Some questions about the technical viability of Ability Draft
I have spent the last hour reading many other board posts about the possibility of a mode like Ability Draft in DotA 2. There are many other posts about the game mode, but honestly not a lot of actual input about it. The main purpose of this post is to find out if this is within the reach of the Riot engine and company outlook for the game.
First a quick overview of the game mode if you are not familiar with it:
Each team is assigned 5 random champions. (something that is obviously already possible in LoL at this time) All of the abilities of the champions are put into a pool for the players to choose, plus the four abilities from 2 other random champions that are not in game to provide greater diversity of the picks. You get to pick 3 regular abilities and 1 ultimate. The game is then played according to the rules and goals of the regular 5 vs 5 game mode. This mode allows for some very powerful and unbalanced skill sets, but that is the idea. This is a for fun mode.
The main purpose of this post is to find out if this is within the reach of the Riot engine and company outlook for the game. In man, MANY previous posts that I have read someone sets up the game mode similar to what I have done. Some more in depth, some less so. Then the comments are very unhelpful: "one time i had ability x, y, and z in dota and it was great!" "me too, but y, x, z is better!" "this is not possible" "servers would implode" etc.
The few posts that bring up problems are easily solved:
"Some champions don't have mana" -- Those champs are not in ability draft. Not all heroes in DotA are in ability draft due to similar problems. This will still leave a large pool of champs that are fun and have interesting abilities.
"Some champs have abilities that only work with themselves" -- See above.
"Abilities in LoL have animations that are champions specific, much more so than DotA." -- While true, even in DotA a lot of the abilities have no animation or a weird one when on specific heroes in ability draft. It doesn't affect how the abilities actually function. If that is not that case in league, that is something I would hope to learn from the answers to this post. Another thing that makes me believe that the animations have no or little affect was the Doom Bots mode where the bots had many abilities that were not their own and abilities that functioned in different ways.
Ability Draft is the only reason I still play DotA. And I would most likely quit and move %100 to LoL if it or something similar were available. I'm not interested if its something that Riot is working on or planning on. And I'm sure that it would be a very large undertaking, I am hoping that someone can tell me if its possible and what the actual problems would be.
Thank you for your consideration.