Blue Essense: an Essential Change? (early level reward thoughts)

Goregon23·11/9/2017, 1:45:34 PM·1 votes·323 views

So there has been a lot of posts regarding this topic. However, I will make my first post on these forums to share what I believe might be a unique insight that may be worth other people's time. So, for a tl:dr:

The level up system is currently flawed due to an elongated feedback loop. Now, onto the explanation:

First, let us address the Red post titled "Blue Essence Earn Rates - Learning the Numbers with Carl and Henrietta" written by Mortdog. The post itself goes into details about the backend of the system as well as some example cases. We are going to focus majorly on the following information; "A Leveling Capsule contains champ shards with a BE value of either 720, 900, 960, or 1,240. (The average value is 910 based on drop rates) A Milestone Capsule (every 10 levels) contains champ shards valued at 1,980, 2,160, or 2,220. (The average value is 2,120 based on drop rates)" So on paper, it does not sound bad. For this to work, we need a good exp system that gives a nice feedback loop that gives a good incentive to level up. In addition, the process of leveling up should not feel like a hard labour. Overwatch does this well whereby obtaining level ups happen pretty swiftly and earns you those lootboxes sooner, allowing you to open it up and get your goodies (or 4 sprays if Blizzard hates you enough) sooner. Taking this into consideration, League of Legends currently has two major flaws in this pre-season:

  1. The process of leveling up takes a long time (personal anecdote: It took me 13 games (7 wins, 5 losses, 1 win of the day)
  2. League of Legends requires you to buy your champions

While the new system is (according to the Red post) mathematically superior, what seems to be forgotten about is the how the player interacts with this system. It feels like such a grind to hit those levels and when you do, you could end up with anything between 720 and 1,240 of champion shards (I got 720 in my first one). An observation I made is that the game mode you play does not affect how much experience you obtain. How much time spent playing seems to be the biggest factor, followed by if you won or lost. Having only played ~20 games during this pre-season I can't make a proper conclusion out of this information so please, check out your own match histories to check if this applies to you too. Now compare this to how the old system works, where each game you played earned you ip. Remeber me mentioning feedback loops? Here is where it comes full circle (da dum tiss). Every game held a small reward post-game regardless of win or loss. These small but frequent increases gave a sense of progression and came with the added bonus of being able to play a short ARAM to get that small amount of ip you needed for your next champion. Now, it takes a good long while for you to receive any blue essence because leveling up is the only way of earning them. This is kind of a big problem regardless of if the system supposedly gives more overall because it does not feel satisfying. League also requires you to expand your champion pool and doing so now will feel like it takes considerably longer than what we have all gotten used to. When I first heard the system was coming to League, I was skeptical but the changes I thought were going to happen did not. My thoughts were that;

  1. Blue essence will be earned every game like ip
  2. Level up rewards would simply be chests that could unlock right away
  3. Emotes would be included in said boxes to pad out the rewards such as sprays did in Overwatch

Perhaps these are going to be added to them but as it stands right now, the system is flawed because gaining experience does not give immediate satisfaction compared to earning raw blue essence each game. The increased time between playing and receiving the rewards is the main culprit in the rise of complaints rather than the system itself (in my opinion at least).

Thanks for reading and I look forward to hearing any discussion about this :)

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