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Passive gold generation

Ukon3·11/18/2018, 1:20:41 AM·10 votes·22,509 views

Hi, my name’s Evan, I’m a three season Master’s player on the North American server who enjoys discussing game design as well as analytical writing I try to keep these brief but also provide enough explanation so that the idea can be presented to those of all skill rather than just those who are already acquainted with concepts or problems I will address.

Today’s Topic: **Passive Gold Generation **

a quick note before I start on this post, I want to define/clarify the relationship between gold and stats, as point 3 is based on this relation: Gold is stats, as everything that you purchase other than wards is a champion stat. the terms are almost interchangeable. Higher gold means you buy more items means you have more stats.

Continuing...

**Problem statements: **

  1. High passive gold generation makes earned gold leads comparatively less relevant. (%difference between 1200g and 1500g is less than the %difference of 1800g and 2100g. (22.2% and 15.4% respectively)

  2. Small to moderate CS leads do not feel at all impactful until they hit 50+. Playing a better lane phase than your opponent and leading them by 30~ cs feels as if it is completely inconsequential, similarly as a jungler, farm leads feel of little importance.

  3. Runes Reforged has significantly increased the gold value of inbuilt champion stats, rendering accrued gold leads less valuable. A reduction in passive gold generation would put more relative value into kills and CS advantages.

  4. Very fed players can be hitting full builds at as early as around 30~ minutes (depending on the cost of their itemization). As their lead becomes more and more standardized as they are not able to spend additional income earned by good play. (This is a much less relevant issue than the previous 3, but i feel is still worth mentioning.)

Exposition: If you get a kill and therefore 300 gold, this 300 gold means less as a percentage of total income when income is higher. This reduction to the relative value of kills renders superior play less influential to the game’s outcome, as your opponent is of a higher base efficacy regardless of how far behind they are put. The baseline efficacy of champions I feel is now too high. With damage runes providing so much value that you always have potential to be useful, even when you play lane very poorly, it very often feels like your play to put a player behind was a wasted effort and being the better player was inconsequential.

On the other hand, feeling like you have no money, ever, and one play cost you the next 20 minutes, is an absolutely miserable feeling, and having league be “winner take all” off of one or two plays while offering no comeback potential would not increase enjoyment of the game for anyone. Back in the day (season 5 I believe?) I very much agree with the need to increase passive gold gen, comebacks were scarce, items were expensive, and “win lane win game” because one player stomped lane was far too prevalent. However, I believe that this preseason offers an excellent time for this because of other comeback mechanics already introduced to the game. The new shut down bounty system is a good way to incentivize players not to totally abandon someone who lost lane, while providing a considerable bounty that can put that player back in the game. Additionally, over the past year or two, the price of the big-ticket items is down, with a 400 gold in the case of IE, and 200 gold down for Rabadons.

Intended outcomes:

  1. A higher emphasis on CS advantages, and the ability for general skill expression to be more effectively rewarded.

  2. More of an emphasis on playing around item spikes, as they will come less frequently, resulting in more defined windows of power that you must push your advantage.

  3. Roaming will incur more risk if they are unsuccessful, possibly resulting in an increased value of individual laning and a higher emphasis on the 1v1.

Possible unintended consequences and solutions to them:

  1. Champions that get less income will see a relative drop in power. This will mostly impact supports, (which arguably need a power down anyway, but we can save that for another post :P) and has the potential make more of an impact in competitive play where resources are allotted specifically, usually leaving the jungler low on income as well. If supports see too much of a decrease in power, the solution could be as simple as adding X additional gold generation to their item quest, be it GP10 or through each item’s respective income mechanic.

  2. Camping lanes becomes too strong. This one is another big possibility, where going after one player over and over becomes too effective a strategy, and that should really try to be avoided. Getting camped relentlessly is a very frustrating experience that ruins games for those on the receiving end. There’s a long list of ways to combat this all with upsides and downsides, but I think with the length of this post already I’ll address that another time, if it even turns out to be a problem at all.

  3. Early game and snowballing champions become too powerful: Higher %difference when it comes to advantages means those who thrive on an advantage (Hello Talon) will see their leads grow too effectively. This can be addressed on a case by case basis, be it in champion nerfs or early item spikes like serrated dirk (Hello again, Talon) being reduced in power. There are other possible changes in the vein of increasing minion value in both exp and gold so that those who roam to spread their advantage pay a higher opportunity cost, a reduction in map mobility for certain lanes or champions, and other such changes, but I’ll save those ideas for another time as this post is already quite long. They also might not even be necessary.

Conclusion and Summary

High passive gold generation renders better play less valuable. With the introduction of higher baseline efficacy, new comeback mechanics, and the recent general agreement of the community and developers to see more weight on the play of an individual rather than on team play, I believe this presents a perfect time to decrease passive gold generation.

As i always say on all my posts (if i remember) there's almost always something i forgot to include or just didn't consider while writing these out, or something that doesn't come to mind until later. If there's somewhere that you think needs more explanation, or something you think I've forgotten, please bring it up!

32 Comments

ModKnightsKemplar11/18/2018, 8:15:32 PM5 votes

There is a bit of a gap, imo, between "exposition" and "intended outcomes"

We voted to approve anyway, because the analysis here is excellent, but did you intend to propose specific changes? Or are you leaving it as a vague "there should be less gold"?

Linna Excel11/28/2018, 8:47:17 PM5 votes

I completely disagree!

Well, if riot were to take gold, items, and leveling out of the game I might agree to that, but this thread isn't about that, is it? IMO the game would be better if more gold was shifted to passive gen.

Reasons!!!

  1. First and foremost, it would make the game less snowbally. If there was less active gold to be had, teams would be closer in terms of power level. That means comebacks are easier, early losses are less painful, and it would feel less painful to the player/team that is behind. Dying once in laning phase costing you the lane and even the game is pretty bad in a team sport where most players have limited impact over the other lanes early on.
  2. Teams that are ahead and snowballing would have less motivation to drag the game out. By keeping the other team closer to them in terms of power, farming kills and dragging the game out both has less of an advantage for you, but it also gives them more time to make a comeback. Because there's more passive gold generated, that means the team that is ahead really wants to make the full use of their advantage ASAP.
  3. People would have to play better, longer. If you get a full item ahead of the other guy, the game starts becoming a lot easier for you. The other team starts losing their ability to respond just because you are up on power level and stats on them. The reason why win percentages start to even out around 50% the later the game goes is because as the other team slowly starts catching up in terms of gold and XP, the team that was ahead starts losing their advantages and has to start actually playing again.
  4. Chasing kills becomes less important. Don't get me wrong, a lot of people play to satisfy their own egos, but the more work and the less reward there is to get from getting another 5 kills, hopefully a lot of people will stop paying attention solely to KDA and more to the map.
  5. Hopefully we'd get less smurfs. Don't get me wrong, bad players are bad across the board but I think that moving gold into passive generation does 2 things to discourage smurfing. The first is one of the reasons why smurfing is so easy for good players is that not only are they better players, but they can translate that into an item advantage to make the game even easier because now they have a stat stick as well. This leads into the second thing: it'd make smurfing just a little bit more work. Without that stat stick, smurfs would have to spend more time in a game with lower level opponents because they don't have a stat stick to speed things up and hopefully that pacing difference might discourage some from doing it so much.
  6. People would be more encouraged to learn about macro play. Sure, micro play would start to suffer but if KDA and "winning lane" are less important than the bigger picture hopefully will start to take over. If there's less rewards in KDA and CS and more rewards in just winning, people will focus on the winning.
  7. It'd help riot to normalize the time and pacing of games. If the gold rate is more fixed, more in passive generation, then you should expect to see a narrow average game time as you don't have these 10K gold lead snowballs pulling the average down.
  8. As a support main, I still am kinda dependent on passive gold. Sure the gold items help, but I'm not CSing that much, I'm not getting so many kills, the only thing I have to look forward to is assists.
  9. A person feeding would be less behind because at least he'd have more gold. As a team game, this means that the weakest link on the team wouldn't be as weak as before.
  10. The best sports generally involve both teams getting an equal number of opportunities to score because past scores don't necessarily make future ones don't give you any advantage in trying to get future scores nor do they directly make it harder for the other team to score. Having your past scores make future points easier flies in the face of fair competition. Imagine if baseball allowed offensive players to get 1 more strike until being out per point ahead... that would mean a team that's up 2 runs now gets an out with 5 strikes, that's a massive advantage. What if football said teams that are ahead only need 5 yards to get a first down? That'd be crazy as it'd make it next to impossible for the other team to get a stop. What if basketball said that the team who is ahead gets 1 more point for each free throw or basket made? Comebacks and lead changes would be difficult.

If anything, gold and XP needs to be put more and more into passive generation in order to normalize the game and focus the players on objectives. Players do what you reward them to, so all rewards need to be tied towards actions that directly contribute to finishing out the game.

PandaNator4311/20/2018, 4:29:05 PM2 votes

enjoys discussing game design

me too!

A good design principle is to make the most fun way to play also the optimal way to play. When weighing different solutions, its good to keep this in mind. What is the most "fun" in LoL is subjective.

I'm not sure what changes you have in mind, but you touch on the idea of laning. The Barricade changes coming in preseason are another way to reward "skill in laning phase" with minimal change to gold income systems (the bulkward changes are brand new gold income source, so there is some change). Just thought it was worth noting :)

glava22211/19/2018, 8:54:08 PM2 votes

while i can understand what you are trying to say, i think that you forgot some other points.

  1. Better play is not rewarded solely with a gold difference. If a player is winning their matchup for example in the mid lane and managed to take a tower, he didnt only get the gold for that tower, he also got the ability to ward the enemy jungle, the freedom to move through said jungle, priority when it comes to controlling the waves among other teams. Everybody has that one game where teams are even in gold but one team has a massive tempo advantage, which makes it almost impossible for the other team to do anything.

  2. Only proactive play is considered good play. I would say its as much of a skill to not get murdered in a horrible matchup as it is to win in an even matchup, and some scaling champions' lane basically is:"survive somehow till i accrue some gold from passive sources and whatever cs i can scrounge up". In this case getting the passive gold gen for a longer period of time without losing the game is one of the objectives. Basically your objective is to try to not lose tower for longer so you get more gold. Here you would say that they both get equal gold, and that is true. But that gold isn't worth the same on both champions.

  3. The impact of these changes on supports isnt well tought out. Its actually very hard to make this idea a power neutral thing for supports. You either cut the gold for everyone with no compensation, which would destroy supports since they get almost no gold now, or you would compensate supports with extra g10 on items which basically means you nerfed everyone but supports, which in the relative world of game balance means you severly buffed supports.

I didnt exactly go deep into details with this but these are just some quick toughts on this topic

Ukon311/18/2018, 1:25:32 AM1 votes

This one got quite lengthy, apologies for that. In writing it i felt a necessity to talk at length due to how much a change to such a core mechanic would create. Also i kept thinking of new things as i wrote it, so I'm sure there's some disjointed statements in there that lack explanation or come across as rambling. please discuss and let me know where something needs clarification.

its gg ifaus12/6/2018, 3:15:18 PM1 votes

Why not make gold generation higher at lower ranks and less at higher ranks?

ModKnightsKemplar11/18/2018, 8:14:35 PM1 votes

Approved!

ModThe Djinn11/18/2018, 8:48:08 PM1 votes

I'll be honest: I feel this would make the highest levels of play even more dramatic (where a few hundred gold IS a really meaningful difference), extend the power of lane bullies, weaken characters with rough early games and, most importantly, harm the experience of supports and players who are not the best at farming. I'm not sure the benefits proposed here are worth the cost, as this would undoubtedly require a huge amount of core-level changes across the cast to compensate for power-wise.

ThrowsTheBird11/22/2018, 12:35:27 PM1 votes

+1

Anything to make this game more competitive!

Nice write-up!