reason we all still play is the constant innovation that Riot presents us with.
I play Chess competitively and win money from tournaments every month or so. I'm not top 100 or anything near that level, but I manage to get by while being a College Student majoring in Game Design. I may be biased towards these changes, seeing as I've dreamed of working for RIOT since the 8th grade. But I think I am capable of presenting an objective argument in this case.
Chess has been the same for a long time. Omitting tournament rule changes, the last "gameplay update" was in the 15th Century where, according H.J.R Murray's "A History of Chess", the double pawn move was being added in India. So, with such little change how can this game still be considered playable at an International Level? This is because the game is perfectly symmetrical. League of Legends, according to the Game Design Youtube series known as Extra Credits, "Is a great example of perfect imbalance," this is to say that the game is asymmetrical with small imbalances used to keep it interesting and provide real decisions for the player rather than encouraging perfect play. Even Faker himself gets baited by cannon creeps into being ganked by EDG, hence the Worlds 2017 match when EDG was 10,000 gold ahead at 25 minutes. This tells us that the best players in the world are extremely far from being considered perfect, and that perfect play probably isn't achievable by humans ever or machines at this time (looking at you, Mr. OpenAI in Dota 2. How'd you lose to the pesky cheese humans had to offer after beating Dendi?) Since this is the case, change allows us to focus more on adapting to the brain babies that Riot drops on us from season to season.
Change is good. Change stops games from becoming stale. It helps prevent players from perfecting any Min-Maxed strategy and then winning without contest, as what happened with Samsung White in 2014 when they solved the vision game. Especially when so much money is made off of spectated events such as Worlds. No one wants to watch or even play the same "perfectly balanced" meta. Heck! People constantly gripe and complain about a "boring" meta, only to then have it changed and two weeks later they are complaining again! I understand that not everyone can be happy, but it scares me that so many people can be adverse to innovation when it does so much to help the game. I am giddy with excitement at the thought of playing with the new runes, they are so much fun to use on the PBE! Yes, Riot can make mistakes in balancing and then seemingly not "respond" to it for a while but you have to look at it from their shoes. It takes many hours of hard work to design content and then play-test it thoroughly. And Riot loses money if they have to scrap this work or keep adding to it. The Time input to Money output is an important idea to keep in mind when designing these things, so please be more considerate before you flame Riot for trying to let the players solve some of the issues that come with the Rioter's blood sweat and tears put into their work.
I have a ton of ideas on this kind of game-play (philosophy?) floating around my head and I decided to share it with some people to hopefully engage into a fun and interesting conversation. Feel free to share your thoughts, I can't promise to read all of them because Design Projects take FOREVER to do, but I will definitely look at most of them! I'm not trying to alienate people who play casually or anything like that and I know my arguments are all over the place here but I wrote this for fun and since I'm not getting a school grade on it I don't feel the need to make it perfect in terms of grammar or flow.
Have a nice day!
