Urfwick wants a Loot Box and voice chat and better support

I am a big fan of skill exclusive skins XD. Although, I would be pretty pissed off if anyone could get skins like "traditional karma" (or trundle or sejuani, or any other champion that had a rework and old school players were given a skin for consolation prize.)

It's a champion loyalty thing.

And champion loyalty was something that appealed to me about this idea.

Which now I've said that, suddenly makes me ok with giving that skin out to people who jump through the right hoops, because those hoops reflect champion loyalty.

One thing that would really help Support players show that they are making a difference is if the game tracked and displayed the numbers of things that wards revealed, rather than just the number of wards placed.

Demonstrating that 10 (low, I know) wards revealed a total of 40 objects (other wards, invading champions, Teemo shrooms, etc) would go a long way to indicating that the Support is actually helping instead of just leeching experience and gold in lane.

As a support player, I do feel like you could do more fundamental stuff. Stuff like itemisation improvements are huge boons to people who already like the role but nobody who doesn't main support is gonna be looking at the new Grail or the buffed Censer/Crucible and thinking "Yes, this will make support so much more fun"! Fun items are nice to have if you already like the basics of the role but people don't like the basics. To be honest, I don't think the role will ever be as popular as one would like until all of these issues are addressed:

1. XP - biggest one. Being under-levelled is just crappy. I realise you guys are making changes but unless my experience in games next patch surprises me, I think the changes will be very small. Supports will still be under-levelled which automatically makes them feel like the weakest champions on the map and there's no reason that has to be the case. You guys can afford to push support XP much more aggressively than you are doing, as I don't think anyone could come up with a realistic problem arising from supports having the same or higher level as the rest of their team.
2. Gold - not much to say about this that isn't obvious, but as with XP there is room to push gold income for supps higher. Personally I feel that putting a "X% increased passive gold generation from items" passive on Sightstone would go a long way to increasing support income while elegantly managing to avoid buffing the item for junglers or creating any must-buy items for other laners.
3. Freedom of map movement - Sightstone's design is a problem that will always lead to bad feelings. Supports have their map movement restricted massively by the vision game and often the need to stick by allies as is - having to recall every 2 minutes for no reason other than needing to recharge Sightstone is the definition of feelsbadman. Other roles can spend ages on the map AFK clearing waves if they want - why do I need to recall instantly just because I wanted to put decent vision around dragon/baron? As a support main who loves almost everything about it, that bugs me. No other roles have crap like that handicapping them.

tl;dr the role will be golden and at least somewhat popular if it isn't automatically comfortably the weakest role in any one team and if map presence isn't tied to being stingy with ward charges.

support main reporting here. If I may, I'd recommend modeling the rest of the items after . I think the problem with the rest of the support items is that it doesn't provide in lane gameplay that is representative of the champions that end up building them.

I mention as the item to follow because champions that build it are being rewarded for harassing champions, no matter where or when. IMO is quite clunky, in that 1. you must be in lane to be rewarded, 2. is restrictive of what you actually use it for, since you ideally want to be proccing it on Cannons > Melee > Casters, creating predictive, linear gameplay in lane, and 3. it can be difficult to actually cash in if your teammates tunnel vision on clearing the wave as fast as possible, creating unnecessary and often unintended frustration (aka blue balls, get it, cuz the charges are blue balls and you just want to blow your stacks). I do like the fact it acts as a heal though, since champions that want to build this will normally be on the bulkier, supportive type end compared to champions.

is in an absolute joke of a state though, to the point where champions like are forced into using , even though the passive isn't exactly ideal for it. I would recommend giving it move speed as a flat stat on it, since that is the build up theme going into , and making some type of gameplay around the gold generation, rather than just passively sitting in lane and cashing in.

Experience increase would be nice certainly, but I think it just beats around the problem that, support needs to have something other to do in lane that monitoring the ADC and making sure vision is sound. New gameplay can attract more interest from people (speaking from experience, if you can't tell, I really like ), so I think this is the path to getting more people into the role, thereby solving a big problem with the queueing system.

well, to be honest the support community rose because well, 5 man team game on a 4 lane map... but I think it's commendable that you guys want to preserve that, now, as a support I don't think the problem is actual recognition, when you're a good support it shows and you kinda know it too, when you keep hooking the enemy adc or clutch healing your adc time and time again, support mains don't really care for recognition (at least I don't when I play support) or even kda, supports care more about being useful and not dead weight.

The reason the community is disenchanting itself with supports is mainly that support is probably the hardest role to be successful at, once you make a mistake there's barely any fall back patterns you can rely onto, I've seen braums, Leonas and even threshs getting melted on teamfights because they made a mistake early game, not to mention sonas, sorakas and at times even nami.

Being successful at supporting is a very valuable skill but doing it consistently depends on so many factors that the players feel like it's an impossible task and that there's no way to win with the class...

The xp changes you're making and the small buffs on the pbe are a good step at making supporting a bit more rewarding (for some) so I can only thank you for taking a look at them (I'm an adc/support player so for me it's a win/win)

It may be helpful to tackle this problem from the champion mastery viewpoint. It is much more difficult to get an S with the average support than any other role since supports aren't supposed to carry. Maybe you should look at how good supports act (e.g. tanking shots that may kill them so the ADC is saved, letting the ADC solo farm while you roam, etc.), revamp the champ mastery system to reflect this, and add in elements of the game that properly reward these sorts of behavior.

Please add a +1/+1 ward mastery (stealth/pink) in the cunning tree right where Assassin is. None of those masteries in that tier appeal to a support, but they definitely want to go down cunning.

Trust me. Supports want to be able to ward more and it's not so large an amount they will be pigeon holed in to being ward monkeys again.

One thing I noticed that helps alot is something Heroes of the Storm does.

They have numbers. Like this game has numbers too but they aren't immediately apparent and are often ignored. Things like amount of healing done, amount of shielding, amount of damage, seconds spent being CCd and seconds spent CCing. Number of CC dealt out. Stuff like that. Heroes doesn't have quite that depth but if certain things that don't directly involve kills or assists (Seconds spent CCing is a good one) were shown, it'd be alot easier to see the visible impact a support has. Maybe a special number for things like blitz or other hooks like total units of movement stolen from enemy type thing.

I'm a mid main, and i used to secondary support. I can't do that in dynamic queue. You'd have more supports like me, and from other roles if for exp example, the odds of me getting mid if support is my secondary, are 17%. I use top as my secondary now because I actually get mid occasionally. Most of that is me disliking to lane and that I had to learn it to get mid.

As for supporting, a lot of pain comes from not getting a tangible metric from which to judge my success, healers get it, and assists kind of, but for supports like Janna who shield and disengage, or Leona who are primarily cc and engage, numbers like, number of seconds CCed (separated by cc type), and number of knock backs, number of champions CCed at one time, and damage shielded, these are stats I wish I could show my team after a really good Janna game. I long for the day that can tell my team to open their cc duration tab. Or to prove to my adc that jams shell shields were better than their sona heals this game, and that my slow does matter. I don't want to have to play soraka to tell my team, I did work look at the end game stats.

abandoning one community in the hopes of growing another, larger one

You would never do something like that, would you Ghostcrawler? Lol.

My favorite ideas being tossed around were regenerating/increased ward placement on sightstone (and sightstone possibly rewarding xp for placement and clearing wards) as well as buffing bandit or reintroducing an experience mastery. Adding amount healed/shielded to stats would be a good starting point on recognition too (And helps players to see how they are doing in that regard)

"then we're just potentially abandoning one community in the hopes of growing another, larger one."

Cough Dominion cough I get that summoner's rift 5v5 pvp is your dream child, but im sure there's players that want to see more than that.

Back onto topic now: I'd like to see another support designed somewhat like bard, in which it's not the typical stuck in lane looking for an outplay situation. It's good to give a support the ability to take more responsibility in their kit.

I'd love to see a skill-shot attempts and accuracy statistic. It'd make me feel great to see that after an awesome game as a skillshot supp.

There are items for the jungle role that can not be purchased unless smite is selected as a summoner spell. Could something like this be implemented for support to make powerful items that can't be purchased or abused by other roles? Has this thought process come up before in discussing the support role?

So I know this idea is somewhat outside the box, but it is something that could definitely help supports in the long run, it would also help them out 'impact' wise because you would see a better assist score on them if this was enacted.

How hard would it be to say give an assist to a support (or honestly any player) should a player be killed because of one of their wards granting vision of an enemy player? It something that I think is being overlooked and could actually help with the numbers across the board on assists.

Countless times I play support and many, many times, one of the enemy team gets their socks blown off because they are caught out of position because I placed a ward on the map and 3 of my teammates saw it, acted upon it and shoved said enemies nose into the dirt. Meanwhile I was back in base, picking up another pink ward to continue my war with the enemy support over control of tri-brush. Not only would I then get EXP for the kill, I would also get a share in the team gold too!

A change like this could even effect other players/lanes as well and maybe even ENCURAGE PLAYERS TO WARD THE MAP, which is something we'd all like to see happen because vision provides game knowledge and game knowledge is power!

It's something small, but I think it would be a step in the right direction for all players in the game. Not just supports.

By that logic, why punish anyone for flaming at all? You can just mute them, right?

That is an incredibly narrow minded way of looking at the problem of toxic behavior, and doesn't really contribute to the conversation.

I'm not denying that the point of adding voice comms is aimed at allowing more competitive play in ranked, so I don't know what point you are trying to argue towards with me.

And I would actually disagree, I think the historic toxicity seen in Halo, CoD, etc. indicates that toxicity would be worse over voice comms.

More of a bummer than those who joined the game after Season 1 and find that they are completely ineligible from ever getting a skin they love for a champion they love?

Those who earned their Victorious Jarvan 4 skin in Season 1 have had it for 5 years now, I think it's fair to say that's enough time to have gotten more than enough exclusive use out of it.

I don't play Sivir but still having the skin is significant

Would you feel worse about Victorious Sivir if this year's Victorious skins earners were able to pick it up?

I'd contend that you wouldn't really care. Those players went through a similar struggle that you went through to get the skin, they just choose Victorious Sivir instead of Victorious Urgot.

If that's the case, then what you're using to set the skin appart is it's age and how few people currently have it. My understanding is that King Bowser is being opened up with this change, so already the precedent is being set for skins that were only available to a select few being available to those determined enough to seek them.

It's one's own fault for joining the game later in date. If you REALLY wanted a victorious skin than you should of started to play the game earlier.

It's my own fault for not having a computer (much less be looking to play a computer game) when League was released. I'll keep that in mind next time.