About the recent Design Value: Mastery

Earl Eulrich·Jul 27, 2014·3 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 HippingtonJul 27, 20144 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.

YouLostMeJul 27, 20142 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.

Earl EulrichJul 27, 20143 votes

random events never increase mastery, it just emphasises luck. I don´t want anything random...but major changes aren´t random, they occur the same for all and everyone has the same chance to adapt. You really don´t make much sense in your arguments, comparing apples to bananas mostly and come up with very strange comparisions...e.g. thornmail is a nicheitem vs ad-aa-reliant champs, yet it´s not a hardcounter to tryn/ad-carries...it just helps to keep them in check for the midgame if they snowball, lategame it doesn´t make a huge difference. THat´s the sort of niche-item that is healthy, hardcounters are never healthy to anything as they don´t allow counterplay and don´t emphasis mastery in that regard.

YouLostMeJul 27, 20143 votes

All right, fine. If a pseudo-random distribution of explosions occured on the map, automatically killing people. In the first five minutes they would develop into a pattern and if you figured out the pattern, you would do better, thus being rewarded with mastery. Same problem.

Thornmail actually does hard-counter AD carries lategame. A marksman that attacks someone with thornmail needs to deal a lot more damage and have some significant healing if she expects to live, and even lategame marksmen can slaughter themselves on an armored tank with tmail. But marksmen have range and can target people who don't have thornmail, so they can still apply their mastery despite being hard countered. Other carries get free outs, like Trynd who is immune to death for 5 seconds, or Vayne whose primary damage output comes from her True damage proc and doesn't get reflected by thornmail.

But if a Caitlyn is 10/0 by 20 minutes, a thornmail is a great buy and counters her super hard for the whole game. The only reason this doesn't see play so much is because marksmen need to spend money on damage and supports need to spend money on support items. That leaves very little gold available to drop on a high-cost item like TMail.

A great example of a bad hard counter item is Executioner's Calling. It was nerfed a lot in S1 and never made a comeback because the process for an AD laner would be (If they do a lot of healing) --> (buy Exe Calling, ignore their healing) and all of a sudden counterplay disappeared.

Earl EulrichJul 27, 20143 votes

But if a Caitlyn is 10/0 by 20 minutes, a thornmail is a great buy and counters her super hard for the whole game. The only reason this doesn't see play so much is because marksmen need to spend money on damage and supports need to spend money on support items. That leaves very little gold available to drop on a high-cost item like TMail.

the thing is...buying Thornmail leaves you very vulnerable to ap-dmg (and cc), the only thing it is good for is fighting ad (mostly auto-attack reliant ads). So yea, it is still effective at that lategame, but the carry will still come out on top of most duels despite the thornmail (that is, if he does have some lifesteal). Same for aegis...it´s great to stop a snowballing-flatpen rushing ap from dominating fights, but lategame he still will have the means to fight you.

The items are effective at what they do, but they always leave you vulnerable to things they are not great at. - making the buy an interessting decission, allowing you to adapt to Situations.

And the other point....I really don´t know what you even want to say with the "explosion-thing" - if you really want to deny that the LoL pick&ban-phase is severly lacking if you compare it to DOTA i just can´t take you seriously, sorry. More bans->you can get outbanned if you have a too small pool of champs/strategies->you need to be able to adapt during champselect by having a broader pool of champs/strategies. Really simple.

ProfDrDeathJul 27, 20142 votes

the thing is...buying Thornmail leaves you very vulnerable to ap-dmg (and cc), the only thing it is good for is fighting ad (mostly auto-attack reliant ads). So yea, it is still effective at that lategame, but the carry will still come out on top of most duels despite the thornmail (that is, if he does have some lifesteal).

Except that, with every current AD carry build, Thornmail will outdamage Lifesteal.

Numbers inc:

Competent ADC has Banshee's for 112 MR and LW for 35% ArPen.

Competent Tanky Guy/Tanky Girl has 250 Armor (probably a lot more), but no MR Pen.

ADC does X damage with an attack and takes 0.3(1-112/212)X = 0.1415 X from Thornmail as damage.

Tank takes (1- 162.5/262.5) *X = 0.3810 X damage. ADC heals for Y% of that.

Y = 0.1415/0.3810 = 37.1%. That's how much Lifesteal an AD carry needs to outheal Thornmail against a 250 Armor target.

Shyvana can have close to 400 Armor. Without breaking a sweat.

You'd need 50.9% Lifesteal to outheal Thornmail on her.

YouLostMeJul 28, 20142 votes

ProfDrDeath has most of your wrongs covered, but I'll get the rest:

the thing is...buying Thornmail leaves you very vulnerable to ap-dmg (and cc), the only thing it is good for is fighting ad (mostly auto-attack reliant ads).

But that's not what I was talking about so it's not actually related to the point. Rushing a chain vest also makes you vulnerable to APC, and that's why toplaners don't buy chain vests if they're laning against mages and do buy chain vests when laning against AA-bruisers.

And the other point....I really don´t know what you even want to say with the "explosion-thing"

Read it and observe the problems stated. Being able to dodge/predict pseudo-random explosions increases emphasis on mastery. Dying unpredictably in the first five minutes of the game decreases emphasis on mastery. You can emphasize mastery in one way while de-emphasizing it in others.

if you really want to deny that the LoL pick&ban-phase is severly lacking if you compare it to DOTA i just can´t take you seriously, sorry.

That is actually not what I said. I recommend you read it again.

More bans->you can get outbanned if you have a too small pool of champs/strategies->you need to be able to adapt during champselect by having a broader pool of champs/strategies. Really simple.

More bans =/= New banning system. Perhaps you should read your post again?

RhlaxJul 29, 20141 votes

There are two main groups of gamers, those who play to win and those who play to have fun.

I feel that for people playing to have fun gamers like myself, randomness such as explosions can offer increased diversity and more interesting game play. However with randomness can create random advantages even with psedu-random distribution. For someone like myself, I wouldn't mind slight bad/good luck, afterall it's all fun and games. The competitive gamers however will notice the slightest un-controllable factor, and ask the question "what can I do to change that?".