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The other reason has me more puzzled. She is anti-fun. Pardon me for just a moment when I say: what the **** is anti-fun? Let's hammer out a definition of what anti-fun is. If possible getting an official, fully fleshed out & detailed Riot definition would be glorious.
To get the ball rolling, here are some other games that have game mechanics that could be considered anti-fun.
http://www.mtgvault....px?DeckID=21087
That Magic the Gathering deck has the potential to win the game essentially on turn 0. It is only playable in the Legacy format for whatever that may be worth to you, but it can be played and there are very few things you can do to stop it. Is this deck anti-fun or fair game?
In both Starcraft:Broodwar & Starcraft 2 there exist a plethora of tactics that fall under the umbrella name of "cheese". Most "cheese" tactics are designed to exploit very specific windows of time and can instantly win games against ill-prepared players. Great swathes of players rage at and insult "cheesing" players. However, an even greater number of players do not care about "cheese" because ALL "cheese" can be countered using some simple principles that have to be LEARNED. Are "cheese" tactics part of the legitimate game or should they be branded as "anti-fun" and removed? Fun fact, the word "cheese" comes from a mispronunciation of "cheater" in Korean.
In the MMO game EVE Online I personally have ripped off & stolen from corporations and alliances for BILLIONS of in-game currency called ISK. I am neither unique nor rare. It takes those people literally hundreds if not thousands of real-life hours to accumulate the things I have irretrievably stolen. What's awesome? My account is still online. All of our accounts are still online. What's even more awesome? ISK can be translated into real-world dollars pretty easily. The 6 thefts listed in the link above translate into about USD$133,591. My own total is a paltry $200. Best part? CCCP accepts this as part of the game. This is PURE THEFT OF TIME REAL MONEY AND EFFORT BY THOUSANDS AND THOUSANDS OF PEOPLE. Anti-fun? or part of the game?
Riot, my final grievance lays with whomever it was that generated the "anti-fun" idea to be spread to the public. Personally I believe it was a meeting somewhere because you can't develop such a sub-standard term alone.
To Whom it May Concern:
You should not design games. You should not develop games. You should not balance games. You should not moderate games. You should not be in any position of power over the direction of a game EVER again.
Zileas' public definition of anti-fun is as follows:
Quote: Anti-fun is the negative experience your opponents feel when you do something that prevents them from 'playing their game' or doing activities they consider fun.
As an extreme case let's consider a scenario. I enjoy winning. I don't enjoy losing. I don't enjoy losing A LOT more than I enjoy winning. Therefore losing is anti-fun. We accept this as ridiculous because we all know that you are not going to win all the time.
How about something more subtle. GamesWorkshop's table top game Warhammer 40K is extremely successful despite it's own marketing strategy. You're going to have to do some research on your own (I am attempting to be brief) but one race, the Imperial Guard, had an ingenious player develop an army list for it that was dubbed "Leafblower" by its opponents. It got this name because the army was so effective that the runner up in the debut tournament said "this army blew opposing armies off the table "like a leafblower"". Not one player at my local game shop regards Leafblower lists as a friendly game army but it is perfectly accepted in tournaments even if only begrudgingly so. This list is not unbeatable, you just have to prepare for it and give a prayer to the Dice Gods.
One last anecdote. Something close to home. Are you aware that a coordinated team in League of Legends fits your definition of anti-fun? My friends and I have a roster we call "The All Stun Team". Includes Taric, Pantheon, Leona, Xerath, and Udyr. The team is incredibly successful because we coordinate and stun-lock targets.
According to Xypherous this is explicitly anti-fun.
Quote: the most prominent anti-fun abilities are lock-down abilities - which, by definition, attempts to hinder the opponent from being able to do anything.
Forgive my dripping sarcasm for a moment: what are you going to do, forbid the use of Vent, Teamspeak, Skype, talking in the same room, typing, texting, phone calls during games?
Some other explicitly anti-fun things hit by Riot are the Summoner Spells Heal & Fortify.
Heal was anti-fun because it gave too much durability, you just couldn't kill the enemy! I wasn't around for that one so I don't know what items were around then but I can at least guess that Ignite was also there. And Ignite counters heal pretty hard. The necessary skill here is Igniting the target before they Heal. Recently ALL healing abilities were hit with nerfs of some kind because healing made it hard to kill the enemy. Never mind there are champion abilities that counter healing. There's also Executioner's Calling. Everyone knows that when Mundo pops his ult you pop your ignite that you SAVED SPECIFICALLY for this occurrence.
Fortify is a bit trickier. It made all turrets invulnerable for a period followed by a very large cooldown. The counter for this was... more Fortifies. A team of 5 fortifies with the appropriate mastery can keep all turrets invulnerable for about 80% of the time or 4 out of every 5 minutes. There is no counter for this. Killing the enemy doesn't work because it could be cast while dead. Assuming perfect coordination you have 1 minute windows in which to deal lasting damage. Riot accused it of promoting passive play so you took things in small steps and went straight to removing it from the game. Since I have no access to a patch-preview server I have no idea but was it ever attempted to make Fortify unable to be cast while dead? That way you can counter Fortify by, I quote Day[9], "killing the *******". How would that be for promoting aggressive play?
Phreak has made a profoundly irritating statement on the topic of anti-fun.
Quote: Terrify has less counter-play. Arguably it's a worse skill in this regard. Sure you could ward and see Fiddle coming from the side, but what about Flash? What about someone else landing a CC or slow first? At some point you're going to get hit. It's a short range instant-cast spell. If the trigger results in instant death, do you really feel like, "Man, if only I was better at this game, I wouldn't have instantly died. Oh well, well played Fiddlesticks."
I have a proposal. If we can assume all the things in that statement, can we not also assume that the player has the ability to learn from their mistakes? Can we assume that learning from mistakes is preferable to creating an ever-expanding safety net so players don't actually need to grow and evolve? Do you know how a metagame develops and changes?
In this specific Fiddlesticks case, if you get CCed, flashed on, then feared, you are indeed well and truly ****ed. But look at what it took. It took you being out of position, Fiddlesticks to burn a flash, an ally to be in position and hit you with a snare/slow. For most of us the immediate solution is to not be so far ahead of the group, not be so far away from the tower, banshee's veil?, and in some specific cases, not be such a dumbass. Is this a lesson that will be learned immediately? Probably not. That is how we get the evolution of a player. If you were to remove Terrify from the game, you remove a way for this lesson to be learned. Please refrain from treating your player base as spoiled, pampered children. David Sirlin would describe type of player you are fostering as scrubs.
At last we are at the end.
The concept of finding and stopping "anti-fun" things is a laudable goal. It makes you feel good. It's just not something that should every actually be done. Doing so halts growth and evolution. Starcraft would not be the benchmark of RTS and e-sports everywhere if Blizzard nerfed entire strategies into oblivion.
Further, you actually can't identify what "anti-fun" is. Sure there are concepts & ideas. But we have concepts & ideas for fairness too. Can you tell me exactly what fair is? Can you tell me exactly what skills are anti-fun? Where is the line? A 3 second stun is okay but what about a 5 second stun? 4? 3.5? 3.25? 3.125? 3.0625? 3.03125? What are the boundaries? Where does it begin? More importantly, where does it STOP?
Who will decide what anti-fun is? Will they publicly list exactly what anti-fun is? Will the list be static or change with the mood of the player base? (Hint: for that rhetorical question there is a right and a wrong answer).
The best games evolve on their own under the creative power of the player base. When you patch things every 2-3 weeks there isn't enough stability to foster natural development. Lastly, when you enforce a specific artificial will(rule, or environment, or restriction, really anything not generated by the player base), ANY will, on a game... the game dies. Sometimes slowly, sometimes quickly... But the game dies.
Shameless repost from official LoL forum.
http://na.leagueofle...d.php?t=1871594
Edited by Aldair, 29 February 2012 - 08:30 PM.
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