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Games are worse because Riot promotes selfishness as their business strategy.

Cdore·12/3/2019, 9:58:52 PM·42 votes·13,538 views

I am coming to realize that for solo queue, there is very little methods in place to encourage everyone working as a team. We have no voice communication as a default (the old curse client was a great thing and I don't know why Riot pressured them to get rid of it; they didn't even give us a good alternative), muting is encouraged, champions are made more self reliant (Riot has admitted in their design notes that they intentionally make champs self proficient so players aren't punished for their champ choice), and Riot has done little to enforce more competitiveness in its playerbase. Even the tips they show during the loading screen and start of the match are just funny random trivia, and nothing informative like "Be very careful walking into fog of war without vision. There may be an ambush waiting!" Instead, we get little quirky stuff which shows how Riot views its fanbase.

Team Builder was a good thing. It let players fill into a lobby, chat, and discuss strategies before queuing up. And if someone tried to troll, everyone could vote to kick said person. This was the best way to do ranked queue, and I had lot more enjoyable experience being in it. Then it was removed. The reason, I can't remember fully, but I know it had something to do with "ranked timings." This also explains why matchmaking has gotten worse. Riot wants faster games, so they compromised rankings to get faster games. Instead of waiting to match up with almost the perfect equal set of teammates and enemies, you will now find people who don't even deserve to be playing in your elo on your team. Then when you see that silver player get absolutely owned by either the gold or plat player simply due to difference of skills, and cause a game ending snowball, it causes people to go to reddit or these boards and complain. The community becomes angrier, people feel like their games are worse, and then you are stuck in a feedback loop where nothing is getting done. Every ranked feels like you're playing in a vacuum with no human beings. Stuck in your own world without any incentive to work with the other person.

All of Riot's designs for League of Legends surrounds selfishness, and is why the game has all the problems it does. Social, game design, and psychological. Buy the latest skin, like the new meme video, vote for your favorite streamer to be on this rival team, open these new limited loot boxes with random prizes...see anything missing? That's right, nothing game related at all. Nothing to encourage any game training or cooperation with your peers. League of Legends is a skinnerbox designed to keep everyone playing and spending money, with little effort or push toward increasing the gameplay integrity that has defined League since its Dota days. One day, we'll either get a classic mode, or a new developer to give us an alternative game, or nothing at all.

47 Comments

TotalSilencey12/3/2019, 11:43:47 PM6 votes

I disagree.

I believe Riot promotes team work.

Teams that work together out on the rift, win more often. Proven.

Teams that flame less, win more. Proven.

Rewards are in place for those that follow the "summoners code" (incentive to play fair, nicely and engage in teamwork).

Toxic behaviour and attitudes are punished to prevent bad behaviour. I even had my first account banned (reformed player here as living proof the system works).

Riot gives you free champs/skins just for being a good team mate and following the summoners code!

As for game content or updates. We are getting new champs all the time. Changes to the gameplay and the rift are coming down every season. I love the new Dragon changes that affect the physical map itself.

You DO NOT need to spend a single $1 on this game! I have a few accounts where I have spent $0 and have all champs and MANY limited edition/rare skins.

Be positive and a good team mate. You will be rewarded in many ways.

Can we lock this thread?

Nea10412/4/2019, 12:04:06 PM6 votes

They turned this game into a Mortal Kombat-ish game, ie. a perma one-shot/burst fiesta where every (viable) champ can kill every other champ, so of course they promote selfishness. I'm glad that many players are finally sick of this mindless cheap concept.

ZephyrDrake12/4/2019, 3:00:09 AM5 votes

Teambuilder was gone because NOBODY played it. I had once a ONE HOUR QUEUE TIME AS A SILVER PLAYER. Nobody cared for it since you literally were at the mercy of whoever was the support. If they didn't like whatever was on your team and it didn't change they would just leave, find a match within seconds while you were there waiting whoever long it took for a support to come which could take upwards to 10 minutes or more at times.

Here is my question to you... why don't you use discord? Or Skype or any other 3rd party program with voice chat that most people tend to have anyways? If you are willing to use the curse thing then you should be willing to use the multitude of other things available. Ah right, you wanted the thing that gave you more than a simple voice chat experience, you wanted something that would give you information that wasn't available through other means as easily and readily.

"Champions are made more self reliant" cool and now tell me where are those champions that require a team to play at any lvl of decency? Oh right they are often the least played and least liked champions in the game. Nobody likes feeling powerless to do something just because their team is doing poorly. People like having some form of agency in their kits.

The tips aren't there to hand hold you and quite frankly if you are playing ranked and didn't knew basic things then a tip on the loading screen isn't going to make you suddenly realize that is actually an important thing to do. The games are faster, yeah and? I rather them be fast than before where you literally slowly lost the game and there was nothing you could do about it other than have an enemy that was miles ahead of you and that you couldn't touch or do anything against but couldn't close the game. I really want to know also where was the excitement and actual gratification of doing nothing but farm for 40+ minutes and have ONE teamfight decide the game. Now that you have to not suck and be at least somewhat decent at all stages of the game it's suddenly too much.

You have normals, you have coop vs ai, you even have a sandbox training mode. You have plenty of videos and guides made by countless players on how to do pretty much anything in league. It's up to you to get better and improve at the game not riot but you. You have the tools available already, if you don't want to use them then It's on you.

HerbertyXsSn12/4/2019, 3:42:11 PM5 votes

What I hate the most is how hard they try to punish toxic chat and make toxicity the scapegoat for why the game's low quality.

In an M rated fucking game at least in Australia, these guy think trashtalking is a problem. Get the fuck out of here.

I understand that saying mean things such as wishing suicide on someone should be met with drastic measures but these guys intentionally leave out voice chat because a select group of sensitive wimps who haven't learnt to face the real world are threatened by the act of being told to not feed over voice. There's no teamwork in this game, I can literally not coordinate with people because a lot of them are usually too focused to listen to pings and with how difficult it is to solo carry in this meta, we need a new way of telling people what your intentions are.

Salty Mc Feed12/4/2019, 12:02:27 PM3 votes

The biggest issue I have is Riot's idea to give everyone a massive window of power instead of just making it balanced and a match based on skill. You could argue that knowing your windows of opportunity is also skill, but when the whole game is just that it no longer adds depth but makes the game really fucking boring because everyone runs out of options.

The best examples for that are tanks and enchanter supports. OP to a certain point, usually ends with % penetration or grievous wounds making them useless. RIot made this even more drastic with more drop off by increasing resistances and making grievous wounds even more easily accessible for everyone and adding more and more heal boost sources. But the most insulting thing that Riot did was to design champions that can just overpower all of that and for example destroy a tank during a time when other champions struggle. I think there is a certain power creep of balance issues that get resolved by adding even more problematic hard counters instead of finding a way to even everything out.

On a surface level and statistically the game might look kind of balanced, but when you actually play it, it feels like it has become more messy with each season.

The thing with team builder was that you were creating a team without getting chance to counter pick the enemy team, maybe that made it more interesting.

Subdue12/4/2019, 4:58:53 PM3 votes

  1. League of Legends is already a team game, and teams that play together do better than teams that don't, regardless of team composition. What is the value of artificially forcing teamwork when the game's natural state already encourages it?

  2. Champions should be sufficiently effective regardless of team composition. Imagine if your favorite champion can only played when someone else on your team plays a specific champion, otherwise you'll be completely useless. How awful would that feel? Teamwork should be organic, not forced by champion limitations.

  3. Muting is not encouraged on its own. Muting teammates who are harassing you is encouraged. Muting yourself if you know you lack the self control to not harass others is encouraged. In both cases, the person is not going to be contributing anything positive to communications.

  4. Ranked matchmaking is actually fairly accurate. You rarely if ever find Platinums in Silver Games, or vice versa, unless there is some duo queue involved. Normal matchmaking has a separate MMR and allows for players to queue to gether regardless of MMR so there's no getting around the fuzziness there. The mode itself is designed for players to be able to mess around and play with their friends.

  5. Riot wants faster queues because players want faster queues. What's stopping you from adding people to your friends list that you enjoy playing with and then always queuing as 5s for the real "teambuilder" experience? Nothing. Well, nothing but time.

  6. You may feel like someone doesn't belong in your skill bracket, but your feeling is rarely accurate. The people in your bracket are statistically as able to win in your bracket as you are. Whether they're feast or famine and either stomp the game or get stomped, or they're more moderate, throwing up consistent, scores, they are able to win just as much as you are.

  7. And finally, hyperbole at its finest. Nothing added towards gameplay you say? What about the complete rework of Dragons that literally just came out? What about the updates to the map that just came out?

Yin Yang Taoist12/4/2019, 5:08:41 PM3 votes

If I'm not mistaken, premades can use voice chat. Why don't you just play with your premade in normals? If you keep winning, it will keep pitching you up against stronger teams. Its not like you won't get any competition if you're not doing Solo Q. Faker did Normals all the way until his Q times rose significantly because his Normal MMR was so high that he could only be matched against the highest rated players.

If you're doing it for the border, do Flex Q. You can talk to your teammates there. If you want to invite strangers, you can add them to discord. Heck, I've seen people post discord lobby's on Ranked Solo/Flex.

I've hardly joined those myself or seen others doing so. Its great if you win or do good but if you lose, I've seen all hell break loose. One guy was extremely grieved after he joined and had a bad game. The Evelynn and her premade just made him miserable, kept making fun of how he's a pretending Diamond smurf going to Harvard in his imagination. My point is, if people really wanted to get on mic with other people because they thought that their game play would be better due to it, they would. Its not like Riot makes it impossible for people to do so. The fact that they aren't goes to show that most aren't interested.

And all that said, Riot already has a massive problem managing their players' toxicity in chat logs. You add voice comms and that's like dropping a tank over a cart tottering on a cliff's edge.

I was never there for the Team Builder so I can't say much about it. I'd simply suggest throwing an alternative to solo Q with the Team builder. Where people who opt in for the Team builder mode get matched against those picking the same mode. I do wonder why Riot removed it though, seeing as you, OP appear to think that it was really popular. Honestly, I don't even get how Riot's being selfish here because they want to market their game the best that they can and they are probably doing it on some statistics and polls that they record which we ordinary players aren't aware of. If their game is selling, the fact that they haven't made any changes means that this is what's actually more popular, don't you think?

Shovel Bot12/4/2019, 6:28:51 AM2 votes

Ever since the Tribunal was bastardized we have suffered greatly in talent and skill in NA by displacing team comp minded silver players and replacing them all with 0/8 Yasuo/Akali silver mains with skins that have no idea how to understand the game.

Please, think of the silver players.

KVbqbFsC8e12/5/2019, 1:50:18 AM1 votes

That sure is alot of typing just to say that you want Team Builder back.

BoringLittleF12/4/2019, 11:55:01 AM1 votes

{quoted}

muting is encouraged

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