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Ability Draft Featured Game Mode?

Tuffcookies·5/18/2019, 5:33:06 PM·1 votes·1,311 views

I'm going to get straight to the point.

Would an ability draft FEATURED game mode be a possibility?

For those who don't know what ability draft is, it's a game mode in Dota 2 where a character model is randomly selected for you, and you are given a pool of abilities from which you can pick (draft) your basic abilities and your ultimate. If you would like to know more, google ability draft dota 2 and you will be able to find an array of YouTube videos visually describing it.

With some of the oddball featured game modes that League has (Legend of the Poro King, Nexus Siege, Doom bots) would it be too out of the ordinary to have an ability draft game mode? I fully understand that there may be major technical obstacles to overcome to make this achievable, but I don't think it's at all impossible.

I'm not sure how well the rest of the community will respond to this, because if you haven't played Dota 2 then you most likely haven't really ever considered this as an option (though some people may have thought of it on their own, being creative/imaginative and what not). But, considering the oddball featured game modes that League currently has, I feel as though ability draft has potential.

I searched the boards (using the built in search feature) and there have been other posts referring to ability draft (all of them being at least around 2 years old). I may be kicking a dead horse by bringing up this topic again, but maybe possibly those posts just got lost in the clutter. I'm hoping, if anything, that this post will spark at least an idea. Maybe not something exactly like Dota's ability draft, but something that can be perfectly relevant and related to League. It's obvious that Riot is capable of doing pretty much anything with the game, so why not try something that the player base hasn't seen before?

I'm not very good at technical posts, and my posts typically tend to be very informal, but I wanted to express this idea, just to get it out there...again.

glhf, gg

EDIT: Riot (Vietnam, I think?) released a "teaser" video referring to a game mode like this. Here's the link:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b8I78SlCilg

2 Comments

Mr Voidling5/19/2019, 6:05:55 PM2 votes

This has been mentioned within the past few months. By me at the least, just in comments not a full post. I kind of recommend a random ability "draft". Not much of a draft at that point, but you don't have to worry about OP kits being picked every time. It's a troll game mode anyway so random fits. Just buff melee champs up so they can compete with ranged, since their abilities usually make up for the difference. I mean, just imagine Morde Q with Jhin/Veigar passive on a ranged champ...

There's also the fact that Rito doesn't want game modes that are inherently more fun than competitive play. Fun = bad. Their player base jumps up while the game mode is up but shoots further down than it was prior after they ditch the game mode. Happens with URF/ARURF. I mean, easy fix is don't remove the game mode = more players. But they care too much about competitive play. I'd even SEARCH for a CUSTOM game if they made it an option to have custom Ability Draft/URF games. But nope.

On a technical level, they can definitely do it, just apply Sylas R mechanics to all champs pretty much. There are 144 champs so there are effectively 720 abilities in the game, with an added like 12 from Jayce/Nid/Elise/Gnar, 2 from Reksai, and 1 more from Kled. Shyvanna's are tied to her active R so no more from her, and Sion has one tied to his passive so we keep them tied. All in all this makes 735 abilities. Each champ has at least two attack animations, regular & crit, so you just make each champ have a specific animation tied to each ability. 735 -5(champ already has animations mapped for their own abilities) means you have 105,120 animation ties to do(less actually due to auto enhancing abilities/stat ups like Jax has). This would definitely take some time, but is feasible nonetheless. Rito could probably knock this out in 3-5 days if they focused on it. Or to make it simple, correlate champion animations to numbers(each champ has numbers 1-8 or something) and then correlate those numbers to specific abilities. If a number is missing it defaults to a different number instead. Example: Ezreal R is mapped to animation #6. Zac E recast animation is tied to #6. Jax doesn't have an ability animation mapped to #6 as he only has 2 abilites and 2 attacks(probably more attack animations but whatevs), so it defaults to a specific alternate #, like in his case #4 his E animation. This is only the model animation, not the displacement, so Jax E animation would still make him levitate while using Ez R. Certain abilities would either be impossible(Zac R) or wouldn't matter, other abilities would probably need specific animations tied to them. but for the most part they can get away with correlating abilities to #'s and then each champ uses their same # animation for the ability. We don't care if its perfect or not.

Question is, do certain abilities get removed for ALL champions, or just all but the champ that can use them? Zac R/passive, Anivia Passive, etc. And are Azir E+Q only available if you randomly got his E and then ALSO RANDOMLY got 1 of them? or disabled?

ADC Yuumi5/19/2019, 12:54:33 AM1 votes

I'd love to see this.

But this is also the time where Riot is denying us even Legend of the Poro King. No rotational modes are ever appearing.