as the title says.. is snowballing even able to be removed from a game like this? obviously in situations where its completely one sided, like if someone is running down mid, or AFk, snowballing would always happen, but is it possible to remove it from the game generally? how would that be possible?
Snowballing is required on Rift because of how you win the game. Without snowballing games would tend to stagnate really easily. The alternative would be to make late-game death timers so soul-crushingly long that even one mistake by one player means the game is over, and I don't think anyone would like that either.
Dominion, by contrast, didn't snowball at all and that didn't cause problems. But again, that was because of how you won the game. Control three or more points, enemy nexus HP drops. Short of one point staying neutralized (which was quite uncommon) the game couldn't stagnate.
I've been saying for a couple years now that the best way to bring snowballing in line is to reduce kill gold. I'm thinking by about 60% but I'm open to arguments for different percentages.
The idea is to reward skill. If you're the more skilled player in a lane, you would kill your opponent over and over again regardless but if someone gets fed off a noobshit feeder and you are more skilled, it would allow some breathing room for you to impact the game and halt their rampage before they start 1v5ing.
Just yesterday, I had a game where we invaded, fucked up and the enemy mid Irelia got a tripple kill. After that, all she did was roam around the map killing everything at will until they won. Nothing and no one even had a chance to stop her. Was it because she was skilled? No. Anyone can be Faker with a massive gold lead. An accident enabled her to carry so hard, not skill. This is the fundamental problem with this game.
If there's no snowballing it will pretty much make everyone sit there and farm for 30+ minutes since there'd be no incentive to get kills unless there was some sort of objective up for grabs, but even then unless it was overtly busted then it wouldn't be worth leaving lanes to go for it.
Why would you want to remove it?
Snowballing isn't bad itself. Herald, lethality, towers like butter and damage creep is what made it unhealthy.
