58 replies to this topic

[Aldair]

Runepriest, on 02 March 2012 - 07:01 AM, said:

Burden of knowledge: For the most part I think this is just art design laziness, I can't think of a single mechanic that you couldn't design a particle/sound/whatever for that you couldn't easily recognize on sight, and then all you would have to do is use Death Recap (Y'know, once that thing is actually FIXED) to figure out what it does. The first part I think is REALLY important, if there's an effect that is really vague and hard to actually notice then it's just a bad one regardless of everything else. Plus, then it's boring for the person using it, you want to see that guy BLEED when he gets hit by a rupture, not just the health bar but the actual graphics of the game.

I think the actual issue is more that art & particles won't fully convey WHAT exactly is happening. Sure you can read the tooltip in the death recap to learn but the particles won't tell you. Think carefully over all the animations and lights and other things that happen when a character has a buff or skill. Generally, they convey a general sense of what is happening. Cho'Gath's rupture has dust on the ground as well as a rumbling sound, general instinct jumps to "bad, ground, there".
Singed's poison cloud has a hissing sound and a purple cloud. Because the cloud originates from the enemy character we get a feeling of "if I go there something bad will happen".
I honestly can't think of a way you could thematically demonstrate that a person shouldn't move. They will certainly learn the first time which is why most people agree that their reasoning is nonsense. It really is the easy way out and a question dodging tool because virtually all abilities in LoL do not specifically convey what is happening unless you already know what is going to happen.

[Gwynbradd]

Aldair, on 02 March 2012 - 07:11 AM, said:

I honestly can't think of a way you could thematically demonstrate that a person shouldn't move. They will certainly learn the first time which is why most people agree that their reasoning is nonsense. It really is the easy way out and a question dodging tool because virtually all abilities in LoL do not specifically convey what is happening unless you already know what is going to happen.

Actually you can demonstrate that moving could hurt you, but it'd require to be used once on you before you fully understand what the ability does. Being bound to a region and getting stunned for going out of it's range or bleeding on movement would be such animations. As you said you won't know what an ability does before the first use against you. There are some abilities in LoL that looked similar to a skillshot and where I wasn't exactly sure as a beginner whether it is or not until I've played against said champion. Same for effects, if you didn't read the tooltip, how the hell are you supposed to know that this spell is going to stun, slow, flip etc. you. Pretty much why burden of knowledge is bad excuse for not introducing new and interesting mechanics.

I can understand that they don't want an overly complex champion (Invoker comes to mind) in LoL, where the difference between a good and bad player would be much much bigger than for instance with Brand or Ahri (no offense meant if you like these champions). But apart from champions who are that difficult that it makes it hard to balance the champion properly due to being too strong on good play and too weak on bad I don't see why you can't demand from players to know what the enemy does you're facing and how to counter his abilities. That should be part of the game and actually is for a lot of the non standard champions in LoL.

[Coal]

Funny thing is that they called Morg shield an example of something 'good'. How is it good? I see a shield coming over Morg and then what? How do I know I can't CC the one with the shield? or that it blocks some magic damage? When I started the bar wasn't even purple. It's almost as much a burden of knowledge as bloodseeker ult is.

[Runepriest]

Morg's CC immunity you pick up easily on the first CC you cast on it by the "Can't be CC'd". Also yes, it wasn't always purple but now that it is it's pretty clear that it's a special type of shield, which if you're watching the health bar doesn't block AA's.

[Suzaku910]

Aldair, on 02 March 2012 - 07:01 AM, said:

Very true. True damage by itself is generally fine. New mechanic and all that noise. % true damage is very problematic. There is no counter for true damage & the % of max health aspect means that once the required numbers of occurences of true damage happen, you die. I do not believe Vayne is broken because she can be countered using the simplest of methods. Kill her. Blind also works. Stunning her too. My friends like playing beefy champions, when they see a Vayne we all know that she's going to hit 0-5 before the first tower falls. We single her out again and again and again.

Going back to Vayne being broken or not. My friends DO believe Vayne is broken. Their argument is that once Vayne hits a certain point in her build her damage output skyrockets into obscenity regardless of her earlier position. And all she has to do is literally stand there to do it. I believe this could fall under a varient of Zileas' aspect of "power without gameplay". But since I was wrong before, I reserve the right to be wrong again.

A final visit to my opinion of why she isn't broken. She isn't picked exclusively over all other possible ranged AD carries. Hidden OP? Sure, why not. But it doesn't seem so.

Nah, that's just hypercarrying. Suck without items but monstrous with them (Vayne is actually one of the closest things to a hypercarry LoL has :X)

Power without Gameplay is more akin to Sona's auras, where they are powerful but besides mathcrafting you don't really see or feel the power that an ability has. It makes champions not feel good to play because you know you have an effect on the game, but you can't actually see or pinpoint the effect on the game visually/just by playing. In the end, it makes it so that the abilities have to be overpowered to feel the effect (like Sona's old auras or Soraka's armor buff) or that the champion just feels flat-out boring (Sona prior to innate rework).

[Aldair]

I am glad I reposted this here. Much better conversation than on the League Forum... Fixing some of my own misconceptions is a huge boost for what I am trying to do.

"The Lexicon" is around 20% complete. 4,421 words thus far.

[Nemerian]

Aldair, on 02 March 2012 - 07:11 AM, said:

I honestly can't think of a way you could thematically demonstrate that a person shouldn't move.

while moving: blood gushing everywhere, healthbar decreasing, you hear bleeding.
while not moving: nothing;

[malphitethewise]

If blood seeker is the same as blood hunter in HoN (which i'm sure they are, names are so similar), then he's pretty anti fun imo, once he hits 6, either you run and die, or you stand still and still die, on top of a 6 second level 1 silence....

[Rapid99]

An interesting delve into the concept of anti-fun, though I’m not sure Riot is doing as bad a job as OP would make it out to me. There is no doubt that the constantly shifting balance scale has an impact on the competitive community digging its roots in and defining what are the good team makeup’s / strategies, but I would consider this a different type of balance than traditional competitive games rather than an inferior one.

The constant patches prevent the player base from getting a complete grip on the state of the game before it changes again but it also keeps the roster fresh and at the very least the unpredictability prevents the game from settling into a “X are the best champions for X position and X is the definite way to counter it”. It limits the depth that players can use and abuse game mechanics (such as the Starcraft 2 windows of opportunity case), which is a good and a bad thing. Good because it allows for unforeseen strategies / builds to cause a breakout in competitive play, but bad because there’s only so far players can develop their builds and strategies in the current game environment before it shifts.

As far as anti-fun goes though, I would argue that the idea of “preventing players from playing the game” is pretty close to the mark and gameplay changes have reflected Riot’s motivation to steer the game away from situations in which this arises. The Fiddlesticks example stated in the original post – which is more of a disadvantaged situation rather than a removal of options isn’t an example of this. It’s pretty obvious in a case such as this that the player on the receiving end would have had at least some chance to prevent the death.

Anti-fun isn’t simply a nice concept to make people feel good, completely separate from a harsh reality where players shouldn’t be limited by some “artificial rule?”. A prime example of anti-fun would be Riots recent attempt to prevent snowballing in competitive play. The issue Riot was dealing with was competitive play swinging too hard in favor of the team that wins 1, maybe 2 good fights. The argument – that the team gained so much of a power lead that the losing team had little to no chance to fight back and take control of the match. Now I don’t think that the losing team in this case should not have to fight for their victory, don’t get me wrong. If your team has lost the last two fights and are struggling it should take some real teamwork and solid play to get back in the game, but that’s it you SHOULD be able to get back in the game by outplaying your opponents.

I would argue that it’s anti-fun if scaling is at a point where a lead means almost inevitable defeat. If irrelevant of whether you outplay your opponents their power lead means that they beat you not only is it not fun for the losing team, it’s also not fun for the spectators. I for one know how boring a competitive match can be to watch when one player / team gets a big lead and then slowly picks their opponent down to nothing. Champions like pre-nerf Vayne are a good example of this at a broader player-base level. Vayne scaled so hard and so harshly that it didn’t matter how badly you stomped on her early game, if she got some money and levels she would be able to take almost anyone on. In addition to this once she had that power lead there was very little most players could do to combat this. Yes you can argue that you simply co-ordinate to take her down but this is true for any champion.

Anti-fun is not about removing mechanics that punish unskilled players (like stunlocks etc), but more about removing and/or fixing elements of the game that take the gameplay down a specific path with very little deviation. Forcing passivity because you literally have no other options when faced with a hardcore scaled enemy is not fun. It’s not that players should not be able to become an unstoppable powerhouse if they outplay their opponents consistently, but that there should never be a point where the losing teams options become so limited they get forced on a downward spiral WHILE NOT BEING ABLE TO COMBAT THIS BY THEMSELVES.

Oh and a quick note on the state of Evelynn. The problem with her was not that scrubs couldn't deal with her so she be removed, it was that to deal with her your team was forced into passivity. This was the ONLY WAY to reliably deal with her at a competitive level. If a team could reliably force the enemy team into a passive laning phase simply by picking Evelynn, this was an issue. Aside from banning Evelynn or picking her first there was literaly NOTHING the revieving team could do to prevent this and this is what I believe the actual concept of anti-fun is. Being FORCED down a particular route reguardless of enemy / your own skill. Being forced to change up your build/strategy because you're having a tough lane is not the same as being forced to tower-hug at a competitive level because that's the only reliable way to keep Evelynn at bay early game, there is no player choice involved in the latter.

Edited by Rapid99, 25 April 2012 - 11:26 PM.