Shower Thoughts: Mini-Games and Balls
Mini-games, starting with Illaoi and the Gangplank rework, have pretty quickly worked their way into players’ salt. But why do a lot of players think they’re so frustrating? All in all, Illaoi and Gangplank’s abilities aren’t too different from what we already have in League: balls. Let’s make an assumption - that a non-trivial amount of frustration with mini-games has to do with them requiring you to focus your attention on a non-champion unit. If that is the case, there has to be a breaking point where the amount or type of focus required is no longer acceptable, because Orianna and Syndra have existed as champions deemed (to a greater or lesser extent at different times) pretty well-designed. Yet their entire kits revolve around non-champion entities that can’t be ignored without massive consequences. What’s the major difference between balls, tentacles, and barrels? Why are they all viewed so differently? ...Maybe it’s just because you can auto tentacles and barrels. It sounds almost insultingly simple, but it’s just possible enough for that to be the crucial difference. In the case of balls, you just have to keep track of where they are and what they can currently do, which is essentially keeping track of spells like normal, with an added field element. Making the field element targetable and attackable crosses the line from “you have to care about this” to “you have to do something about this”. You only have to care about what your opponent does with their balls. With tentacles and barrels, you also need to figure out what to do with them, since you’ve been given the option, and their power has been balanced accordingly. You’ve basically been given an extra ability that uses itself whenever it wants and is consistently trying to kill you. Just making something attackable doesn’t automatically make it frustrating, though; Yorick’s new wall is pretty well-received, after all. Hell, I’ve even seen people calling it weak (though that’s more an issue of the delay before it pops up). But I haven’t really seen it called frustrating, certainly not to the extent of Illaoi’s tentacle army and Gangplank’s ACME Barrel Co. Then again, it doesn’t deal damage. It’s also not around constantly, though his ghouls are. The ghouls count as a mini-game, too, I think, but once again it’s one Yorick plays much more actively than his opponents.
Conclusion: Mini-games are disliked when they require too much attention/effort too often or over too long a period of time.
Trying out a post format where I just vomit something that went through my head randomly during the day, written down as soon after the thought as possible, with little to no attention paid to editing. Let me know if it was interesting/boring/gave you cancer!
