League of Legends: I finally updated the player list in the OP!

[OceansAndrew]

When you went ham on Nasus and got that shutdown I was like

"SHIT JUST GOT REAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAL"

did you ever find that nexus? I was sympathetic to your plight. :'-(

[Nabeel Ansari]

did you ever find that nexus? I was sympathetic to your plight. :'-(

I did, and I shot it with a laser

and as long as a player wasn't trying to throw we all had a ton of fun.

Hey, I found the nexus!

Edited August 23, 2013 by Neblix

[prophetik music]

some part of me wishes that everyone wouldn't always roll good tanks to try for another carry. we had three ADCs, an ap burst, and singed last night in an aram...and singed rolled and got eve. needless to say, we got cremated. i don't get it - singed is super fun to play because you get tanky and still deal loads of damage. do people not realize you need tanks just as much in aram as you do in normals?

along those lines is that it's really annoying when the other team makes fun of a tank that has a lot of deaths - even if that tank is setting up kill after kill. case in point - i was 2-10 last night as singed, and the other team is razzing me in allchat saying i'm terrible because i had so many deaths. it was 40-20 at that point, mostly because of a wretched zyra who missed her ult four times in a row and a sivir who never bought lifesteal and got dueled down by shen three seperate times. now, if i've got 15 assists and 2 kills when we've only got 20 total, i think that's darn good. i wound up having the second-most kills on our team at the end of the game, and being able to duel any two or three of my opponents, but the view that tanks are bad permeates aram and that frustrates me.

[Nabeel Ansari]

people judging player skill in ARAM?

[relyanCe]

ARAM is longrange burst or cc-heavy tank rush

player skill...? I mean sure, you may be diamondtier in your play but if the enemy team comp crushes yours, upsets are truly truly rare

[Bleck]

league of legends is longrange burst or cc-heavy tank rush

the secret

[relyanCe]

well yeah but

[Bleck]

man I'm so glad they added in ravenous hydra to help those ailing melee carries

*gets fucking destroyed by invincible splashsteal wukong top-lane*

so... s-so glad...

[Ryan Jobson]

is that stinking monkey boy really that good? my buddy keeps telling me to buy him but... i dunno,.. he's a freaking monkey!

[Nabeel Ansari]

A fed Wukong is about as scary as a fed Riven.

Just send 3 guys to fight him... alone... and he'll be dealt with. You two can handle the rest of the team, right?

[Tensei]

^ Aren't those like bruisers or something, rather than carries?

[RiverSound]

^ Aren't those like bruisers or something, rather than carries?

For example, Riven is built like a carry: full ad items&lifesteal, and usually a guardian angel to top it off. So you could count it as an additional ad carry in terms of damage output. Jayce is similar to that.

[prophetik music]

tensai knows the difference. he's being ironic.

[Nabeel Ansari]

Okay so I just got out of a game against a 547 AD Fiora who healed 60% of her life in one auto attack

WHAT THE FUCK

[Tensei]

tensai knows the difference. he's being ironic.

No, I legit don't know what a 'bruiser' is supposed to be, but I keep seeing people refer to champions like Wukong and Riven as such.

[Bleck]

champs who get lots of cc and are tough to kill because of their mobility and/or free tankiness but also get enough damage to kill other champs easily

most of the champs that people refer to as 'bruisers' are called 'fighters' in lol's official terminology but not all 'fighters' are 'bruisers'

in fact they arguably changed their terminology recently to reclassify 'ad carries' as 'marksmen' after thousands of people who played the game wondered out loud why ashe is considered the carry if their fucking darius is the one carrying their team

fun fact: every character popularly referred to as a bruiser is either overpowered or has a broken kit

[zircon]

I wish labels like that didn't exist, so Riot would stop pigeonholing their champion designs. Anytime people want to try a champ with a different kind of build they nerf the abilities/numbers to make it so you HAVE to play them in one specific way.

[Bleck]

the labels and the pigeonholing exist to reduce burden of knowledge, I think; having a bunch of characters that all play extremely differently only serves to make the game more opaque to newer players and ultimately reduces the size and quality of the playerbase

also, I'm okay with a character having a single way to be played when there are over one hundred different characters to choose from; the novelty of AP Ashe or AD Malzahar or Six Warmogs Veigar isn't really worth obfuscating a new player's learning process

[Lampje4life]

I wish labels like that didn't exist, so Riot would stop pigeonholing their champion designs. Anytime people want to try a champ with a different kind of build they nerf the abilities/numbers to make it so you HAVE to play them in one specific way.

I've been maining AP Tristana for the past ~420 ranked games, it's great fun and still not (too) nerfed. So some champions definately still can be played in different ways.

Though I agree it would be nice to see some different items on specific champions, it's all kinda predictable right now and if you don't follow the meta, you can count on getting reported after the match.

[Tensei]

I think there's something to be said for emergent gameplay. Some of the most iconic, important gameplay mechanics of entire genres started out unintended. Can you imagine Capcom patching out combo's in SF2, or ID software removing rocket jumping in Quake?

Riot essentially putting a hard limit on pushing early towers and severely restricting viable character builds rubs me the wrong way for that reason.

[zircon]

I don't think it adds to the burden of knowledge much, if at all. Let's say you're playing AP Alistar, which was interesting because it let him do burst damage instead of just being a damage-soaking CC tank (of course, he had to give up some tankiness to do so). Playing against him would be no different. You still want to avoid his attacks. It just adds more options for how to build him and makes the game more flavorful.

LoL has a lot of mechanics that I appreciate compared with Dota2, but I think we can all agree that Dota2 has an objectively very large fanbase and is a competitive success. You don't need to turn LoL into Dota2 by having gold lost on death, couriers, TP stones, way higher mana costs, etc. to take some inspiration from their more varied hero design.

[Bleck]

I think there's something to be said for emergent gameplay. Some of the most iconic, important gameplay mechanics of entire genres started out unintended. Can you imagine Capcom patching out combo's in SF2, or ID software removing rocket jumping in Quake?

Riot essentially putting a hard limit on pushing early towers and severely restricting viable character builds rubs me the wrong way for that reason.

the difference with those examples is that everyone can do combos in street fighter, and everyone can rocket jump in quake

whereas early tower pushing limits the viable champion pool to 'people who can push towers early', and viable character builds generally seems to refer to building a champion in such a way as to give them damage and cc and tankyness which is fun to play as of course but uh isn't really fun to play against

I don't think it adds to the burden of knowledge much, if at all. Let's say you're playing AP Alistar, which was interesting because it let him do burst damage instead of just being a damage-soaking CC tank (of course, he had to give up some tankiness to do so). Playing against him would be no different. You still want to avoid his attacks.

playing against him would be no different except now his powerful CC combo also does huge amounts of damage to you and he's still able to get tanky because of his ult

remember earlier when I said that every champion with a kit that makes them tanky for free but also enables huge damage is either overpowered but broken? what's the point of lol being a team game if it has characters that fulfill every meaningful part of a team by themselves?

also, I'm pretty sure that any character where your strategy is to just not go anywhere near them is zero fun to play against and severely limits effective and entertaining counterplay, which is why they nerfed alistar so hard in the first place

LoL has a lot of mechanics that I appreciate compared with Dota2, but I think we can all agree that Dota2 has an objectively very large fanbase and is a competitive success. You don't need to turn LoL into Dota2 by having gold lost on death, couriers, TP stones, way higher mana costs, etc. to take some inspiration from their more varied hero design.

I agree with having more varied design for playable characters - I just don't agree when it involves playstyles that are so wildly different that opposing players have to hard counter that character, which limits player freedom more than it enables it (e.g having to play a character that can counter Jayce top or else you're straight fucked), or when 'varied design' is a codeword for 'overpowered/broken champ'

way back in either this thread or the dota 2 thread, tensei pointed out how nobody in lol played like broodmother, and I disagreed - I was wrong to disagree there, but now I've played/watched enough dota 2 to know that broodmother is very rarely picked in matches compared to the popular characters that are often essentially the 'bruisers' of dota2; characters that have kits that are so powerful that they don't necessarily win by more skillful playing (i.e enabling good plays for your team) but rather by removing your opponent's ability to do the same, which is competitive I guess but more importantly isn't any fun

and don't get me wrong this happens a lot in lol too (e.g wards and shields are slowly making the game unfun), I'm just saying that a lot of changes that people say they want to happen for the good of the game are actually just for novelty purposes that are just gonna make things worse over time

[Tensei]

the difference with those examples is that everyone can do combos in street fighter, and everyone can rocket jump in quake

whereas early tower pushing limits the viable champion pool to 'people who can push towers early', and viable character builds generally seems to refer to building a champion in such a way as to give them damage and cc and tankyness which is fun to play as of course but uh isn't really fun to play against

I don't really see the distinction here. Both Rocket Jumps and Combos changed the way Quake and Street Fighter played, in the sense that pretty much every player had to learn how to utilize those mechanics themselves, as well as figure out how to play against them. You are always free to draft champions that can push quickly as well, and I do think that if given a chance, the community could develop ways to play against it. Except now we won't know if that's possible, because Riot effectively removed it. Much like stealth and proxy Singed. I'm gonna say that the way it is right now (Towers start with additional armor which starts decaying after 4 minutes) is about as unintuitive to a new player as denying.

Even if fast 2v1 pushes were deemed imbalanced, there are far more elegant solutions for nerfing it than effectively adding a hard limit on when it's okay to push down a tower, such as cheap items or summoner spells that clear minions faster or maybe temporarily power up a single tower.

Edited August 25, 2013 by Tensei

[OceansAndrew]

As a newer player who has played for maybe 25 hours total, I am strongly in favor of Bleck's argument that effectively managing the complexity of the game is a benefit to it as a whole. I haven't even seen half the champions in action, either on my team, or elsewhere, let alone additional rogue builds. There are over 100 choices already, and for those that have been playing since release, that's cool, but if the game is to survive and keep people playing, there needs to be a complexity cap.

Old-timers DO burn out, and the game needs a constant flux of new players to keep the game making money. Without a specific, designed level of complexity, that cycles out old when adding new content, it's basically only going to make the barrier to entry that much more intimidating and difficult to achieve.

Riot seems to employ some pretty smart people, so I am pretty sure they know where they want the different levels of complexity to be for each group of players.

**Unrelated aside**

About 5 years ago, the makers of Magic the Gathering had realized their complexity creep had spiraled out-of-control, and created a guideline of how much specific complexity they would introduce at once. The hardest of the hardcore were terrified the game would be ruined, but the more defined identities of colors and streamlined rules text increased the tournament playing Magic population has quadrupled since. More players for them means more money into the game, which in turn is better for the players.

[prophetik music]

i have never seen anyone build ad akali, so i tried it tonight. it is surprisingly effective (on aram). hydra into hextech into spirit visage gives you 55% spell vamp, ~20% lifesteal with runes or masteries, and a 20% bonus to those regen effects, and a lot of good base stats. and you crap damage since you have a tiamat's. the magic resist and hp help a lot too.