Riot's biggest design problem and something that changed in the community

deadlychuck·Aug 13, 2018·2 votes·1,330 views

Is an inability to recognize playing something intentionally abnormally and playing something poorly.

This is generally expressed in the design by pretty much forcing some combos onto players, with explicitly coded interactions like a Yasuo Q/E or basically Illaoi as a whole.

Yet this gets expressed in the community, but is in part a product of the community adapting to riot's design, by the assumption that a player who builds something that's off meta or less efficient is bad, rather than them having a preference for the difference it creates.

4 Comments

KhristophorosAug 13, 20181 votes

People have always assumed off-meta = bad.

Also another thing I've noticed is it's very common for toxic players to single out a player they are angry at and criticize their build instead of their gameplay since they're too mentally inept to actually identify what the player is doing wrong.

deadlychuckAug 13, 20181 votes

True, but it didn't use to have as much validity, because secondary builds (I wouldn't call them off meta, because that implies it didn't fit into some existing role) didn't use to have as much of a power gap with their primary builds as they do now.

simkoooAug 13, 20181 votes

so u prefer not build the build that give u the best result instead u go for the build that is diffrent but could handicap ur team and make u completely worthless like when my supp wanted to go full dmg crit taric at my promo, believe when i say his build was different and i as his adc was fcked for sure [zombie-brand-facepalm]

deadlychuckAug 13, 20181 votes

u go for the build that ... could handicap ur team and make u completely worthless

This is also true for the builds which are recommended and expected of the champions. You act as if a champion loses their mechanics simply because they built different stats. Building different stats changes nothing about the mechanics of the champion, only what situations in which a mechanic is best utilized, aside from avoidance defensive mechanics (invuln, untargetable, stealth, exc) which are always used in the same situations. This creates tremendous depth and play freedom within the game.