Creativity in League of Legends

Hi. Long time player. Season 2. I've mained multiple roles. Every lane. Every champion type. Pure focus AD. To control Mage. To CC tank teamfight. To Bruiser splitpusher, to combinations of them all. Including fascination with Nami/Sona types.

You can read my take on why this new season feels so snowbally in my previous posts or the addendum at the bottom. Most of it has to do with the inherent volitility of Jungle and the value of Gold.* (read value of Gold at the bottom)

What I absolutely want to draw you closer to is the mind of a creative player in league of legends. The idea of rune changes and mastery changes should be an exciting one for a long time creative league player. Creativity is what keeps the base of this game going. The game is not as overtly complex as micro/macro games in real-time such as starcraft, warcraft, or previous games this genre was founded on. This reinforces the importance on keeping the game creative and have users be able to individually define themselves. You've made some attempts to do this in champion design recently which I will acknowledge and feel you've gone in a great direction with. The creativity and change in game dynamics that champions like Warwick and completely new champions is fantastic and you can tell the player base is happy with a lot of the new champions that bring a diversity of playstyles to the game.

The thing is all this champion redesign, creative new champion direction is great, but it's not what keeps the game creative, new, and healthy to it's player base. The redeeming quality and re-invention that keeps an (essential) game of tug-o-war fresh is the rebalancing and redirection of runes and masteries every season, (along with the fantastic neutrals changes). Junglers thrive on creative learning on new neutrals. Yet, for some reason, as a creative player, there is a distinct feeling of loss of creativity in this seasons set-up. What I am referring to here is the runes changes and not the neutral/jungle changes. These seem to reward invades and a overall throwy die at your own red buff game (which needs more counterplay), but that's fine from a creative perspective. It's something to learn. But what feels lame and sucks the creativity from the game is lack of being able to uniquely define yourself in runes/masteries. I'll give some suggestions to why I think so, but a lot of my friends have already began to play less this season and I think I've found the culprit.

At it's peak, this game is based on math. Your design team can avoid this all they want, but the raw stats of the game effect the balance more than anything else. The new rune system has taken out the raw stat runes which gave you incredible flexibility to such things as Hybrid Pen Mundo, with attack speed, lethality reds, CDR/ mana regen on supports, ETC. The combinations were endless. You could uniquely define your champion for a different role in a different matchup. If you wanted to play Hecarim Mid, you could figure out a rune page that would give you the sustain, or defenses capable of taking/regening the punishment of being melee in a ranged lane. If your team needed slightly more physical damage on a full AP team you could get hybrid pen and attack speed on Mundo and do some serious auto-attack damaging with his E. If your team needed a bit more tanky on your Urgot, you could adjust your runes and use a bit more defensive stats. The whole point of these rune choices and balancing was that it was exciting to mix with the mastery changes. (Who would have guessed that changing the double-edged sword mastery from 1.5->3.0 to 2.5->5.0 would imbalance assasins so much!?). The changes to % healing were so game changing very interesting as a reversal to % dmg in earlier seasons.

The thing is, the excitement is in uniquely defining your character to the role your team requires. That was the fun in the last season. Now, with the removal of raw stats, you've taken out a significant portion of the ability to uniquely define a champion and replaced it with (trivial) manabend/scorch/electrocute/aery passives that feel HUGELY uniform. These runes mentioned above don't uniquely define my character, they put the playstyle in a generic box and essentially runs opposite the great work that the champion design team does in diversing league of legends for different types of players. I understand the goal was likely stated in the board meeting was "making the game (rune system) more accessible to new comers". But, what you've done is given very stock / lackluster / somewhat trivial abilities in the runes, in counter to the creative. So, idk, I've played less and less. Creativity and creative players keep the game fresh. Nerfing their exploits is one thing, but removing the ability to reinvent a Character (champion) limits the self-life of the game. For the most part, creative people keep the game from becoming stale, not just for themselves, but for everyone. In a sense, you are creating much more work for yourselves in the future because the game will get stale faster for creative players. And without creative players, you'll have a hard time remaining the top game.

*Raw stats taken out of runes means that those first few long swords are x2 -> x3 more powerful spike. Furthermore the lack of rune Lethality combined with the level advantage (faster minion speed), makes those first few lethality item more relevant without having it in runes. And don't get me started on the value of bramble vest/ninja tabi.

Thormail Rush on Every Champion! Ex Dee