league's snowballing problem solutions?

AmetDeCrypt·2/16/2018, 3:25:23 PM·1 votes·203 views

I want to talk about iterative feedback loops in games. see linked video by mark brown for a crash course on this. currently league has several loops. catchup xp being one negative loop for players behind in levels, and gold rewards on kills and minions gaining in strength are positive loops (while the minion one may have been a dumbass balance decision that's for another post)

the main problem in the game so I hear right now is games are too snowbally, however lcs games aren't because the risk is too high so they actually go in the opposite direction and play extremely safely. now I think we can all agree league and games in general are more fun when people are taking risks and pulling off plays, but basically anyone who has figured out the game has realised you can just farm, and you don't have to do anything until you hit full build. the singular negative loop is not enough nor is it in the right place to counteract this because being ahead or behind isn't referenced in xp, but in gold difference.

so what can be done? I have a few (possibly really bad) ideas. Namely, reduce early kill gold by a substantial amount, say down to 200 or maybe even 150 if you wanted to be drastic, and have future kills rack up slowly or even stay stagnant or reduce more slowly. there's no reason that the first kills should decide the whole match. counteractive to this, minions, jungle camps, and other non player/objective sources of income get reduced as the gold gap grows, while increasing for the team behind, shutdown gold (oh I forgot another negative loop but I'm too lazy to edit it now) should also be reworked, because this causes the person with the bounty to want to play safer and only go for necessary kills and not take any risks. I'm not certain what exactly it can become, perhaps the bounty is simply a more limited effect of stacks that increase kill gold on each person while active and fall off over the course of several minutes, but shutting down removes those stacks and gives an amount of gold to the killer for each stack, but no teamwide gold and not an extreme amount, 10-15 per stack may work.

consecutive tower pushes can also be encouraged by reinforcements of minions or special minions that spawn in waves after defeating towers, like a single canon wave gets upgraded to a siege minion wave in that lane. this would create an objective to fight over as you can either risk it and push into the enemy zone to get an extra tower or back off and let them have the extra gold. not so much a problem to fix as it would shake up the whole "take bot tower, back, rotate and take top, back, rotate and take mid, back, rotate and take baron, back." always backing after baron, what's up with that unless you're really low?

I'm open to other suggestions as well if you all have any.

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