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@Riot It's time to have a serious discussion about hide and seek

Koechophe·11/16/2014, 2:54:02 AM·36 votes·2,479 views

Intro Hide and seek is the most popular off-game mode. People dismiss the game mode, but at any given time, there is at least one hide and seek ready to be joined, and most often the number exceeds 5 open hide and seek queues. It is easier to get into a hide and seek game than it is to get into a game of dominion. Hide and seek is not just something that 10 people do randomly, it's playerbase is substantial and rivals other game modes such as twisted treeline and dominion. Hide and Seek is incredibly fun if played correctly (seriously, try it guys, if you get a good game which happens about 50% of the time, it is awesome).

What is Hide and Seek? Hide and Seek is a custom game mode (much like ARAM was in its inception) played on dominion. The general idea is that there are 2 seekers and five hiders. The hiders hide from the seekers while the seekers work together to kill the hiders. The hiders can't kill the seekers, but can cast CC on them, and cannot back. The hiders have 5 lives and if just one survives until 40 minutes, they win. If the seekers kill them all, the seekers win. Neither side can cap points.

If played correctly, the goal is to outsmart and juke the other team. It is great practice in landing skill shots and in deception. I would urge anyone to try hide and seek before commenting on how useless the mode is.

What is wrong with hide and seek? The biggest issue with hide and seek is the trolls. about 50% of the games involve people who go in as hiders and just troll the seekers to death for no reason. If you actually do well as seekers, this number jumps up to 75%. A lot of games get ruined because people just troll the crap out of them because they believe they won't get punished. It turns into a nasty free for all.

There are other issues too. The fact that there is no penalty for leaving custom games means that it's harder to queue up. Due to the changes made to IP gains in custom games, hide and seek has no IP whatsoever. Hide and seek also has an "honor system" for permabanned champions that often gets completely ignored.

What do hide and seek players want? We aren't asking for much as a playerbase. We're not going to request a queue, because we know that that is a huge leap that takes a massive playerbase to sustain.

Ideally, what would work best would be a selection mode of "hide and seek" (just like there's blind pick, draft pick, tournament draft and aram in custom games) where one side is 5 people and one side is 2. In this mode, the game automatically ends if the hiders all die 5 times or if the game reaches 40 minutes, giving the win to the hiders or the seekers respectively. Ideally, in this mode, the seekers would have 100% damage reduction, and the hiders would have high out of combat health and mana regeneration. If a seeker gets out, they cease to grant sight to their team and their attacks and spells do nothing against seekers. This would be the absolute ideal and would essentially remove all the problems with hide and seek.

But here are some easier things that we would really appreciate.

  1. IP gains for a 5v2 situation. Honestly, it's kind of ridiculous that we don't get IP. The premise is to avoid getting bots who farm ip, but 5v2 is 7 people, vs the fact that they can use 3v3 for actual IP gains and it only requires 3 people.
  2. Ability to adequately report someone for trolling a hide and seek game. When someone joins a custom match that's marked hide and seek, they essentially sign an agreement to play by the rules of the custom game. If they troll the game, they ruin the experience of the other 6 players. That is just as bad as ruining a twisted treeline, or a summoners rift by being toxic, except it's worse because you can't press ignore to get rid of their negative influence. Ideally we'd take the above measures to make such trolling impossible, but at the very least, we should be able to report trolls, and it should be clear that such trolling is punishable by bans.
  3. The ability to "permaban" a champion before rounds. That option in custom games would be invaluable.

The ideal scenario would be awesome, but even just those two things would be greatly appreciated.

Conclusion The hide and seek community is substantial. We have been ignored for quite some time, and written off, but the game mode is never the less legitimate. It would not take that much work to help the experience of all hide and seek players, and we would like to formally request that riot, at the very least, would discuss hide and seek with the playerbase.

Tl;DR Hide and seek ftw, rito pls.

Thank you for reading, kindly upvote and bump if you agree.

15 Comments

Wheatloaf11/16/2014, 5:30:13 PM8 votes

I'd at least like to see it as a Featured Game Mode.

Junkο11/16/2014, 4:12:50 PM4 votes
  1. Ability to adequately report someone for trolling a hide and seek game. When someone joins a custom match that's marked hide and seek, they essentially sign an agreement to play by the rules of the custom game. If they troll the game, they ruin the experience of the other 6 players. That is just as bad as ruining a twisted treeline, or a summoners rift by being toxic, except it's worse because you can't press ignore to get rid of their negative influence. Ideally we'd take the above measures to make such trolling impossible, but at the very least, we should be able to report trolls, and it should be clear that such trolling is punishable by bans.

Sadly this won't happen. It is REALLY easy to misunderstand the rules, and people can just bend the rules into their favor if they hate you. I played a game where everybody was saying it was okay for me to use Singed Q because it was their fault if the seekers walked into it. Eventually it got obnoxious for them and we agreed that i won't use it until i get Rylai. However it was still obnoxious then and everybody started flamming me for it and reported me at the end of the game, even when i stopped using it (which made me useless and i didn't have any fun at all)

Bouffon dAnglais11/16/2014, 12:47:46 PM3 votes

Rito pls. I love hide and seek.

kanacho11/17/2014, 12:03:49 AM3 votes

The problem with hide and seek (yes I have played it plenty enough), is that it does not fit mechanically well with League in two regards.

#1 there are really TERRIBLE champions In the game mode. Since you are restricted to using only CC abilities or non-damaging abilities like heals and such, you get an issue where a lot of champions who have miniscule CC but highly offensive abilities are terrible hiders, which doesn't particularly fit well with the mechanics of league.

#2 on the other side of the spectrum, we got people who are RIDICULOUSLY broken. Teemo, Evelynn, and Rengar are extremely irritating in the mode, and I see far too often that hosts completely ban out use of perma stealthers or even the likes of Rengar (even though he isn't a perma stealthier, his ultimate is hilariously strong against people who are hiding). The people who had low CC but huge damage can be really broken Seekers but terrible hiders.

The problem here is that Riot is not going to change champions simply to fit Hide and Seek (and I know you aren't asking for that), but having to effectively auto-ban certain champs is just annoying. THIS HOWEVER could be changed quite easily by giving seekers a special buff to better detect teemo or Evelynn and what-not by giving them an arrow indicator or the general direction they are in if they are close to them, or maybe something a little less powerful like just an exclamation mark (sort of like how rengar's ultimate works) in order to indicate a stealthed champion is nearby. Having access to stealth-sweeping items would additionally help in fixing that problem. It would require Riot to take time to program enough rules/balance changes in in order to make it enjoyable and satisfying, but they have spent time on things like hexakill or ascension, etc... The problem is that Riot just throws out these game modes then abandons them rarely putting them in again or updating them (which is quite boring).

If Riot had 1 active featured game-mode of the week, that'd be fun. Even if it was rotated between hexakill, or ascension, or urf mode, etc... That could be the solution to your issue here, and I think Riot can take a look at it.

Davids Uploader3/25/2015, 3:51:15 PM1 votes

I agree with a good bit about this, but what if a hider loses their 5th life they just stay dead? Even if they do not give vision or can cc or harm seekers, they can still bodyblock CC under your idea.

VerrKol11/16/2014, 11:45:31 PM1 votes

I'd love to see Riot turn Hide and Seek into a featured game mode then leave it up as an option for customs. I think that's the best situation players could possibly hope for. I think it could see a lot more play than some other featured modes like Doom Bots which were really only fun once or twice as gimmicks.

+1 for my support

The Soulforged11/18/2014, 2:47:22 AM1 votes

Tbh I have played hide and seek far more times than I should have, and I notice that the game is severely unbalanced. The seekers are at such a disadvantage unless they get good picks, and the hiders bad ones. Every time I play, I have had an unpleasant experience, and this is even when there are no trolls.

Norlamin III11/16/2014, 12:26:10 PM1 votes

urf? you speak of it in weird ways.