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Gaming News
Topic Started: Aug 28 2011, 09:03 AM (32,832 Views)
MrMarill
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DAT STORY TIEM

I feel I'm pretty qualified to step in here.

Riot lies. Riot are a company driven by friendly lies and broken promises. The experiences of new players simply don't matter to them as LoL is spread by word of mouth. Very few people are going to start the game for the first time without hearing about it from a friend who's willing to play with them.

For example, the Tutorial is years old and recommends requires you to build Thornmail on the Champion Ashe. I'm pretty sure if I saw somebody build Thornmail on Ashe in a Ranked game, I'd flip a table. Those are two things that should never, EVER go together but they're in the tutorial. Riot does not care for their new players as long as some of them stay to give them money.

As for the learning curve, I think I'd argue that LoL is a game with a ludicrously high skill ceiling but a low entry point. That said, there are so many things going on that Riot never really teach the player and that really needs to change.

LoL is very easy to get hooked on as soon as you find a Champion you click with. This is getting harder and harder with the 117 Champions available in the game and a new player wouldn't be wrong to assume the more expensive (in-game points) ones were cooler and spent their hard earned points buying one to find them complex and unenjoyable. Part of this can come from appearances not fitting themes; the soul reaver chain warden Thresh is a Support, for example.

The biggest issue new players will have is the way that Riot punishes toxicity. This sounds odd, but basically Riot don't IP ban their players. This makes sense as to why they wouldn't with such a gigantic playerbase in their student years, but what this means is that a player banned for toxicity will almost immediately make a new account (referred to as a "smurf") and play on it until their ban is lifted. New players coming into games are, more often than not, matched with a majority of smurf players who all know where to go and what to do.

The Tutorial tells players nothing on how to actually play the game to a competent standard and what any of the systems mean. What's utterly mind boggling is that Riot in fact released a video on the basics to the game, how to play it and how to win found here[/u] (I really recommend it for a very basic understanding of the game). What makes ZERO sense is that the video is UNLISTED and can not be accessed in the client. I can't begin to fathom the reason for this.

Riot are going in the same direction as many other companies before them; i.e., they're so huge that they don't feel they can make mistakes so just do whatever the hell they want. In their effort to make "e-sports" a genuine term, they're alienating both new players looking to learn the basics and old players looking for a fun game at a lower level. Riot are spending millions of dollars advertising the game with their LCS so their number one priority right now should be making the game accessible and able to hook players. Right now, I don't see that happening.
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Olinea
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Romanticide
Feb 1 2014, 09:02 PM
I'll most likely always think toxicity is LoL's (and online gaming's) biggest problem. It's THE reason I don't play online, as I've probably said before. Well, that and I tend to prefer single player experiences anyway.

But yeah, I have to agree with this article. It shouldn't require tens of hours to BEGIN to learn a game. Like the author, I have a pretty big backlog, so if I'm not hooked in the first hour or so of gameplay, I'm going to find another game. After the first couple hours, I expect to start learning the game, and if I don't feel I have some kind of grasp of how to play after 5-10 hours, well, your game's not doing a good job of teaching. I don't expect to have everything mastered, but I expect to have some level of proficiency with what's been introduced to me.

I'd have to assume Riot knows this is an issue and is trying to do something about it. Me, I'd hope there's a glossary or some shit for common terms, a program that allows newcomers to learn from veterans, and perhaps other things I haven't thought of. Idk. *shrug*
I forgot I was going to address this article today - mostly because Marill, Sev, Kradden, and I are the resident experts on the game (Volt and Snow know more than a fair bit too) and it's always good to have perspective. Discussion's nice.

Marill and I had pretty different experiences learning to play the game so he can give some background if he wants (Preview Edit: Okay, so he did reply) but I'll speak mostly for myself. As I'm sure a number of people are aware LoL wasn't the first game of its kind - most people attribute that honor to DotA, a series of custom maps in Warcraft III created by Eul, passed down to Guinsoo (who now works for Riot), and finally the enigmatic IceFrog who continues to develop both DotA and its popular successor Dota 2.

I played more than a good bit of Warcraft 3 with my brothers and my dad and we all learned DotA the hardest way possible - in Warcraft 3. While the article makes a point of outlining how hard it is for new players, it is certainly better than back then, where it takes literally under a minute to make a new account - no email verification, captcha, nothing. Because the games aren't for a dedicated DotA client, there's no way to assess skill levels and your team can have a skilled veteran and first-timer on the same side. Toxic players don't have to worry about consequences for their actions - you can flame, berate, say the nastiest things, and leave the game in the middle to cripple your team and it's not likely you will see any of those people ever again. Some players downloaded a program called "Banlist" to record the names of these people. We had hundreds and hundreds of names in our banlist recording griefers, flamers, and leavers, and I could count on one hand how many times we saw those people.

I make it out to be some sort of feral no-holds-barred place where people scream at each other and no games get played, but that's not entirely true - you still got good games once in a while where people may criticize each other but ten people battle it out and the skill gap isn't totally one-sided. We learned in this environment and yeah, sometimes you meet assholes but learning the game was fun because we did it together. Our dad printed out a list of the item combinations so he could look up items he wanted to build without taking forever, we played "All Random" games to learn about every hero in the game and what they were capable of, and yeah, once in a while we decided we were going to feed and yell and ruin someone's game because we found it funny. We went from the initial first-time blues to oftentimes singlehandedly carrying games by using our developed mechanical skills, map knowledge, and game sense. We stopped after a while because we realized we were playing more than was good for us, and didn't touch the genre for a while.

Fast forward to sophomore year. My roommate was playing LoL and I was bored, decided to give it a try myself. I had a good bit of game sense but it still felt like a new game - I just knew the bare basics like last-hitting, not tower diving, and the like. I got flamed when I jumped into PvP but I was hardened from being berated in DotA and laughed it off. It's a video game. I was in a skill bracket that ideally would be matching me with new players like myself. Obviously this guy had played before.

Now that I'm done with my background let's look at the article.

The article doesn't seem to have a defined point that they address, instead hitting a few, but what's noteworthy to me is the end portion in which they basically explain that catering the game to newer players entails advertising to people who have never tried the game before, and if a rival competitor focused on catering to, and securing, a new playerbase, they would give Riot a run for their money.

I don't fully agree with this theory since it ignores a few key features to simplify the problem. While some customers are going to look to your noob-friendly MOBA because it's easy for them to settle into, it ignores the part where you need to secure your playerbase - specifically the part where the idea of simplifying the MOBA genre would involve taking out gameplay elements that form a certain core to it. League has done an alright job at this, if Dota 2 is to be taken as the other titan in the genre. The writer thinks that getting into League is hard? Dota has most every feature in League, in addition to destroyable trees, more punishing abilities, creep denies, multiple juke routes, and more. I have nothing but respect for those who try to learn the genre by starting with Dota 2. If you try to take out many more elements of League you either lose the essence of the MOBA genre or the tools that a player should be expected to have. If you dumb it down too much the skill ceiling will lower, and as I'm sure people can agree, if you can't do any better in a game, you won't keep playing it.

The idea of a noob-friendly MOBA also kinda falls short when you realize that Riot is well-entrenched and League has certain advantages that your new game doesn't. At the top of the list is the enormous playerbase. You almost certainly know multiple people in real life who play this game on a daily basis. And one of the best incentives for people to play the game is having friends who do, too. My grades tanked last year because I was playing with friends in Europe, in Davis, in Berkeley, and from back home. It gets so much more fun when you play with friends, and a competitor needs to be able to deal with the fact that people are loyal to Riot and won't easily hop over to another game, especially when they're familiarized with the game themselves. One of the best ways to learn is playing with people you know. The idea of a competitor which is noob-friendly mainly caters to people who don't know, or don't feel comfortable playing with, people in real life who would be willing to give them a hand in learning what is indisputably a tough game to pick up.

As far as Riot addressing the problem with new players goes, it's no secret that it's tough for people to get into the genre, both because of the learning curve and because of "smurf" accounts made by experienced players, either because the player is looking for an easy win by beating people who are learning the game, or - probably more commonly - people who have had their main accounts temporarily or permanently banned for behavioral-related issues. I mentioned learning with friends and I'm sure Jonty can talk more about that, but yeah, Riot could use a better tutorial for newer players to explain the game in a more realistic setting. Currently the tutorial is pretty short and is simplified to some degree (one lane instead of three) but this simplification means you lose out on some skills that you could certainly stand to know - map awareness, last-hitting, map objectives, neutral creeps, etc. If you're learning LoL on your own it can be a grind but having helped several players learn the game before it's not like being bad at the game means you're not going to have any fun.

My advice to people trying to get into the genre is to find people you know and realize that while once in a while there may be someone behind the other screen yelling about how bad you are, they're an asshole and it's just a game. Everyone learned the game at one point or another - if you're looking for immediate skill and something you can pick up right away, there are plenty of games out there. But the fact that it's so complex means that you take something away from every game and once you do get settled into it, it's certainly worth the time you put in.
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Snowman
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Romanticide
Feb 1 2014, 09:02 PM
Me, I'd hope there's a glossary or some shit for common terms, a program that allows newcomers to learn from veterans, and perhaps other things I haven't thought of. Idk. *shrug*
I agree. These games do usually have "suggested items" for different characters and sometimes different situations, but knowing why they're suggested and when you'd want to buy them would be nice. Also, regarding veterans teaching new players, I do know of at least one game that does that. Team Fortress 2 calls it "coaching", which makes sense. I haven't used it myself, but I believe it just lets a player communicate with another player with voice chat and I think the coach can also click on things to show someone "oh, you should go here" or "attack this guy". And I know people do play TF2 competitively, but compared to the other competitive games I've played (LoL, Dota 2, CSGO), it's not really that complex. So it'd be nice if other games had that too, assuming you can get toxic coaches banned.

Still, even if you have a good understanding of the game and you're of average or higher skill, toxic players will still be there... I wouldn't say I'm at a high ranking in any of the games I've played (only got ranked in one, and not highly) but I've played with friends/acquaintances who are highly ranked in games. It hurts to even think about playing with one of them because he's such a terrible person when he's playing games, and the other guy gets pretty upset if someone else is the reason we lost but he doesn't actually get mad at people like the other guy. My other friends who play actually behave like people though, so they're fine. It's just that some people always want a higher ranking and if they think you're the reason they died or lost the game or something, they might be angry at you. My IRL friends who play competitive games seem to only care about their rankings in the game and not about enjoying it. Almost every weekend, one friend will say "oh, I'm gonna grind up to [ranking] this weekend". So if people make plans for the whole weekend and they don't work out, well, more reasons to get mad.

Also, I just noticed that Marill and Oli made hella long posts in the time I wrote this. I opened this up then started playing Minecraft, heh. So I'm gonna read that now.
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Romanticide
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I wanted to get to this yesterday because it seems to be turning into a good discussion and all, but Superb Owl stuff means I wouldn't have given it the thought it deserves. So yeah. >.>

MrMarill
Feb 2 2014, 03:41 AM
LoL is very easy to get hooked on as soon as you find a Champion you click with. This is getting harder and harder with the 117 Champions available in the game and a new player wouldn't be wrong to assume the more expensive (in-game points) ones were cooler and spent their hard earned points buying one to find them complex and unenjoyable. Part of this can come from appearances not fitting themes; the soul reaver chain warden Thresh is a Support, for example.
At what point do you stop adding champions?

If your goal is to simply make money (let's be real, it's a huge one for Riot, and I can't blame them for this), the only right answer is "never". New champions for the player base to try out results in new strategies being found, players finding new champions they love, and all that other good stuff.

But I would think that at some point, you would have tapped out all the meaningful possibilities for champions. You can keep adding new mechanics to the game and make new champions that maximize these mechanics' potential, but at some point the game is going to be so bloated that it's both off-putting to newcomers and a bitch to balance/patch/maintain in general. Sure, you can just combine things that haven't been combined before, but metagames (in my admittedly limited experience) tend to emphasize characters that specialize in something. And why not? If you have something that's really good at one thing, why use something that's mediocre at two things? Players are smart enough to know you're using something mediocre and exploit that fact. You can make gimmicky champions, but people recognize gimmicky things in the context of a given game when they see them and usually (though not always, obviously) avoid them.

I stick to just gameplay possibilities because you can make new races, make champions that look good in some way, and so on, until the cows come home, but that adds nothing meaningful in terms of gameplay. Complexity for complexity's sake and quantity for quantity's sake aren't good things.


Quote:
 
The biggest issue new players will have is the way that Riot punishes toxicity. This sounds odd, but basically Riot don't IP ban their players. This makes sense as to why they wouldn't with such a gigantic playerbase in their student years, but what this means is that a player banned for toxicity will almost immediately make a new account (referred to as a "smurf") and play on it until their ban is lifted. New players coming into games are, more often than not, matched with a majority of smurf players who all know where to go and what to do.

There's also a legitimate reason to smurf, that being to test new strategies in lower-level games. I'd have to assume that if you try something you're not 100% familiar with at a high enough level, you will get destroyed. Smurfing against a newcomer won't tell you anything about a new strategy because the newcomer is likely going to make newcomer mistakes, so it'd be almost meaningless.

As for the actual point you're making, I think we both know this is done because money. IP ban someone, even if they deserve it, and they might not come back and spend money on the game. I'd think Riot has a large enough player base to take a stand and say "we don't want this kind of player in our game, and if it means less money, so be it", but I doubt that's going to happen. Most everyone wants to make more money, which generally means growing and growing until that's no longer sustainable.


Quote:
 
Riot are going in the same direction as many other companies before them; i.e., they're so huge that they don't feel they can make mistakes so just do whatever the hell they want. In their effort to make "e-sports" a genuine term, they're alienating both new players looking to learn the basics and old players looking for a fun game at a lower level. Riot are spending millions of dollars advertising the game with their LCS so their number one priority right now should be making the game accessible and able to hook players. Right now, I don't see that happening.

You could also argue they're an innovator in their domain, so there isn't a blueprint for them to go by. There have been other games with millions of players, most of those being MMORPGs, which obviously have different goals and different gameplay. There haven't been many games like this. The genre is relatively new, which goes without saying. The free-to-play model is still in its infancy, but it's only going to get bigger because it's a great idea in theory and because mistakes will (hopefully) be learned from.

What I'm trying to say is, they just might not know what the hell they're doing. At least, not completely. They have 27 million reasons they're doing *something* right. You don't build that kind of base by fucking up at every turn.

But yes, I have to agree. Major sports are popular because they're relatively simple to watch. Is LoL on this level? Would I be able to grasp at least some basics by watching top teams go at it? Is it entertaining to watch? These are all things that attract casuals/newcomers, and if they aren't being done well, Riot is going to fail with this whole e-sports thing. (I do think they're being done well to some extent - You don't fill the Staples Center with spectators if they'll be watching a shitty game.)


Olinea
 
I don't fully agree with this theory since it ignores a few key features to simplify the problem. While some customers are going to look to your noob-friendly MOBA because it's easy for them to settle into, it ignores the part where you need to secure your playerbase - specifically the part where the idea of simplifying the MOBA genre would involve taking out gameplay elements that form a certain core to it. League has done an alright job at this, if Dota 2 is to be taken as the other titan in the genre. The writer thinks that getting into League is hard? Dota has most every feature in League, in addition to destroyable trees, more punishing abilities, creep denies, multiple juke routes, and more. I have nothing but respect for those who try to learn the genre by starting with Dota 2. If you try to take out many more elements of League you either lose the essence of the MOBA genre or the tools that a player should be expected to have. If you dumb it down too much the skill ceiling will lower, and as I'm sure people can agree, if you can't do any better in a game, you won't keep playing it.

I suppose the trick for attracting newcomers/casual players is to make your game "easy to learn but hard to master" while keeping a reasonably complex version of the elements that make the game fit into its given genre. Not an easy task.

Like I said, I'd want to play a game in which I feel like I'm making progress. Contrary to what I may have implied, I don't necessarily *mind* slow progress as long as I know I'm making progress. I know that at some point I'll plateau and it'll probably be a relatively low plateau for various reasons, but yeah. My point is, I don't care for the idea that I might need to play a game for 100 hours or something insane just to learn the basics. I really hope that this is not the case with LoL. (100+ hours for advanced mechanics and still more time to learn the metagame? Yeah, that's more like what I'd expect.)

And yes, securing a player base is not easy. Just look to any WoW competitor for that. If you're releasing a new MMORPG, it's going to be compared to WoW and much of your player base is already very familiar with that game. I suppose this is because WoW is synonymous with that genre as a whole; even someone not familiar with games might recognize "World of Warcraft" by name at this point. While I doubt LoL has reached that status, especially with another huge competitor in DotA, I do feel both of these games might become synonymous with this genre and thus make it harder for a more n00b-friendly title to establish itself. Whether that's for better or worse, I don't know.


Quote:
 
The idea of a noob-friendly MOBA also kinda falls short when you realize that Riot is well-entrenched and League has certain advantages that your new game doesn't. At the top of the list is the enormous playerbase. You almost certainly know multiple people in real life who play this game on a daily basis. And one of the best incentives for people to play the game is having friends who do, too. My grades tanked last year because I was playing with friends in Europe, in Davis, in Berkeley, and from back home. It gets so much more fun when you play with friends, and a competitor needs to be able to deal with the fact that people are loyal to Riot and won't easily hop over to another game, especially when they're familiarized with the game themselves. One of the best ways to learn is playing with people you know. The idea of a competitor which is noob-friendly mainly caters to people who don't know, or don't feel comfortable playing with, people in real life who would be willing to give them a hand in learning what is indisputably a tough game to pick up.

Agreed. The only reason I'd ever consider picking up this game is because I know I could learn from you, Marill, or whoever else in our community is willing to help. As I might have made clear once or twenty thousand times, I don't know many gamers IRL. The few I do know are into very different games. I don't know where else I'd go to meet people who would help me learn to play this game.

This whole paragraph does imply a failure in advertising, though. Successful advertising should make someone like me, who isn't necessarily in the target audience (I obviously game, though I'd find it very hard to say this type of experience is targeted at me.) feel "hey, maybe I should try this League of Legends thing; it seems interesting." Even getting high-level matches/tournaments covered on major gaming sites would probably do wonders for them. Writers or whoever that could convey the complexity of high-level play while still making it entertaining could be immensely helpful in attracting newcomers. EVE Online sounds awesome when sites write about its wars, though by most accounts playing it seems like a snoozefest.


Quote:
 
I mentioned learning with friends and I'm sure Jonty can talk more about that, but yeah, Riot could use a better tutorial for newer players to explain the game in a more realistic setting. Currently the tutorial is pretty short and is simplified to some degree (one lane instead of three) but this simplification means you lose out on some skills that you could certainly stand to know - map awareness, last-hitting, map objectives, neutral creeps, etc. If you're learning LoL on your own it can be a grind but having helped several players learn the game before it's not like being bad at the game means you're not going to have any fun.

No tutorial is going to teach you everything, especially with a game as complex as LoL seems to be, but it sounds like this tutorial is the barest of the bare-bones. I feel like it'd require minimal resources to make the tutorial a bit more informative on realistic situations that you might see as a newcomer to the game. This is kind of, you know, the entire reason to make a tutorial in the first place. If I can't apply things from your tutorial to the game as I'll be playing it in the first few hours, your tutorial has failed.
Edited by Romanticide, Feb 3 2014, 04:34 PM.
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MrMarill
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DAT STORY TIEM

Gonna reply to this later, so remind me to if I don't.
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Romanticide
Feb 3 2014, 04:26 PM
At what point do you stop adding champions?

If your goal is to simply make money (let's be real, it's a huge one for Riot, and I can't blame them for this), the only right answer is "never". New champions for the player base to try out results in new strategies being found, players finding new champions they love, and all that other good stuff.

But I would think that at some point, you would have tapped out all the meaningful possibilities for champions. You can keep adding new mechanics to the game and make new champions that maximize these mechanics' potential, but at some point the game is going to be so bloated that it's both off-putting to newcomers and a bitch to balance/patch/maintain in general. Sure, you can just combine things that haven't been combined before, but metagames (in my admittedly limited experience) tend to emphasize characters that specialize in something. And why not? If you have something that's really good at one thing, why use something that's mediocre at two things? Players are smart enough to know you're using something mediocre and exploit that fact. You can make gimmicky champions, but people recognize gimmicky things in the context of a given game when they see them and usually (though not always, obviously) avoid them.

I stick to just gameplay possibilities because you can make new races, make champions that look good in some way, and so on, until the cows come home, but that adds nothing meaningful in terms of gameplay. Complexity for complexity's sake and quantity for quantity's sake aren't good things.
The entire post has a lot of stuff written in here but I feel like this is a pretty good question, and as I was thinking about how I'd answer it I realized it's gonna be long. Strap in.

The most in-depth answer I can give requires a bit of knowledge of the metagames of LoL and Dota 2. I don't know how much you know about the genre so I'll try to give a crash course.

Posted Image

Posted Image

First is LoL, second is Dota 2. I'll use blue text for LoL terminology and red for Dota. They two have different maps but the biggest similarities are the three lanes - "top lane" extending from the bottom left corner to the top left corner to the top right, "bottom lane" from the bottom left corner to the bottom right corner to the top right, and "mid lane" stretching diagonally between the team's bases. Your "minions"/"creeps", or small uncontrollable soldiers, march along the path until they encounter enemy "minions"/"creeps" and battle. Where they meet is vital in the early game when people are weak, and you need to control that equilibrium such that you're playing safe near your tower (and thus it's difficult for people to ambush you) but not such that your opponents can throw caution to the wind and "push" (kill your creeps faster than theirs can die, so the creeps move forward and attack your tower) their creeps and destroy your tower, because it reduces the amount of safe points you have on the map. Outside the lanes are "jungle monsters"/"neutral creeps", more powerful than regular creeps - such that not every character in either game can efficiently take them down from the get-go without being mauled.


LoL

LoL's meta is pretty basic, and it's oriented around the roles that players set for a champion. With 5 players per team and three lanes, the amount of "gold", or money you get from killing creeps/players, is pigeonholed, because while you could send 2 people together in two of your lanes and one person by himself, you'd need to distribute the money and, at best, you end up with two mediocre people. However, to help alleviate this problem, typically one player is the jungler, and kill the jungle creeps from the beginning. You don't want your jungler to pair up with someone for a few levels because once he leaves you've now left your partner with less gold and experience than his opponent. So your team has three lanes as gold sources, plus a set of jungle camps for the jungler. This means you still have to deal with two players laning together.

The mid lane, being noticeably the shortest, is typically where you'll send a mage, because mages are frail and they need to be able to reach safety. Mages tend to heavily rely on levels so they can have more powerful spells quicker, and so your mage is going to lane by himself. Some teams opt for a different style and will send an assassin in the mid lane, because they also rely on levels, and because the mid lane is in the center of the map, you're able to most efficiently roam around and pick off weaker players across the map. Going from one corner to the other is a surefire way to fall behind in gold and levels, particularly if your ambush isn't successful.

The bottom lane is where you'll send two players - your "marksman" (think a traditional archer) and your "support". The solution to "4 gold sources, 5 players" lies in the support. The best characters designed for support are able to function well without any gold to boost damage output, instead relying on abilities and low-cost items to provide service to a team. Support characters' abilities pack a lot of "utility", which is kind of loosely defined, but I've always defined it as "something your teammates can take advantage of". Something to pin down an opponent, either by slowing or freezing them, is good utility, because an ability like that can be used in a lot of ways - to stop an enemy's advance, to stop an enemy's retreat and kill them, delay someone from reaching a point on the map, or some other function. Supports can heal their teammate and play a more passive lane (where their optimal strategy is to take few risks because your team's "marksman" is more effective than theirs later in the game with more items, and you don't want to blow the game before that happens), or have more aggressive spells to try and establish dominance and cripple the opponent such that they can't recover easily. A good support can do both given what your team needs to accomplish, and later releases are prime examples of power creep which I'll get to later.

The team's "marksman" has a pretty easy and a pretty difficult job. They rank highest on the totem pole in the lategame, because the items they get give benefits that synergize - attack damage to deal more damage per hit, attack speed to deal more hits (so instead of having one big attack once in a while, now you have a lot), and critical strikes, which give a chance to multiply damage you deal in an attack (so having good attack damage increases how much damage a crit does, and more attack speed means you have more opportunities to crit). They need a lot of money, and when they get it, they deal a crapton of damage. As such, they tend to be very high-priority targets, and fights are often won or lost based on how efficiently you can take down their marksman (if you do at all). Good marksmans have abilities to amplify damage output to stupidly high levels, by increasing one of the three big stats, up-front damage to assert dominance in the early game, and "gap closers" which let them escape from danger very quickly.

Your "jungler" does what I mentioned previously - spends their time killing neutrally-aligned monsters, running around the map, and providing an unknown to the enemy team. Vision is hugely important in these games, and having a jungler who could be literally anywhere is a gigantic asset. More times than I can count, I've played aggressively on an opponent who's in a bad spot only to realize that he was luring me into his jungler teammate and the tables turn in an instant. Teams without junglers are at big disadvantages because the opponent has constant vision on all members of that team and know when a play might be risky. Good junglers vary in their styles but they tend to be bulky or have strong regenerative abilities (to take repeated hits from powerful monsters), and usually have strong "crowd control" (stuns/slows) to make their ambushes more successful. If you spend too much time killing jungle monsters you lose pressure on the opponent, and if you spend all of your time running around and ambushing, you get very predictable in where you'll show up and lose out on money you'd get by killing creeps.

Top lane is weird to describe because it's hard to generalize the standard top laner characters, but the most traditional one is a "fighter" or "bruiser", who tend to be bulky but still pack up-close offense. You wouldn't ideally send someone frail into the top lane because they're alone, and it's a long way back to safety if your opponent is in control of the lane equilibrium. Bruisers can take a hit and give one right back, but this means that they aren't going to last as long as a dedicated tank, and they aren't going to deal as much sustained damage as a marksman or mage. Good bruisers need to provide an immediate threat through up-front damage, they need a way to stay in a fight longer (either through base stats that make them bulky by default, or by abilities), and they need to be a constant threat such that they cannot be ignored.

Some champions fit a role that lets them counter the norm. Urgot is a bulky marksman who lacks consistent damage output but trades this for a more bruiser-style role and a threatening ability that swaps places with an opponent, which lets your team pile on an unfortunate foe while you waltz out of their team. Nunu can be played as a jungler who focuses on crippling the opposing jungler by quickly killing the monsters on their side so they can't recover and fall behind. Teemo is a frail top laner who uses his range to dominate his (typically melee) opponent as he escapes danger by dropping mushroom land mines and speedily running away. These anti-meta characters aren't very common but they exist to provide a way to throw the opponent off their game and punish people who play too strictly to the established meta.

If you have 30 minutes to kill and kinda want a sample game to see it in action, there's an old video with me and my friends playing. There's a lot of terminology that you won't understand but there's gameplay and it pretty well illustrates a lot of the things I pointed out. Particularly note the fact that the scorpion and mummy (junglers) make surprise attacks that usually end in someone dying, Chris (the cow, support) tends to control the bottom lane with Peter (the weird spitting creature, marksman), a lot of jungler attention is paid to the top lane (from both sides), and while Viktor (the robot my friend played against in the mid lane) played very well and got powerful in the early game, we were able to isolate him in bad spots using my (scorpion's) strong crowd control ability and protect our spitting monster marksman so he dealt a bunch of damage.

[utube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oOAcBS6Z4Cg[/utube]

Dota 2

I'm admittedly less experienced with the Dota 2 meta than I am with LoL, but I do know a fair bit, so here goes:

Dota's meta differs from LoL because their characters have more powerful abilities and this allows/forces you to distribute gold differently. A stun that lasts for 3 seconds is extremely rare in LoL (I believe only 1-2 out of the 117 characters have something of that caliber), but in Dota some characters have up to 5 seconds of it. This means if an ability like that lands on you, you can't do anything for five seconds, and it usually spells death for you. Abilities like this don't come cheap, though - they tend to have drawbacks like immobilizing yourself for the duration, exorbitant mana costs, or requiring high levels for it to scale to that level. The abilities in Dota are significantly more powerful than those in LoL - sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse.

The Chinese adapted a playstyle that's generally used now called the 1-5 system. Every player on the team is assigned a number based on their priority for receiving money - the lower your number, the more important it is that this player gets money. 1s tend to be very reliant on gold and have abilities that function much better with money under their belt. You need your 1 to get as much money as they can, and fast. On the other end of the spectrum, your 5 has a huge amount of power in their abilities and, honestly, could spend the entire game without getting any gold and still perform well.

Dota still has the top, middle, bot lane convention, but there's also a set of terms they use called the short lane and long lane. In your "short lane" (bottom for the bottom-left team, top for the top-right team) you send your 1, your 4, and your 5 in a tri-lane where all of the money goes to the 1, and your 4 and 5 take no money. This lane is the "short lane" because your team can lure the neutral creeps to fight your creeps to let the equilibrium go to your side. So your "short lane" is the opponent's "long lane" because they spend all of their time deep in enemy territory, heavily unsafe and without many options to fix that. You send the 1, 4, and 5 together to ensure that your 1 gets money no matter what. No risks. Your 1 falls behind, you're fucked.

Opposing the 1, 4, and 5 is traditionally one guy - the 3. Yeah, he goes 1v3 against people with super overpowered abilities deep in enemy territory, so he needs to be really, really safe. You can send your tri-lane against theirs if you think you can beat them, but typically you play it safe. 3s need to function well with few items but they need to be safe - they tend to be ambushers or play supportive roles. It's hard to call.

In the midlane you have your 2s - standard stuff. They farm, they gank, they're powerful, but they aren't 1s.

Alternatively you can run a jungler (typically your 4) but the pool is very limited and there are a lot of counterplay options to shut a jungler down.

*exhale*

Actually addressing the question

The answer to the question "At what point do you stop adding champions?" depends on who you ask.

LoL has the unfortunate problem of pigeonholing their champions into specific roles. When someone is released the immediate reaction is typically "which lane will I play him/her/it in?", and a champion's role is typically established before it's even released (there are some exceptions such as Quinn, who was released almost a year ago and still struggles to find a defined role). As the game is loading you can see your opponent's team and about 80-90% of the time you can easily tell who is going where - the other 10% is some sort of gimmick or unexpected lane assignment. So when you release a new carry or support or something, you need to give them something that sets them apart, and would make you want to pick that specific jungler in a circumstance, or if your team needs an early-game mage you might want this one because it has something your team lacks - tank-busting, stuns, lategame fallback from great "scaling" (champions with great scaling suck early on but get very powerful later), etc.

Riot's design philosophy (which I'm actually a fan of) can sometimes get them into trouble. For example, they tend to try to avoid "anti-fun" abilities. A prime example is a "mana burn", where you cast an ability and it removes some of your opponent's mana. This leads to really boring gameplay because the character with the mana burn just ends up continually removing his opponent's mana until the opponent loses that resource and their character is stripped of its powers. You choose a character because of what it can do, and if it can't do that thing, you don't have fun. So Riot tries to introduce abilities that are not only fun to use, but fun to play against - typically "skillshots" that you need to aim (in the video, my friend had to aim a cylinder of light that ensnared people that it hit), so you have fun trying to aim it and if your opponent dodges it, they feel good about themselves.

But Riot's been criticized for its champion designs being rather... uninspired/same-y. There's a huge mobility creep problem in LoL where almost every new release has some form of gap closer to let them instantly traverse distances. Not everyone has an ability like that, and those who do tend to be newer releases. This discourages players from using old champions because they quite literally can't keep up with the newer champions. If you have a gap closer it means your mistakes are punished less easily, you have more room for aggression, and you have a gigantic advantage over those who can't do that. But they're fun for players to use, and flow well with other abilities, and so Riot continues to release champions with these gap closers. Mobility absolutely isn't wrong to have in a game like this, but it really sucks when your old favorites are being overshadowed.

Touching on something you said:

Quote:
 
If you have something that's really good at one thing, why use something that's mediocre at two things?


A lot of new releases tend to be jack-of-all trades and their power needs to be dampened across the board as a result, but having more tools is generally better than having more specialized ones. As an example, let's take one of the oldest champions, Soraka (purple), and compare her to Thresh (green), a rather new release. Both of these are choices you have when you play the support role.

Posted ImagePosted Image

Soraka is very binary, and is probably the closest thing to a cleric the game has. Her specialties include healing, restoring mana, damaging stars, and... more healing. You pick Soraka when you want a safe lane, when you don't want to get into big aggressive fights (small skirmishes are fine because you can recover) and when you don't want to get aggressed on. She has no way to reliably mitigate aggression other than adding health, and she isn't picked very often at all.

Thresh is one of the best supports in the game right now, and probably will always be. He can throw a hook at someone to ensare them and drag them over to you, or fly along the chain to drag himself to their position. He can throw a lantern to shield teammates and pull them to him, adding a gap closer (the best form of safety) to otherwise unsafe champions. He can swing his chain in a big loop to drag people towards him, or push them away to interrupt advances. His ultimate ability is to create a giant prison of walls that severely cripple people who walk through, in order to dissuade an advance or trap someone he's pulled himself to. Thresh has a tool for almost literally every job - he mitigates aggression for a safer lane, he can play aggressively to assert dominance, he provides a constant threat with his multitude of abilities to pick off an important player, he adds safety, protects allies, and... there's almost literally nothing Thresh can't do that you would want in a support. He is seen in almost every game at the professional level because professional support players have mastered his skillshots and overcome his high skill cap.

Soraka may be the best cleric in the game but she has very exploitable weaknesses. Thresh can do everything - while he doesn't heal as well as Soraka, he pairs well with everyone.

I make Thresh sound like a bad guy but in all honesty he's good for the game. You wouldn't see a Soraka skill video because a really good Soraka could do very few things different from an average Soraka. Thresh makes plays and they're exciting to watch, they're exciting to use, and he's fun to play against. Thresh is really well designed. He's just bad for Soraka.

Dota has roles but because the kits (abilities) of its heroes are more diverse and flexible (because they allow for much more freedom in hero creation, even if the ability might be "unfun" by Riot's standards), you have a lot more diversity in what sets a hero apart from the others. Your 1 is going to be a highly prioritized target, and there's a lot of ways you can get around that. Your 1 could have a long range, it can have huge mobility to dart around, make a bunch of copies of himself to confuse the enemy and amplify damage output, have a magic immunity ability to stop it from being locked down - every hero has something that they do and nobody else does quite the same. When I'm choosing a 5 I might want the ogre who's luck-based and has a chance for his spells to cast multiple times, the ice lady who gives mana to everyone on the map, the wisp who tethers to his allies and teleports them across the map, or something else. Everyone is very distinct in what they do and while they have a function that they perform best at, it means your choice in hero will drastically affect what you do in that game.

So my answer to the question is: You don't. New champions are great for the game because every release will add something new you can do, or some character to identify as. Riot hates binary champions like Soraka and tries to fix old champions with glaring flaws, because playing healbot is boring and playing against healbot is boring. It can be daunting to learn all of the champions but if you don't keep putting them out then the game gets stale.
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MrMarill
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Not really sure how I can follow up on Olinea's post but I'll try to focus on the question based on what he's said.

The fact of the matter is that League of Legends is a hella competitive game and people will nearly always pick the strongest thing they possibly can in a Ranked environment unless they're going out of their way to be hipster for the sake of it.

Riot have talked about the idea of certain Champions being generally good and others having a niche role that they excel at and I think this is good. You can't have everyone doing the same thing; it's just boring and not possible. At the same time, though, new releases are a huge source of income for Riot. If you release a new Champion, you need it to be strong enough for people to play. Of course, you can just go the default route of making them far stronger than everyone else, but Riot tend to just slap every mechanic onto their new Champions.

In 2013, only seven Champions were released for the entire year. In 2012, the aim was for a Champion every two weeks and that meant there was more allowance for niche picks. As it is, if Riot release a Champion after potentially months of work and build up, they can't be specialised Champion; they have to be generally good. Far less people are going to want to play someone every game if they just happen to do one thing very well, so recent releases have done everything very well and then one thing exceedingly well. I don't think there'll be any argument that all seven of the 2013 Champions had cohesive, complete kits, but there would definitely be an argument that they had far too many things going for them.

If you look at Warwick, a Champion from the original release of the game, he's pretty basic in what he does. His passive gives him health back on attacks, his first ability does the same thing, his second lets him attack faster, his third is a passive ability that makes you chase down low health enemies and his ultimate jumps onto an enemy and does a flurry of attacks. Interaction and gameplay-wise, only really his first and ultimate ability involve the player in some way; the rest are pretty straight forward.

Then look at the newest release, Yasuo. His passive gives him double crit chance as well as a shield every few seconds, his first ability is an extra attack that doubles as a knock up every few uses, his second ability grants him extra shield but also works as a wall to stop opponent's attacks; you get the idea. Basically, new Champions have a ton of extra things added onto their kits to give them either invisible, raw power or to just make them feel more exciting. In Yasuo's case, he's a low health, high damage melee unit. Generally this archetype suffers from exploding before they reach their target, so they gave him massive gap closers and a shield. These band aid solutions make Riot's newer releases far stronger than anything seen before and not necessarily because the numbers are higher.

I feel that new Champions kept the game fresh and exciting throughout 2012 but I'm now dreading each one because I know they're going to be unexciting to play against. With a few exceptions, most Champions before 2013 offered counterplay in some way; they used skillshots or they would have noticeable drawbacks. Recent Champions are full of mechanics that are fun to use but no considerations are given for how they are to play against. Thresh, the Support Olinea mentioned, can save any ally and bring them to him. This is unbelievably frustrating to play against but allows for clutch plays and exciting close calls to watch and play as.

As long as LoL's focus remains on evolving Esports, we will continue to see Champions who are a spectacle to behold before they're balanced. A unique thing that LoL has over any other game, traditional or virtual, is that all the plays you see professional players do look possible. The skillcap in LoL comes with decision making and game knowledge rather than raw mechanics on most Champions, so if you see somebody doing an incredible 1v3 play then most players will think they can do it. I mean, we can all physically move our fingers quickly enough to do the plays.

If you see Yasuo or Thresh do awesome dodges and plays for their team, it makes you want to play them and try it yourself. I know that I see videos of fantastic plays on YouTube and want to try that kind of stuff out for myself. I think this is the reason we'll continue to see Champion releases with overtuned kits and too many mechanics.

This wasn't really an answer to the question but more a discussion on Riot's design philosophy as of late. Urgh. What this means for new players, though, is that they're going to get more and more Champions to try and learn as the game evolves. It's not quite as bad as Pokemon, but LoL is very punishing if you don't know what your opponent is capable of. I feel that there should be a question mark next to every Champion as the game loads which can be clicked to see a basic overview of their kit, what their cooldowns are and how much damage they do. There's no point in spending millions on Esports to attract new players if there's no considerations given to what the trickle down effects of all these changes are.
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Granskjegg
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What the fuck is the deal with Flappy Bird any way?

http://www.gamespot.com/articles/ebay-auction-for-iphone-with-flappy-bird-installed-nearing-100-000-update/1100-6417630/

Makes me regret not downloading the game, only to sell my phone now, lol.

As the article says, it might just be troll bids, but I hope not, just for the lulz factor.
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Romanticide
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The deal is that the art is arguably ripped off. It looks so much like Super Mario World that I can't dismiss it as coincidence or even an homage. Sure, it's possible to make a character or even an area with similarities to an older title, which I'd have no issue with, but when your whole game evokes Super Mario World, it looks like a ripoff to me.
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DarkFlashlight
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The first time I saw somebody playing it, I thought it was a Super Mario ripoff*. Even the bird looks like a SMB fish.


I don't get why people even like that game. It's not fun. It's not enjoyable at all. The gimmick is being hard. That's not a gimmick. It's poor design.


*Although honestly, I wasn't wrong.
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Romanticide
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1) Casual players like things that are simple to play. It's no coincidence that the biggest games in the mobile/social gaming scenes are games with mechanics that are so simple to grasp that even a three year old child could pick them up. Floppy Bird? Tap the screen. Candy Crush Saga/the endless "match three" games? Match three objects up with each other. Angry Birds? Line up the shot. (We'll ignore the lolrandom physics.) It also helps that all of these games do not require significant time investments. You can play them for five minutes while waiting for the kids, for a haircut, or whatever else. Of course, five minutes adds up, so it's likely some people have played for as long as I've played, say, Persona 4. (240 hours across three files)

I don't think there's anything wrong with any of this, but it's not exactly what I'm looking for in my games. If anything is wrong with mobile gaming, it's that publishers/developers are taking advantage of an un-discerning audience.

2) People want to like what other people like. There are so many bad things (well, things I think are bad) that are liked that I can't help but think this is fairly obvious stuff.

3) I don't think the gimmick is "being hard" so much as it is "can I beat myself?" This is a game with very simple core gameplay. From what little I've cared to gather, the game keeps track of your best score, there's no online multiplayer aspect or whatever, and there's obviously no story. That leaves beating your previous high score as the only motivation I can think of.
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MrMarill
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I think that games like Flappy Bird are so "good" because the appeal is universal. It's the same as Tetris; it doesn't matter where you're from, the gameplay and systems don't require basic knowledge of whatever to understand. Even something like Space Invaders you have to have knowledge that aliens are bad. You'll learn that fairly quickly, but I'm pretty sure everyone in the world can tap the screen on Flappy Bird and know to avoid all the pipes.

Flappy Bird, though, is a pretty stupid game. The issue I always have with "never-ending games" is that until you approach your potentially gigantic high score, you're not really feeling fulfilled as a player and you feel like you've wasted your time if you get pretty far in but mess up. Mobile games tend to annoy me as well as they just play on an audience that doesn't know any better and, in general, intuitive and universal games are incredibly difficult to make so have already been made. These then tend to get recoloured and there we go. Flappy Bird is just the helicopter game with Mario's graphics. Angry Birds is just Defend Your Castle or w/e it's called. They just have bright, colourful graphics that anyone can understand at a glance.
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Volt
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Keep Moving Forward

The "deal" with Flappy Bird is that it was an accident. The creator, Dong Nguyen released the game in May of 2013 with practically no fanfare. About three weeks or so ago, in a thread on NeoGAF about masochistic games, Flappy Bird was brought up. Apparently the right people liked it enough to recommend it for Pewdiepie to play, which he did about two weeks ago. That video got around 8 million views.

Nguyen had no intention of the game being a success, he was just making games for fun. But because of the sudden popularity, he was suddenly getting a torrent of hate mail and death threats in every conceivable way. He was not prepared to take this kind of criticism. And then yesterday, he removed the game from the appstore, saying that he had enough and he just wants to be left alone.

There was no reason to hate the game, it was just an innocent small release that blew up accidentally. And that's all that people needed to unleash fury on the poor guy. I hate people sometimes.
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Olinea
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I need to preorder this.

EDIT: I did. And I will not regret it.
Edited by Olinea, Feb 12 2014, 09:02 AM.
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Granskjegg
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LOL
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