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Volatility and League: Why does playing league feel like a coinflip?

Anaphiel·5/21/2019, 10:48:10 PM·18 votes·9,032 views

Hi all,

The purpose of this post is to make an observation, but first, story time!

[slayer-pantheon-rainbows]

Once, long long ago in a land tinted by the merry, potentially biased and rose-tinted glasses with which one views "The good old days", many remember enjoying this game much, much more. Each game, win or lose, felt meaningful and enjoyable. A spark of delight, now greatly dimmed (but still alive), existed at the thought of devoting another hour to a game of League.

Now however, many of us feel frustrated, angry, powerless. Often victory and defeat feel as if they were predetermined rather than earned. Personally, I sometimes look at my KDA, see a number like 11/2/8, and wonder: When did that get there!? Did I even do anything to earn this?

Equally, some games upon glancing at the screen, a few crucial things can be seen: 1. Am I colorblind? The screen is always gray for some reason. 2. Move over Red Cross, apparently I am an expert at feeding the hungry. 3. The minions are building infinity edges. 4. Is my *Insert team member here a bag of rocks stapled to a chair? How has he died so much?*

This feeling is certainly frustrating, and I'm sure I'm not alone in feeling this lack of agency, but what is causing it? Is the sudden sense of powerlessness simple burnout? Has the meta simply shifted away from my particular preferences? Are myself and many others simply not remembering the frustrations of yesteryear? The world may never know.

Alright, storytime is over, if you have not yet fallen asleep, I get to the point below. [slayer-pantheon-thumbs]

Like 95% of the band of merry masochists that is the league community in general, I am not terribly good at this game. I am an off-meta lover and jungle player who peaked at low plat and never had the drive nor the inclination to strive for more. (I was an old Kayle main... Lol... They killed my baby! All two jungle Kayle players on this fine earth are outraged! All two of us! Reeee!) But I have played quite a lot. Enough to hazard a guess as to why league isn't quite scratching the same itch anymore for some.

The reason that I feel the game may be more frustrating is rather simple. Even lanes seem fairly rare nowadays.

Once, in earlier seasons, excepting cases in which a great mismatch of skill or an impressive jungler tent were involved, a lot of lanes went fairly even. Both participants in said lane were able to be useful to their teams later on.

If I were to hazard some numbers, on average I observed that, given equal jungler presence/performance:

  1. 60% The lanes went even. Niether lane opponent gained a conclusive advantage in either farm, kills, or pressure. Mistakes and plays were made in equal measure.
  2. 20% Hard win. This lane is now unaccountably huge, and will be a major factor in determining victory. This laner is BIG.
  3. 20% Hard lose. Ya might as well stack tear on Garen. This is essentially a caster minion with a larger health bar.

Now even lanes seem to happen far less often. Spectacular wins and losses make each game feel as if God is flipping a coin during matchmaking.

My frustration with league is not specific champions, although quite a few feel irritating to fight against. Zoe Akali Pyke

My frustration with league is not the high amount of power afforded the runes reforged system, even if I DID prefer the game when they didnt exist.

My frustration with league is not its developers, who have done their best attempting to balance an absolute frankensteinish mess of interconnecting variables that make pleasing everyone impossible.

At the moment. My issue with league is that mistakes are punished far too harshly. Games are so volatile, so edge of knife that players do not have room to learn or demonstrate skill before the game is already decided. A skilled player is praised the most not for the incredible plays he is capable of demonstrating, but the consistency with which he/she can pull those plays off. League at its best is more than capable of rewarding consistent application of skill without consigning the first man to make a mistake to involuntarily becoming their opponent's heavy bag.

I dare not pinpoint everything that might need to change to help fix this issue for fear that this discussion will simply devolve into people arguing about what they think needs nerfing. I suspect that gentling the curve of burst damage would go a long way. Strategically tuning damage numbers might help also.

But, in any case, allowing players just slightly more breathing room would go a long way toward making gameplay feel meaningful, and not merely the natural conclusion of runaway snowballing.

Thank you for your time. This ended up a lot longer than I intended to write, but if you have not already lapsed into a coma from the long read, I hope you at least derived some amusement from the reading.

[vlad-salute]

TL:DR: League is a coinflip because the line between absolute victory and crippling defeat, is now paper thin. This makes each game more frustrating.

16 Comments

Exin05/22/2019, 12:09:08 AM7 votes

{quoted}

Hi all, .....

You are right in everything but sad truth is that riot want it this way. Riot make clear they do anything for shortening game and here we are super hard snowballing, iam looking at numbers and average game lenght is slightly under 30 minutes and i bet money that Riots main goal is shave off another 10 minutes

Kanyoupipu5/22/2019, 2:14:33 AM5 votes

Games are so volatile, so edge of knife that players do not have room to learn or demonstrate skill before the game is already decided.

I agree with this thought.

It is very discouraging to think me getting sweaty to get a small CS lead and finally a solo kill in lane doesn't matter because another lane got absolutely dumpstered before I can even think about snowballing.

Nea1045/22/2019, 4:37:35 AM4 votes

"My frustration with league is not its developers, who have done their best attempting to balance an absolute frankensteinish mess of interconnecting variables that make pleasing everyone impossible."

I really disagree about this. A game doesn't appear magically all of a sudden. It needs to be coded and developed.

They intentionally don't fix a lot of things, starting from unbalanced champions 'till uneven matchmaking 80% of the times. This is not excusable.

Hayaishi25/22/2019, 9:50:14 AM3 votes

ITbh i think it has to do a lot with autofill and how the game is changing too fast.

Autofill has always existed, even without role queue. Back when we didn't have role queue you were required to learn how to play every role and as a ADC main i would just learn maybe 2 champions in each role just in case but majority of my time would go towards learning marksmen and their matchups. In fact most of the champions i play still today came from that time i was learning more champions to be useful in other roles.

But what's the problem? Every role (specially jungle) changes way too often. One patch your comfort picks are decent then Riot does one of the balance patches and your comfort picks in another role now perform worse in some match ups or have to change their build now to adapt to changes and it's simply to much to keep up for most players (Even high elo players can't keep up with learning new information in their main role and then on every other role) this is why you feel the difference in teammates is too big sometimes. It isn't necessarily their skill level as players, but the how the knowledge they used to rely on isn't relevant anymore. Staying competitive in LoL is hard and the fact that the game changes so much makes it even harder.

I don't even bother to learn the jungle anymore, it changes every month anyways so i just dodge whenever i get it. I can handle myself in mid but i only play one champion there comfortably and in top lane i can play more but then i get destroyed by ranged top laners because i don't have the necessary experience to deal with them. I'm good at support because i play ADC so i understand how supporting and their match ups work.

AnotherFeeder5/22/2019, 6:02:13 AM3 votes

I mean, essentially ya. Damages being high enough that a player can one shot certain champs without items, all the added objectives that force games to move faster, every role being a carry with none being just utility functions anymore. All this dumbed the game down significantly and made it so a games typically more decided by its shit player than its best. Use to be fairly simple if someone on ur team got hard stomped, to drag a game out to the later stages so thst every player had a chance to make an impact. But games only have a late game when the teamthst won early fk up and throw the lead. Games that went even through early to mid feel like 1 in a million. But even the old late game carries now have their power spikes moved earlier to be viable bcuz riot knows that fights where everyones full build do not happen anymore.

Mb one day we'll get to play old league again, but to don that riots gotta learn how to admit a mistake and get rid of runes reforged.

King Livid5/22/2019, 12:43:08 AM2 votes

Interesting read! Now I'm going to ramble for a loooooong time!

I'm just a lowly silver player, so I'm not sure how much my opinion counts. That said, I think I disagree with this part:

At the moment. My issue with league is that mistakes are punished far too harshly. Games are so volatile, so edge of knife that players do not have room to learn or demonstrate skill before the game is already decided. A skilled player is praised the most not for the incredible plays he is capable of demonstrating, but the consistency with which he/she can pull those plays off. League at its best is more than capable of rewarding consistent application of skill without consigning the first man to make a mistake to involuntarily becoming their opponent's heavy bag.

I'm not sure league is a special case when compared to other games. In every game (sports too) small mistakes can cost you games. In professional soccer, for example: a wrong step, a too powerful pass, a too weak pass, or even just touching the ball wrong can cost you a goal and from there the game.

There's not really a way to make it where small mistakes don't punish you hard. Players who understand the game will always be looking for ways to get ahead and punish small mistakes. I once heard a Challenger streamer say that one auto can win or lose high elo bot lane.

I've played games where my team was ahead, then we threw, then they were ahead, then they threw. Games (not just league) are about punishing every wrong thing your opponent does. There's not really a way to fix this. The only thing you can do is understand the kinds of mistakes that can win/lose games and be ready for them.

I think this also an elo thing. In my silver games we're all making lots of mistakes, some are punished and some are not. It might be that I just haven't experienced burnout (been playing casually for a year now, mostly normals with groups of friends) but I've never thought "there are too many things to keep track of and I just lose because of one small mistake", I usually think along the lines of "If I can just avoid that one tiny mistake then I can win games.

I play Mordekaiser sometimes and for a while he was my main (my username has nothing to do with him lol but it fits). I once laned against a Darius who @lvl2 instantly leveled his pull and chunked me so hard I got zoned for the rest of the game. I was frustrated and tilted, but I was actually impressed that the Darius was so fast with that. Now every time I lane against a Darius I'm ready for that.

My mindset towards games is like this: every lane is a battle, and the game is the war. Just because you win/lose battles doesn't necessarily mean you win/lose the war, but it makes a big difference and it should.

Don't take this he wrong way because I want to be respectful but I think your frustration is stemming from burnout.

TLDR: yes, games punish you for small mistakes because that's just how all games not just league work. I think the frustration part for you is burnout.

14daysuspensionk5/22/2019, 6:17:08 PM2 votes

I love how Pyke ult can do up to 500 fucking dmg (according to death recap) WHEN IT WAS DESIGNED AS A FUCKING EXECUTE, RIOT.

FSRER5/22/2019, 11:13:26 AM1 votes

I played adc after a long time..Jhin to be specific I was doing fine but I was the onle one with positive score 0/4/2 toplane 1/3/1 jungle 1/7/0 midlane and my support was a 1k points thresh so I had nothing to rely on. I ended 1/1/2 I think with only me and my support not being spawn afk at 14 mins.... What did I do to deserve such teamates? I never have been toxic, never have trolled, never have given up.... Btw, that was one of my plat 2 promo games

TotalJerk5/22/2019, 10:02:45 PM1 votes

Why does playing league feel like a coinflip

Because it's a 5v5 game. Assuming all roles are equal in influence, you are only 10% of the equation in every game. You have to at some point learn to accept that unwinnable/unloseable games are going to happen more often than not unless you are far, far above your current MMR in terms of skill. The best you can do is make it count when you actually get an opportunity to be the major deciding factor, and learn to accept it when you don't. Focus on whether you did the best you could instead of whether or not the game went well.

Jonesybones5/22/2019, 10:04:09 PM1 votes

its not until D1-D2

zlumpy5/23/2019, 12:21:33 AM1 votes

Short answer is they sped up the game so much that it's too hard to come back. 40 minute games may have been long but there was a chance for comeback if the enemy didnt close the game out.

Sea Slug Menace5/22/2019, 7:15:21 AM1 votes

{quoted}

At the moment. My issue with league is that mistakes are punished far too harshly. Games are so volatile, so edge of knife that players do not have room to learn or demonstrate skill before the game is already decided. A skilled player is praised the most not for the incredible plays he is capable of demonstrating, but the consistency with which he/she can pull those plays off. League at its best is more than capable of rewarding consistent application of skill without consigning the first man to make a mistake to involuntarily becoming their opponent's heavy bag.

TL:DR: League is a coinflip because the line between absolute victory and crippling defeat, is now paper thin. This makes each game more frustrating.

well, games are shorter yeah, because riot wanted to give players more room to snowball and make games that feel unwinnable end quicker rather than dragging them out.

to do this they added turret plating, so obviously if the enemy laner gets all 4 plates and you get 0 they have like 600 more gold

this leads to aggressive champions who can dominate early/mid, and obviously when your Lucian dies to the enemy draven or vice versa, lanes kinda fucked.

reducing gold given for champion kills would solve a lot in terms of comebacks and skill expression. reducing a kill from 350 to 100 would 180 the game as we see it

if a vayne goes 4/0 right now that's 350.. 700.. 1400 gold give or take a few, if it was down to 100 gold, a 4 kill vayne would only gain 400 gold and the games would last much longer, enemies would have a chance at comebacks, 400 gold is just a ruby crystal, 1400 is a bf sword

league has shifted from games that average 40 mins and regularly go to 50 mins, not only that but even in all previous seasons, the higher in rank you went, the less times games lasted, bronze games were consistently long.. talking 50 mins

and now league has been out for 10 years so games will be shorter regardless because people know more but, if you do happen to get an account into bronze 4 or iron, you will notice that games go long asf still.

yeah if you reduce gold from 350g to 100 then a 10/jax is going to be about 3.5x weaker than a current jax, not only that but the enemy will be able to get some kills due to this.

this would make tanks OP again, but at least tanks can't do much damage to structures (at least before they couldn't, before demolish was a rune) so you'd still have to wait for your marksmen to get 3+ items, which would take much longer

OgSc5/23/2019, 8:18:41 PM1 votes

True. Recently I just give up and run it down when my botlane goes 0/3 cuz the game is over. Chineaseritotrashdumpgames cant ever fix stuff cause they are too busy getting money. To do anything. They dont care about the players, 90% of their effort is on low quality skins. If at least 50% was on bug fixing or balancing, this game eould get so much better and more money would be coming.

ZaFishbone5/22/2019, 8:38:58 AM1 votes

{quoted} TL:DR: League is a coinflip because the line between absolute victory and crippling defeat, is now paper thin. This makes each game more frustrating.

This line pretty much contradicts what everyone is saying, that the game is super snowbally, decided in the first 15 minutes, etc.