@Riot: Please let us know about the state of possible support incentives

Dehitay·Mar 25, 2016·3 votes·642 views

When dynamic queue first came out, Riot predicted there might be a problem with the lack of popularity in the support role and said they would consider incentives if popularity decreased too much (which it definitely did). Personally, I think the majority of the problems Riot is having with dynamic queue could be solved by increasing the popularity of fill and support picks.

So is Riot still considering support/fill pick incentives? If so, what kind of incentives? And if you're having a hard time figuring out what incentives might work, could you please make a thread asking for ideas? because I'm sure somebody in the League community would definitely have an idea that would work for you.

11 Comments

Mew Goes ADMar 25, 20162 votes

Riot needs to stop treating the symptom and start treating the disease.

So far, their main "solutions" to support not being fun to play for 95% of the population are to either find ways for people to avoid playing support or find ways to "sneak" people into playing the support role they don't want to play. Even your suggestion above is just another version of the latter, except using a carrot.

The fact that people don't want to play support is a symptom of the fact that people do not find that role enjoyable to play.

If Riot had just focused on making support an actual fun role for the majority of players, they would never have needed to invent Teambuilder/Dynamic Queue, warding trinkets/sightstones, and other various junk that doesn't fix the core problem in the first place: People do not like spending half the game playing Riot's warding mini-game "chores" and having no gold or levels.

Surely Riot can figure some other mechanic to distribute vision around the map and other ways to prevent high CC characters from being too strong; they have had years now.

We don't need more carrots/sticks to "encourage" support or more fancy convoluted queue systems that lets people "not have to play" support. We need support to be a real role most people are interested in playing.

ErockandrollMar 25, 20161 votes

[{quoted}](name=Mew Goes AD,realm=NA,application-id=3ErqAdtq,discussion-id=kLBl4V9B,comment-id=0002,timestamp=2016-03-25T16:52:11.995+0000)

Riot needs to stop treating the symptom and start treating the disease.

So far, their main "solutions" to support not being fun to play for 95% of the population are to either find ways for people to avoid playing support or find ways to "sneak" people into playing the support role they don't want to play. Even your suggestion above is just another version of the latter, except using a carrot.

The fact that people don't want to play support is a symptom of the fact that people do not find that role enjoyable to play.

If Riot had just focused on making support an actual fun role for the majority of players, they would never have needed to invent Teambuilder/Dynamic Queue, warding trinkets/sightstones, and other various junk that doesn't fix the core problem in the first place: People do not like spending half the game playing Riot's warding mini-game "chores" and having no gold or levels.

Surely Riot can figure some other mechanic to distribute vision around the map and other ways to prevent high CC characters from being too strong; they have had years now.

We don't need more carrots/sticks to "encourage" support or more fancy convoluted queue systems that lets people "not have to play" support. We need support to be a real role most people are interested in playing.

I hope you have some suggestions. Cause the way I see it. People definition of Fun, seems to correlate with there ability to win. And they avoid the support role feeling that there ability to win is out of there hands. But on the opposite end of the token, supports don't carry. They're not suppose to, so by definition, people won't like playing support because they can't carry.

And out side of game mechanics, the Community is also a problem for supports, as the supports often becomes the teams whipping boy. ("Where's my support?, Stop taking Kills?, etc")

I really don't know what your definition of fun is, and it's probably different from mine. (Me, I enjoy playing support as it is) But it feels like the community at large as a very narrow definition, and making the support role fit that narrow definition would probably destroy the role as we know it.

MimyMar 25, 20161 votes

As a support..

I would love a sightstone recharge buff on every assist.

Give me little thing like this that don't give much power. But help me do my job.

Riot nerfed sightstone soooo much.

This one little buff... 1 charge granted per assist.. please.

Mew Goes ADMar 25, 20161 votes

Would you really? I would argue that that further exacerbates the problem rather than helping, and I'll tell you why if you answer some questions:

What is your most fun moment in recent memory that you have while playing a support?

What is your favorite thing about playing a support?

Any other support mains can feel free to answer as well.

MimyMar 25, 20162 votes

What is your most fun moment in recent memory that you have while playing a support? Watching their botlane try to dive me low health and they end up taking a lot of damage but I manage to manuver well enough for me to get a double kill out of it when dieing.

Going mid when My adc backs and helping my mid get fed..

What is your favorite thing about playing a support? Watching my ADC get fed and maniacally laughing like an evil scientist as my creation tears up the rift..

http://www.kidsmomo.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/evil-laugh-farnworth.gif

I don't care if I get credit.. that's the best feeling.. is watching the freelo happen..

Mew Goes ADMar 25, 20161 votes

Very nice. However, notice, neither of those things have jack anything to do with the vision/warding system.

Whenever I ask supports why they play supports, they, 100% of the time, give me answers about how they used their kit to help a teammate, or baited the opponents somehow, or made some amazing play when botlane. The answer has never been how much someone likes wandering off to sweep for wards or walk upriver to dragon every 3 minutes when the ward timer goes off.

Yes, vision is still important, but this concept that it must be achieved by this extremely boring mechanic of moving your character around the map to place an item on the ground and sweeping the haystack for items opponents may have placed on the ground is misguided. Riot has plenty of smart people on their development team, surely there were 1 million other mechanics they could have come up with that were both significantly more fun and involved more of the team than this one.

Maybe objectives that grant temporary vision of jungle areas, maybe more mobs similar to rift scuttler (and buff rift scuttle’s vision), maybe some vision reward based on CS, or even floating bunny rabbits that pick which team they like best based on cookies. I’m sure Riot can come up with their own thing, but the point is that even these completely from-the-hip suggestions are still significantly better than Riot's boring as all hell warding system to distribute vision around the map.

Sightstone doesn’t need a buff; it needs to be removed from the game. So do trinkets. The only reason trinkets exist are because the supports told Riot that they were tired of spending all their time doing boring warding “chores,” and Riot’s clearly genius response was to make it so that all the players “had to do” the boring thing instead of considering that perhaps that mechanic was not healthy for the game. Let me restate that one more time: One group of players told Riot that their mechanic was boring, and instead of replacing it with something else, their solution was to annoy all the other players on the map as well.

MimyMar 25, 20161 votes

Yea because warding is one of the things I hate about supporting because they nerfed warding soo much...

So of course its something I want FIXED... You asking BS questions....

Sightstone doesn’t need a buff; it needs to be removed from the game.

Hell no, fuck that.. that would make supports job 10 times harder because we need to buy all those wards that we need for items to help the carry.

We'd just be constantly yelled at for never buying enough wards..

Mew Goes ADMar 25, 20162 votes

Hell no, fuck that.. that would make supports job 10 times harder because we need to buy all those wards that we need for items to help the carry.

We'd just be constantly yelled at for never buying enough wards..

Wards wouldn't exist either. No form of warding/wards/trinkets/sightstone would exist.

That's the point. A different mechanic for map vision.

Please read a post if you are going to respond to it.

MimyMar 25, 20161 votes

That sounds... really dumb...

Teemo Ashe TwistedFate Kalista

anyone who provides vision... would rule the rift..

Maybe objectives that grant temporary vision of jungle areas

It's called Smiting Wolves... and yes... scuttle..

or even floating bunny rabbits that pick which team they like best based on cookies.

What are you on?.... seriously.... Go clear your head of whatever you're on and come back reading what you said clean...

Probably on some serious Teemo shrooms..

DehitayMar 25, 20161 votes

I was thinking more along the lines of incentives for choose support or fill in role select, but there's also a ton of a good ideas for making support more fun to play in general. I'm not sure if everybody remembers when you got bonus gold for assist streaks. I think Riot took it away cause it was helping non supports make more gold than they intended. But if you would just attack the bonus gold for assist streaks as a passive for the support items, then it would mostly only get used on supports.

DehitayMar 25, 20161 votes

As somebody who played support as a secondary role, I can tell you that an incentive program would definitely help. Primary supports are having the time of their lives right now. But as a jungle main, I got sick and tired of being support every single game when I queued up as jgl/sup. I eventually got fed up and started queueing up as jgl/top. And I am just one of many who did the same thing. There are ton of people who would play support if they didn't have to play it every single time they put it as an option.

Proof of this goes back to when dynamic queue first came out. I was jgl/sup back then as well or fill in normal games, and I got a very good spread of role placements. But as time went on, more people stopped choosing support resulting in more people never getting their primary and then proceeding to stop choosing support going into a vicious cycle. If people were given a reason to choose support, this cycle would break and support/fill secondaries would come back.

Just because you hate playing support doesn't mean everybody else does. People just would rather play their main role the majority of the time.