Boards›Live Gameplay Balance

Brute Force vs Outplay

Old Man Teeto·7/18/2014, 1:19:25 PM·5 votes·782 views

This has been nagging at the back of my head for a long time.

When you lose a close fight, or die for some reason, why did you die? Could you have dodged a skill shot and won? Flashed an important ability?
Or would they have won despite your best effort in fighting back? We see it time and time again the "desperate" flash or expenditure of spells to save someone who was highly unlikely to escape in pro play, so it's not absent from any level of play.

Sometimes you just have to realize, "Hey, I shouldn't have taken that fight."

No matter what though, you have to take some fights in the game or you lose. There's two types of fights I've found.

**The Brute Force **- These fights are your wombo-combo's, your duelist vs non-duelist, your gold lead fights.

**The Outplay **- These are why we play League, they fill highlight reels, make us cheer and giddy.

Many of the balance problems come from champions that claim to be designed to "Outplay" who can just as easily "Brute Force". Lets take a trip back... away from whatever your complaints are about the balance is now... back to Season two...

         -----------------------------------------------

Urgot was Viable, and a consistent pick and ban by a lot of teams.

I love my crab, he taught me how to be the damage dealer of bot lane. However, he was Brute Force to the extreme. He won fights by showing up to the right place and taking them. Sure, he had an E that was dodge able, a Q that was dodge able (if you also dodged the E). It didn't mean you could punish him reliably for missing his E.

Urgot was nerfed for this reason.

Olaf was nerfed, refitted, nerfed for the same reason. He won fights by "showing up" more or less.

               ---------------------------------

Flash forward into Season 3.

A new set of champions hit the field, new items, new strategies. Zed, Fizz, Ahri, Kassadin, Riven, Jax rise during the season. Every one of these champions has a significant outplay potential. Dodging a skill, avoiding an important ability, or hitting an important ability.

Most of them however, can also just brute force half the fights and don't need to outplay to be effective.

Zed or Fizz get in range of a squishy? Bam, dead. Ahri press W and R from 1000 range and DFG mid flight? Bam, dead. (Watch Season 3 worlds, this happened a lot) Jax has enough items? Can't fight him.

Yet they all STILL have outplay potential, and most of them only need standard gold income to reach a state at which they win fights by showing up.

         ------------------------------

Flash back to present. Here are two "extreme" examples of powerful champions for each.

Brute Force: Ryze Outplay: Thresh

A Ryze with 0 items will do nothing late game besides die. A Thresh with 0 items could potentially win the game for his team.

"But that's what THEY'RE DESIGNED FOR."

How many times do I have to increase Ryze items until he has the same potential impact as that Thresh? 3? 4? 5? 6?!?

Too many champions with** high-outplay potential can both use that to snowball and brute force**, or just beat champions who don't have outplay potential by brute forcing.

The game is being plagued by champions who win by brute forcing fights, but can outplay their opponents leaving almost no way to play against them except pray for mistakes. These are the most complained about champions in every single season. One, or the other. When you *reliably *have both or so much brute force (Olaf/Urgot) that there's no option to outplay, there's a problem with champion health.

3 Comments

Hyrum Graff7/18/2014, 2:27:09 PM3 votes

While I don't agree with all the examples you used, I think your point in general is correct.

The tl;dr of your analysis, if I've read it right, is that champions need both outplay potential and counterplay in order to be healthy. Fortunately for us, I think Riot agrees - counterplay is one of their core values. It doesn't mean that every champ has enough of it yet, but it does mean that this kind of thing is on their radar :)

I don't have too much to add substantively, but, could I also suggest that you add some formatting into your post? You've broken it up into paragraphs wonderfully, which helps a lot with 'wall of text syndrome,' but I think it could be even better with appropriately placed bold, italics, #headers, and --- lines.

Cheers, Hyrum Graff

Nyhver7/19/2014, 8:55:11 AM1 votes

It's a balance of what Riot/the people decide is should be strong and think is strong.

Personally, I don't want any 'low/no outplay' champions to be in the ranked environment or LCS. It'd be too much of a task to expect in the near future, and it'd probably leave a lot of people upset if it was anytime recent, but one way to ensure this isn't a problem is by reworking all champion kits to have outplay in them. Both counterplay, (say, through items) and outplay are important for interesting and fun games, inside and outside of the LCS. The problem is that most league champions lack outplay, or significant amounts of it anyways, like Ryze. He's a very mechanically lackluster champion, he's basically 100% knowledge based, which includes positioning and lane knowledge and team fight knowledge and calculation knowledge and rotation knowledge. You don't outplay Ryze significantly, and he doesn't outplay you significantly, any time you die or kill him it falls under a very basic outplay which is knowledge based. As opposed to mechanical based which can be really interesting and isn't always the same. With gold comes brute force, that's just the way the game works, if you want good play or picks (that end up in early kills or late game scaling or whatnot) it is inevitable for some amount of 'brute force' to exist on champions. What I would have liked in League's inception though, was to ensure a large amount of different unique game mechanics that each champion would have while being mechanically intensive to the point where a mechanically skilled player was consistently rewarded for such things, and there was always outplay involved, for both players.

More linear champions should have better numbers for their respective abilities, outplay champions should be rewarded for outplaying. I don't like that design concept though, I'd rather it just be all outplay champions, and Riot still seems to like the 'FOTM cycles' philosophy instead of 'everything is balanced / OP so nothing is OP compared to each other because it's all OP'

Most of the League champions I find very dull, linear, and they lack outplay. As a metaphor, I want all Champions to be Zed vs. Zed, in different ways. That'd make me happy, but it's too much to ask for and too many people would be angry with it. Especially since, game design and 'my champion got ruined and changed, why?' problems aside, internet service providers in the U.S. are bad/lackluster and there's still server stability issues / isps trying to throttle companies that don't pay a fee. Which leads to less people being able to perform mechanically at their peak.