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lets track stats to make playing support more fun

88 MikePoole··2 votes·444 views

Ok so i'm going to say something obvious present a problem and spitball a few ideas that might help please bear with me if its TLDR for you read the line 3.

I'm new to the forums so i don't know where this should be posted but i thought heres the concepts community they read this, maybe a group of people that latch onto this and can contribute an idea to help the game evolve.

So the problem i see is no one likes to play supports, (obvious i know) its the hardest role to carry and the least gratifying if you do your job well the other guy gets the good job.

so i had the idea what if you could track a supports stats like a good thresh player and a bad one can have the same score from just auto'ing the champions for assists and not dieing, so if you could see that the good thresh landed 100 hooks that game and rescued players 20 times with his lantern but the terrible one hit no hooks and never even used his other ability it would go a long way in being able to make support players able to have just as much glory as they deserve because a good support can win a game, but never gets recognised for it.

I think if we made the support role just as gratifying to play as the other roles people wouldn't always hate being support and it would encourage players to get better at the role which is better for everyone, just an idea.

3 Comments

Anastaecia2 votes

Why does everyone (including Riot) look high and low for the solution to making supp more fun. It's kinda VERY OBVIOUS.

What are really the only 2 things that supp doesn't do that the rest of the team does....cs and get kills. CSing is a means to an end, but rather boring in itself.

**That leaves....OH YEA.....what's that...people wanna get kills in a PvP game? Say it ain't so! And one role is looked down upon for getting them! **

MAKE IT OKAY FOR SUPPS TO GET KILLS. Not sure how, but the laners get so butt hurt because they get 150g, instead of 300.

DanniiDarkness1 votes

{quoted}

What are really the only 2 things that supp doesn't do that the rest of the team does....cs and get kills. CSing is a means to an end, but rather boring in itself.

That leaves....OH YEA.....what's that...people wanna get kills in a PvP game? Say it ain't so!

I had to lol at this :D

It's true but it's not the entire story. People enjoy getting the kills, but people also want to remain relevant, even if they aren't necessarily getting the kill shots, but they want somebody else to recognise it too. It seems to be a psychologically need people have, to be recognised for things like uniqueness and individuality. You can see this in people who would rather keep split pushing up way too far with no vision and no real escapes, even when they are behind. Two key scores that have the potential to reflect this more accurately than others is the K/D score, which is why everyone cares so much about these numbers. I'm not saying you're entirely wrong, but I think relevancy has a lot to do with with the high value placed on good K/D ratios rather than just the number of kills. The ratio reflects both skill and relevancy - something that it's hard to be if you're dead all the time.

idk I feel way off the mark in some ways from this angle, like I'm reaching too far and padding it with too much hypothetical... the rebuttal to this entire position is that the reason people like great K/D ratios because they feel great when they get a kill but if that turns into a 1:1 trade they feel like shit because it devalues the power you get from a PVP victory. Hmmm feels like a pretty strong counter. Perhaps there's some truth to both of them.

And Assists, well, nobody cares about those. They don't necessarily mean anything more than you turned up at the fight.

MAKE IT OKAY FOR SUPPS TO GET KILLS. Not sure how, but the laners get so butt hurt because they get 150g, instead of 300.

This made me wonder why people KS -- outside of accidents, I mean. It could be just the gold, but I think it's more than that. Is it just the kills as you have said? They get caught up in the excitement of the moment and just pewpew? Or is it about bolstering their own KD score - even if artificially.

Just thinking aloud.

I have no idea how you could achieve it either. Not easily, if at all, that's for sure. Personally, it's not something I care that much about if it happens as a natural course of just making sure the kill is secured and a team-mate stays alive. The frequency with which it usually happens or is likely to happen the ADC is any good should be quite low, so I don't see the harm in it going to a support. It's not like we do nothing and they get the entire farm, while the supp gets none of it, while still having to buy pinks and spend time warding at the cost of XP and a little more gold.

Although a non-damage support's ability to fulfil their role isn't directly tied to how itemized they are, it isn't non-existent either. Each item they complete usually adds a level of utility to their kit - a mini, support-sized power-spike, if you will, letting them perform that role better. Sure, it isn't on the same consistent level as say, the DPS output of an Infinity Edge, but then most support items are only 2/3 the price.

Most importantly, everything I said ^ here ^ is all relative to observations made at my MMR - which is non-existent, so.... yeeeeeeah >.> - slinks away -

[{quoted}](name=88 MikePoole,realm=NA,application-id=A8FQeEA8,discussion-id=jHvdbigM,comment-id=,timestamp=2018-02-24T10:28:45.301+0000) So the problem i see is no one likes to play supports, (obvious i know) its the hardest role to carry and the least gratifying if you do your job well the other guy gets the good job.

so i had the idea what if you could track a supports stats like a good thresh player and a bad one can have the same score from just auto'ing the champions for assists and not dieing, so if you could see that the good thresh landed 100 hooks that game and rescued players 20 times with his lantern but the terrible one hit no hooks and never even used his other ability it would go a long way in being able to make support players able to have just as much glory as they deserve because a good support can win a game, but never gets recognised for it.

I think if we made the support role just as gratifying to play as the other roles people wouldn't always hate being support and it would encourage players to get better at the role which is better for everyone, just an idea.

I like playing support :(

I think the core idea of finding a stat that can reflect how well a support did is a good one. I think it's probably one of the reasons we have many of the stats that we currently do. eg. Warding Score, CC score, etc. It's also something I've thought about and considered how to go about measuring as well as how I've seen them implemented in other games.

While I like the concept, there is an underlying problem that is inherent with creating this type of metric - it is exceedingly difficult to decide what is useful, in order to create anything that can provide meaningful feedback to the player about their performance, which is, after all the purpose of the exercise. As I said, there are already these metrics to SOME degree in game, but nobody gives a toss about ward scores (for example) unless it's to out BestnoobNA#69 for not warding once during the whole game.

It's not because people don't care about warding, but because it's hard to place a value on what placing a ward returns to the team. You could place a pink down smack bam in the centre of mid-lane and get it AA'd down in 2 seconds flat but you'd still get a point on the meter. Likewise, grabbing a hook on Thresh when the ADC isn't in a position to back up the play might lead to an unfavourable trade for Thresh, or open an opportunity for the other team to get a pick on the ADC while they know hook is on cooldown. This is why often, the only consistently reliable metrics in-game tend to be K/D ratios and CS (during laning phase particularly)... and Win Rate % across a number of matches out-of-game.

Consider World of Warcraft, which I used to play quite a lot of. WoW has probably the most comprehensive DPS meters available to any game. There are also a couple of online sites dedicated to analysing the data from the combat logs you can upload to them. The combat logs can run for 50-100MB long and list every event of every player you are instanced with to the millisecond. Coordinate data is also tracked - so there is a means to track precisely what every player is doing and where they are doing it, at any given time. Yet they still can't generate an effective metric for measuring how well a Tank tanked and a Healer healed (other than raw healing output and healing taken) I mean, they aren't too bad and not entirely useless - they're ok approximations, but it's pretty easy to feed the numbers or misinterpret. The problem is that there are just so many variables involved - and we are talking about PVE dungeons and raids here, where the boss mechanics are entirely scripted! Even so, it takes an experienced person to trawl through the various metrics in order to pull any real value out from the data.

The fight analyzers are great at saying things like: "You took 4 stacks of that debuff. You are only supposed to take 3 maximum and then tank swap otherwise you will take LOADS more damage and your healers will have trouble keeping you alive after that."

But you will never see them say something like: "hey, I see that you took 7 stacks of that debuff instead of 3. Now, ordinarily, that might make you the worst tank I have ever seen, buuut... I can also see that your off-tank died earlier; you had to tank for 20 seconds longer than normal while staying alive and making no mistakes to save a total party wipe... and somehow you managed it. Bloody good tanking, some of the best I've seen."

Bear in mind that NONE of this stuff is done by Blizzard. This is all done by enthusiast modders or modders-turned-business-modellers (some pun intended).

I'm not saying it's a hopeless cause. I would love for there to be a way of describing this usefulness a support or tank can provide in a way that has meaning. I'm happy to brainstorm and explore ideas - I just have no idea at this point what would even be relevant across such a large pool of so many champions, different abilities, and the dynamic nature of the game. In my Warcraft example earlier, I was literally only exploring the roles of pure healing and pure damage soaking with you. Metrics for utility are still, for the most part non-existent.

Sorry for the lengthy post, I may have gotten carried away. Just a bit.

TLDR; me likee, but is hard, can do how??

lolibus1 votes

thats not the reason nobody wants to play support

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