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@Riot - Can We Please Talk About Your Design Policy?

Hinagiku33·2/9/2015, 4:32:15 AM·8 votes·684 views

Hello All, Fiora All Night here.

Following the apparent guidelines to get attention from Riot here on the boards, I'm trying to spark up a serious and critical discussion on the game design policy and philosophy in a point-counterpoint format. This will be long so here's a tl;dr:

tl;dr - Hey Riot, some things in your stated design goals/policies aren't meeting up with what you are actually doing. We have no idea if this is an error or if those policies and goals have changed since you haven't told us. Can you please post your current design philosophy or at least stop by to address some concerns that we have? Please and thank you!

So, I'm sure pretty much everyone here has seen piles and piles of complaint threads here. What are they all about you ask? Well, some of us have some issues with past and recent decisions that Riot has made as they seem to go against what Riot has done and said in the past. Rather than bore you with a wall of text, let's try and get some fancy bullet notes in here!

  1. Mobility - Riot has stated several times now that mobility creep is a serious issue in the game that devalues and renders obsolete many beloved older champs who lack crazy MS boosts and dashes. Riot has also stated that part of this was due to them undervaluing mobility when determining a champ's power budget. Kalista RekSai Yasuo ...So, what exactly happened here Riot? Ahri even got a new MS buff on her Q. You have said that some champs 'have no weaknesses' and need to be nerfed, but when mobility is a huge reason why this happens...why do you continue to undervalue mobility and add so much of it?

Counterpoint - Mobility is fun. It is seriously awesome to zip around, dodging skillshots, and making huge plays by surprising your opponents. It's not hard to see the extreme fun potential of high mobility champions. A case can be made that mobility isn't the problem, but rather the lack of any tools for immobile champs to counter it.

  1. Counterplay - Akali ...look, I love Akali and have played her since season 2, but it's hard not to feel bad for all of the people frustrated by her kit. Point-and-click burst that can 100-0 a key member of your team will never, ever be fun to play against. Let me take another shot at myself here: Fiora ...tons of fun for me but a lot of people hate her point-and-click kit, especially her ult. I feel that modern champs overall do better, but even the champs with skillshots and 'outplay potential' coughLeeSin Zed cough can feel terrible to play against. I dislike nerfs in general but can you elaborate on why there doesn't seem to be even minor mechanics changes to even one skill despite tons of community suggestions?

Counterpoint - Point-and-Click may not be fun, but it is not inherently broken. On the flip-side, annoying 'outplay' champs could be exactly that...annoying. Reliable champs often do trade sheer power compared to others, but being reliable means that they can do some damage all of the time instead of champs that hurt more but can be dodged. Outplay champs do often require skill and aren't really a problem at lower levels of play, but against a skilled player they don't really offer much chance for you to do anything about them.

  1. 'Ball of Stats' - This one goes back a while. Irelia ...I rest my case. No, but seriously for a long time now a lot of champs have been accused of this, where playing against them stops being a skill-check and starts being a stat-check. Can you survive their burst? Cool, murder them. Either you do enough damage and they die uselessly, or they can soak just enough damage to get to you can kill you. Binary. There seems to be no apparent effort to solve this problem and even newer champs can fall into this trap if their kit is too straight-forward. The common complaint is that these champs are nerfed and forgotten. Can you please let us know if there is anything in the works, items, reworks, whatever, to address this?

Counterpoint - The opposite of this is the dreaded 'overloaded kit syndrome' that many people also complain about with newer champs. It may be the case that champs that have the tools to have other options and avoid utterly binary play-styles only overshadow the binary champs since they are the ones that need work done. You can still argue that this goes too far on some champs and that a healthy median can be reached for everyone.

  1. Range vs. Melee - The big one. The one that has gone on for years with no end in sight. We've heard this argument from both sides at least a hundred times. AD Carries and Mages dislike being deleted in

3 Comments

Kingsgrave2/9/2015, 6:42:39 AM3 votes

Honestly Mobility makes the game not only more fun to watch and more fun to play, it makes the characters a lot easier to design and balance. It actually gives them room to fuck up and variable matchups.

How do you balance something like Darius and Morde? Champs with pretty much no mobility. You give them a fuck ton of no counterplay burst and raw stat power so that if anyone is dumb enough to get close to them the Morde or Darius player can feel useful.

The majority of assassins have point and click burst, and that seems to mostly exist because of how difficult it tends to be to play a squishy character like to begin with. If they had more actual thinking and timing in their kits it wouldnt be a problem. Talon and LB have to somewhat think about when to go in and Fizz has to at least land a skillshot before he can just keyboard stomp you. Akali and Kat never have to think about it, they just wait for the "they used CC" check on their checklist and then they get fed.

Teridax682/9/2015, 4:43:11 PM3 votes

I think the issue of mobility creep needs to be framed a bit differently. The problem isn't that there are so many mobile champions, but rather that mobility has often been undervalued on champions, allowing them to have similar tools to less mobile characters, plus a gapcloser. It's been tackled pretty well so far in several cases: Lucian is hyper-mobile, but that mobility takes up a huge chunk of his power budget (because of it, he's constantly high-risk); RekSai also has amazing mobility, but that mobility is heavily gated and mostly unavailable when she's in the middle of combat. Even Kalista, who has a dash on literally every autoattack, pays for it by having no steroids and a heavy dependence on a teammate. The problem comes more from champions like LeeSin who don't pay any kind of price for their mobility (Lee doesn't exactly have weaknesses to exploit, per se). This also ties into the issue of ranged vs. melee, I think: melee champions like Rek'Sai or Mega Gnar are healthy because they have the tools to affect ranged champions even when kited, but also give their opponents opportunities to outplay them, but champions like Olaf , Darius or even XinZhao are a problem because either they get kited to oblivion and get to make zero impact, either they reach their target and it's pretty much a guaranteed kill for them, regardless of what happens. There are definitely some other factors that impact on this (minion collision creates pretty lopsided melee vs. ranged matchups, especially in top lane), but in a lot of cases the core problem is with melee champions being improperly designed, not with ranged champions being oppressive (though that's definitely the case with champions like Ryze or Vladimir when they're strong).

Hinagiku332/9/2015, 4:34:28 AM1 votes
  1. Range vs. Melee - The big one. The one that has gone on for years with no end in sight. We've heard this argument from both sides at least a hundred times. AD Carries and Mages dislike being deleted in