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About the recent Design Value: Mastery

Earl Eulrich·7/27/2014, 1:57:27 PM·3 votes·1,280 views

For the context...here the quote i want to address up first:

Adaptability

Adaptability is both your ability to learn and respond to new ideas, new threats and new changes, along with your ability to play in a variety of styles. Different players are adaptable in different ways. Some choose to pick up a large number of champions, while others spend that time deeply mastering one along a variety of builds. We try to support both, but fundamentally believe that to pursue mastery in League is about being an adaptable player.

Our primary method of rewarding adaptability is through system and play balance changes. We aspire to keep as many champions as possible viable at a competitive level (to mixed success, admittedly), and also spend a lot of time trying to increase the amount of viable team-level strategies. The better balanced the game is, the more we can reward players who remain adaptable against a wide breadth of threats, and similarly reward them for investing time in learning to play less-popular champions and strategies.

So I think you actually contradict yourself with recent decissions and some longtime shortcomings:

  • you stated that you don´t want to make major changes so close to worlds coming up - though this would actually reward teams that are more adaptable than others, just as your design goals here seem to be

  • champ-select is very stall since like forever, allowing Teams to only prepare a very small amount of CHampions and Tactics...as the pick&ban-phase is not restrictive enough and fairly easy to predict currently. I think adding some more layers of bans really would accomplish a lot in terms of diversity in champions an tactics played - really rewarding more adaptable teams that have mastered more champs and strategies (maybe look at DOTA 2 for inspiration, while i really can´t stand most of the game....the pick&ban phase is a lot better there)

  • I think you should maybe create more niche-items like thornmail/aegis that allow you to adapt to specific things like a snowballing-ad ingame on the flow, as they are more interessting than overall nobrainers like pen or an IE for carries that work in any situaton (the pen-system really is still not in a good spot at all).

8 Comments

Sire Hippington7/27/2014, 2:06:37 PM4 votes

Totally agree, the dota ban system alows a lot more adaptation: ban a few champs, pick a few then ban again and pick again, so u can see wich direction the enemy combo goes and target the seond wave of bans on their current strategy.

I think in nich items the game already improved and keeps omproving, but it could still use alot improvment here, and the pen-system realy is bad. Liked it in S1/2 more, cause u kinda had to decide if u want flat pen to eplode squishys or %pen to shred tanks, as stacking both was less effecktive. Now u can get the best of both worlds with out giving up to much, and the powerlvl of % pen is just to high, LW/Void are just mandatory for any primary damgedealer.

YouLostMe7/27/2014, 6:13:43 PM2 votes

This is sort of like the slippery slope fallacy. Just because a given change could reward mastery more in one area doesn't mean it won't totally screw up incentives for mastery in other areas. For example, the LoL design team could have parts of Summoner's Rift randomly explode, killing everything in the area. That would encourage mastery and adaptability because players who would predict/dodge the explosions would do better. But dying at unpredictable times decreases the impact that player skill has in the short term, thus decreasing mastery. Perhaps it's important

  • Major changes to champions at worlds would encourage mastery (so would random explosions), but could lead to situations where Riot misses a crucial imbalance or bug. Obviously a single overpowered champ or broken champ will decrease mastery on the whole, so slower update cycles are important.
  • I don't really understand how the pick/ban phase would improve mastery at all. If it's predictable now, it will likely be predictable then. Instead of banning Kass/Braum/Yasuo/Lucian, they would ban Kass/Braum and pick Yasuo/Lucian. Over the course of multiple games, this homogenizes picks and decreases mastery again. If consistent picks/bans is a problem, it is a problem because of champion balance and not the banning system.
  • Niche items lead to hard counters, which discourage mastery. For example, if there was a defensive item called AkaliVladSux that hard-countered spell vamp and healing spells, the counterplay aspect of dealing with a fed akali or vlad would change from playing around them (splitpush for either, buy pink for akali, kite against vlad) to just walking into lane with your item and playing like normal. That's another decrease in mastery.