League of Legends Item/Scaling Rehaul Proposition

This is a copy of the first half of my reddit post. Please scroll down to the bottom of my reddit post to see the details of the proposed changes.

It's hard to believe League is almost a decade old. I've played since Season 1 and it's been quite a ride. In those days, every update patch was exciting, and the start of a new season felt revolutionary. My nostalgia goggles are pretty strong, and some of you may have realized that a lot of old players have some pretty big nostalgia goggles tucked away in their pockets.

However, for some time now, the magic has gone away. You may think, "Well, if you've played the game for 7 years, then yeah." However, it's not that the magic has just disappeared. Now, a new kind of magic has taken us: we think we hate the game, but we can't stop playing. Most veteran players and streamers have probably pubicly voiced the opinion that League isn't fun anymore, and they only stream it for the money. The playerbase certainly hasn't seen an increase, and "new content" seems to be stagnant.

There are doubtlessly a multitude of factors for this, but I believe one of the biggest reasons is the near impossibility of this game to successfully realize its desired appeal. Games must have a certain appeal and pull. Something about the game must make you want to play more. In online gaming, I believe a few key components have historically been the recipe to success:

• Socialization
• The prospect that you can be in the top
• Allowing the player to be and feel unique in his/her game domain

League once offered all these things, and I believe that's the real reason why it became so popular as it did. However, these key elements of a successful online game started to slowly diminish. The socialization element alone is worthy of an entire debate, but here I want to focus only on the third element: Uniqueness.

How can you stand out in League? How can you plan, strategize, and invest in yourself to be a successful pioneer of something new in the game world? Right now, you can't. Experimentation is discouraged. The successful experiments (AP Shaco, AP Trynd for example) have already been widely broadcasted and people have lost interest in it. Back in the early, early days of League, just playing Lee Sin or Nidalee alone made you stand out, because nobody knew how to play those champions. Now, the game and its userbase has seen it all. There's not much we don't know. We roughly know what to expect if you try an AP Sona mid. You'll have Lulu-tier damage, poor wave clear, and you'll be easy to gank. It's outclassed by mid Lulu pretty hard. We already know it's pointless.

I think Riot and the playerbase assumed if we keep expanding the roster of champions, the gameplay will never get old. The problem is that it actually does get old. You can't have an "infinte" roster of champions. It's most definitely finite. And the more you expand the roster with complex champions, the more dated and dated the old ones get. Why play Garen if you can play Darius or Aatrox? Why play Blitzcrank if you can play Pike? Simply expanding the champion roster won't do the trick. One day, you'll end up having 300 champions, with 40% of them being power-creeped clones of older champions. Not only that, with every addition of a champion tailored for 5v5 on the Rift, the harder it gets to balance and implement a new map/game mode.

Balance is another thing that has struggled to find co-existence with Uniqueness. Generally, the pattern of patching for the past 7 years has been: nerf popular champions with high winrates, buff popular champions with low winrates, re-work champions with abysmal pickrates. Occasionally, there have been changes with large-scale game impact, such as changes to dragon, Baron, and neutral jungle monsters. My question after a certain point of 100+ patches has been, “Why? What’s the end goal?” And it seems that the general (and only) design philosophy seems to be to flatten out champion winrates to 50% as much as possible. There’s a big problem with this: that’s going to be astronomically difficult, unless we standardize champion skillsets and damage tightly. This means that we have to settle on a fixed number of available CC effects, cap out maximum DPS for all champions across the board, cap out the number of dashes and blinks a champion can have, and also set the minimum numbers for these stats, as well. Then, in a hypothetical League world where all champions have 49~51% winrates, clusters of champions would actually be very similar to one another. The current state of the game is already somewhat like this. It’s not hard to figure out why this runs contrary to the gamer’s ideal of being unique. This is why I am proposing a vast expansion and rework of the item system. Simply put, the idea is to make most champions have two or more different valid playstyles. In order to make this happen, scaling will have to be re-done entirely, many new items will have to be added, and how items upgrade and progress to higher tier items will also have to be re-examined.

(Actual item ideas and changes in the reddit post)

Conclusion The main purpose of introducing a large number of new items and re-working stats across the board is to create a more efficient and flexible model that would facilitate the addition of new content much easier than now. It seems that the current model of game balancing makes it very difficult for any new map or game mode to get big. Remember Dominion? Twisted Treeline? Howling Abyss? Interestingly enough, the only game mode that seems to any love is U.R.F., and it seems that U.R.F. allows you to play champions like Jhin or Zed in ways you can’t in the normal game. That’s my main goal with the new items: open the possibilities for every champion to be played in 2 or more distinct styles that the skillset allows. Which is easier? Increase the number of champions from 150 to 300? Or, make it so that each of the 150 champions can be played 2 different ways? Which is a more longer-lasting, flexible, efficient, and creative model?

You can like or dislike the new items. Although I would personally love to see all of them in the game, my main point is that players must realize that the game’s stat calculation must be changed across the board and damage sources have to be expanded for the game’s never-ending balance conundrum to be solved. Even if all these new items are added, that actually wouldn’t be enough to truly diversify each champion’s playstyle. Hypothetically, I estimate that there needs to be at least 50 more items in addition to the ones we have now, and all of the current items need to have their stats changed.

As I said earlier, experimentation has mostly ended. There is only 1 “correct” way to play each champion, and there is only 1 “correct” way to play the game. We’ve already hit the peak, and this happens to any online game this old. The problem is that we haven’t had new content besides new champions, and we won’t get anywhere with the current model.