On March 15 2012 23:18 Exempt. wrote: There are a lot of posts and arguments I can't address nor does addressing them accomplish my points. I hope everyone will be able to go into reading this post in a rational sense without getting heavily invested in emotions. Emotionality, although impossible to ridden of, can reasonably be lessened to an extent as to help logic true for atleast a decent discussion.
I hope everyone from this point can discuss an argument with avoidance of emotion in an attempt to give a discussion that is useful. At the very least I have accomplished my point of simply throwing my ideas out not to prove that I'm correct, but merely providing an alternate possibility that some agree with. In the end of this it does not matter whether I'm right or wrong, nor does it matter if any of you are correct. That's not the point of argument.
As thus since there is no emotional outcome of this discussion, and little reason in pointing out semantics and sensationalism of proposed ideas. I'm sure people can point out the common sense behind these ideas and that their overall idea is the obvious, true, and meaningful idea.
And with that, I believe that the problem is:
People blindly believe that it's impossible to reach a skillcap. Which is a highly silly assumption. There is nothing that proves human beings CANNOT perfect something.
The reason why this matters is that the game won't last long enough if isn't difficult enough to be competitive enough to warrant spectation for the game. This hurts the business in esports, thus hurting esports, and possibly ruining something i've grown to love.
I think the majority of problems is that people are viewing the concepts of skill, knowledge, and skillcaps in somewhat incorrect ways.
Skill isn't the result of knowledge, knowledge is just a means as a basic tool to allow access to skill.
And a skillcap is simply the highest possible peak human beings can achieve. In which case you could argue that Broodwar was somewhat "solved" or neared it's skillcap as it's highly unlikely for another human being to achieve a higher level of "skill" than Flash, etc.
A high level of all three result in the ability of the game to become an esport as their is a higher level of interest in spectating. As well, the measureability of all three result in our terminology of the competition of the game.
In which case under these definitions we can definitely measure the difficulty, spectatability, and competitive nature of any video game, including League of Legends. There is no reason saying we CANT argue these points.
you are really trying too hard man
You think it's a bad thing to constantly try to think, argue, debate? If anything there isn't enough of it. Just people like you who can't remove their emotions and even try to attempt rationality. If people tried harder there most certainly would be less wars. And probably better games.
On March 15 2012 23:21 Zergneedsfood wrote:
On March 15 2012 23:20 Exempt. wrote:
On March 15 2012 22:52 SmoKim wrote: Why the FUCK is every fucking thing regarding the games we enjoy an act of war where everyone picks a side and throw shit against one another?
Great news for LoL, nothings changed for BW, SC2 still going. Can't we just be happy/passive about it?
Because theirs absolutely NOTHING wrong with arguing, it's people like you who get so emotionally involved that ruin the experience for everyone else.
Yeah dude, because picking a side and throwing shit at another side is a great demonstration of arguing.
There's nothing wrong with calling the game uncompetitive because whether or not it's competitive or not, or whether you're good or bad at a game or anything else, does. not. matter. It's only flinging shit to you because you care too much about opinions of others about the game.
It doesn't matter whether I'm right or wrong, like I said stop getting so emotionally involved in things that don't matter.
It's like it hurts peoples souls when someone tries to tell them that what they think or believe is wrong. It doesn't fucking matter if you're correct or not. Engaging in the activity is the important part. Fuck.
Wow...
There is nothing to argue about, so why argue? You haven't said one constructive thing at all this entire thread.
I posted this with the expectation that people would find this as good news, that e-sports are growing outside of just SC2. We aren't losing anything, nobody is... Well some people are freaking out over this like somebody is ruining your birthday party by having more people over to their house with a bigger cake 10 blocks away.
I've seen amazing discussions over the years on this site, actually arguing back and forth and not fighting like a bunch of spoiled brats over something that has no effect on them. I'm just going to ask a mod to lock this thread if people keep trying to smear other games and don't have any reasoning besides "LOL DOESN'T MAKE YOU HIT BUTTONS AS FAST SO IT MUST BE EASIER!!"
Well because it's just your opinion whether or not there is something to argue about. If you don't feel it's worth arguing then the obvious decision is to not engage in argument. You flinging shit because some people want to argue doesn't make you any better than anyone else.
The constructive argument I placed was that I felt LoL was bad for esports as it didn't support competition that would last many years to come for reasons such as lack of differentiating skill and what not. My conclusive thesis was that because of this lack of competition LoL would just hurt esports in the long run. Not help it.
The problem is people didn't go with retorting my opinion. They shit talked it. All that needed to be done with this argument was someone to post what juicyfruit said recently in his opinions as to why lol is worth competition and thus esports by talking about:
- How many competitors there are - Potential for skill improvement (i.e. skill cap) - Balance
if someone simply, academically brang those points up to disprove my opinions on lol as a competitive game I would of left the discussion more open-minded.
But no, that didn't happen, because people can't think in a logic fashion, they get too clouded by their emotions because of the fact that I was arguing something that they certainly didn't believe in.
Here's one to hoping public school systems slowly improve / college is stressed more in society so that some day a larger portion of the human race can participate in a scholarly debate that so many simply aren't prepared to do now.
Okay, understood.
I'm going to try and parallel E-Sports with Sports in order to draw a comparison most people can grasp, I hope.
You can look at any sport that makes people compete on an individual level such as table tennis or golf and argue that they require more individual skill to succeed in. Which is of course correct, but that's only because if you make a mistake it's a lot more unforgiving then if you make a mistake in a team oriented sport like Hockey or Football (CFL/NFL variety).
What hurts my head is when people say team games require less or no skill because they aren't punished nearly as hard for making individual mistakes. If a table tennis player over shoots and misses the table, bam the opponent is up a point, if you are a quarterback and throw an interception you at least have the rest of your team on the field to stop an immediate touchdown and the defense to recover the ball. Taking away individual accountability doesn't make any team based sport require less skill on an individual level, they aren't mutually exclusive. We wouldn't have individuals on teams like Wayne Gretzky or Peyton Manning getting held up on people's shoulders and being heralded as masters of their craft if individual skill didn't matter.
Of course no sport really has a skill cap, it would lead to a very uninteresting viewing experience. If two people hit the skill cap in table tennis i'm sure it would be fun to watch for the first 3 minutes but after that when you realize no player is going to drop the ball so to speak it removes any aspect of suspense. I think this holds true for e-sports as well, if you had even 10 people hit the skill cap in LoL and pitted them in a 5vs5 the game would simply never end. People would realize the game isn't a viable competitive medium and move on, or Riot would fix it somehow, maybe make people maintain 300+ APM or get booted as so many people hold that number as a measure of skill these days.
Balance is also a relatively easy thing to address, even in a game with as many diverse pieces as LoL has. Day[9] summed balance up really well on an episode of the Daily or SotG, I can't quite remember. To paraphrase he said something along the lines of if something is overpowered then every single person would simply use that race/class/strategy/character. That of course would mean the game would get very stale very quick and not be a viable competitive medium. Of course the volatility of LoL simply means this won't happen, if one combination of characters seems to be unbeatable somebody will find a crack in that and exploit it with another combination of characters. It's like mixing boxing, rock paper scissors and chess into a sport between two opponents who have 5 hands that act on their own but are guided by one person.
Let me break that down a bit and explain... The boxing aspect comes from the fact you are trying to beat your opponent in a set number of rounds either by knocking him out or through a much longer game plan and simply out playing him. Rock paper scissors covers the randomness that is inherent in every game and sport; you, you're team and your opponents can't be predicted and individuals will have advantages over others but generally balance over all as a team. Chess simply because each person has a set amount of pieces to play with, 5 in the case of LoL with their active skills (You can go into items but shhhh), knowing what to use and when and being able to make those decisions in a split second repeatedly and accurately over a 20-30 minute game is exhausting. Doing all that is hard enough, but doing it with 4 other people while trying to act as a coherent whole is a difficult task.
I agree with you when you say knowledge gives you the tools you need to improve and be skillful. You don't see many pro golfers using a driver on the green >.<' Having the knowledge to know what tools to use and when is what really separates E-Sports from sports in my opinion.
Just as a followup I believe the reason why most people say team games like LoL are less skilled than sc2 is because if one is to be punished less severely on a mistake it slowly discludes the mistake over time. The problem with LoL is exactly that -- it discludes a lot of mistakes into a severely nasty punishment to the team in the end where one team wins a teamfight and ends the game.
That's a huge problem with the game because it emphasizes the skill needed for the singular teamfight and less on everything that leads up to the teamfight. This leads to the game being less dynamic / strategic. With the game being less strategic players can then focus more practice in perfecting a smaller number of mechanical skills in the first place. When the player can then focus more energy into a singular skill at hand they can then reach the supposed skillcap for that mechanical skill and perfect it. At this point we're at a dilemma as to whether or not players can do this as there is no proof or not this is theorteically possible. My proposition is that this is possible for players to perfect the mechanical skills required in LoL and thus hit or enclose the skillcap unlike ever seen before in any other competitive esport seen yet.
That's why I believe LoL in it's current state won't last as a competitive game.
You bring an interesting point about if 10 players hit then skillcap then a 5v5 would never end. I think this will happen to a lesser extent. Games will continuously get longer and longer if something isn't done to fix it because pushing and ending a near even game is too highly difficult for either team to do. As well, when games get longer and longer those mistakes we were talking about before will continuously become less important -- ever much so that the team fight becomes increasingly more important.
I think you are completely correct about balance, it's a pretty easy fix to design the game to be better. In order to make the game better I feel they need to rebalance the game in a way where the end team fight plays a slightly less importance in the grand scheme of things. In which case LoL certainly would be a more competitive game in my eyes.
One area in which I think they could do this is revamping their summoner spell system, the game would be much more dynamic and strategic if it were possible for players to change their summoner spells during the game. This would further increase the skillcap by adding larger strategic depth to the game. The means by which they do this whether by cooldowns, gold use, whatever, doesn't matter.
TL;DR: I simply don't understand why people are so vehemently against my opinions when their were thousands upon thousands of SC2 related threads stating that starcraft was designed wrong and was a bad game. Well it was, and blizzard redesigned and balanced the game until shit like 4 gate weren't so predominant. LoL NEEDS to go through this same phase in design change or it flat out won't deliver as a good competitive game.
To follow up on your follow up I would like to point out that your experience with LoL appears to be very lacking as you only describe one of the ways to play the game.
In your limited assessment of how LoL is played you have missed an ENTIRE playstyle called split-pushing that focuses on avoiding team fights altogether, knowing this it is difficult for me to agree with your very narrow view of "The problem with LoL is exactly that -- it discludes a lot of mistakes into a severely nasty punishment to the team in the end where one team wins a teamfight and ends the game."
If you had put more effort into researching your argument rather than arguing it, you would find that your argument is composed of many glaring flaws that individuals who are more experienced with your subject matter (LoL) will recognize with ease.
Also to address the myth of skill cap I pose you the question of" what if anything has ever hit a skill cap?" I for one believe it is impossible to hit a skill cap. You can only ever approach a skill cap never hit it, think of it as an asymptote on a graph.
I'm aware of split pushing. Pretty much one of the only ways I play the game is master yi, zilean, and anivia. In my argument I also talked about the problems of pushing in my portion of 10 skillcapped players 5v5. Since you misconstrued my arguments you've made assumptions on how to interpret the information I gave.
You think I really would lack understanding of the game if I went through all the effort of defending myself the last 20 pages? Common sense would say I obviously feel confident about my knowledge of the game in this case.
Whether or not skillcaps can be reached is theoretical, it's been discussed and might as well be discarded for lack of evidence.
Even if I didn't address split push in my previous post the fact that the only solution to the problem is to split push even further proves my point of the simplicity of the game. In which case my points of how players have few mechanical skills to focus on and perfect come into play and into my conclusion that the skillcap of LoL can be reached or at the very least closest to attainable compared to any other competitive gaming. Making it a shit game for competitive play.
Good for them. Not my cup of tea though so I think I'll stick to watching starcraft. Good to see that theres a large community supporting another title in the esports line-up.
On March 16 2012 01:11 a5mod wrote: Teamliquid should stop supporting LoL streams.
this. What's the next step supporting up and coming angry birds players? I mean just because a game is popular doesn't make it interesting to play much less to watch. I think lol can be a good complement for players that find Hon/dota too hard but in the the competitive scene there should be only room for one game.
this. What's the next step supporting up and coming angry birds players? I mean just because a game is popular doesn't make it interesting to play much less to watch. I think SC2 can be a good complement for players that find BW too hard but in the the competitive scene there should be only room for one game.
What's up with all of the bw analogies is there still some resentment lingering towards sc2. The bw/sc2 isn't applicable to lol/hon/dota as bw/sc2 is part of the same franchise. While dota/hon/lol/blizzardDOTA are different franchises with different ideas on how to create a MOBA game. Sc2 is easier than bw but why i'm watching supply blocks every day in the GSL? Sc2 isn't an attempt to rethink a genre but instead to remake the starcraft experience in a modern UI. bw and sc2 targets the same market/people but same cannot be said about lol/dota. Sc2 didn't attempt to attract a massive amount of casual players just look at the social interaction on battle.net vs that same space that riot offers. Sc2 kept a similar visual theme which looks more adult as opposed to that of lol.
On March 16 2012 01:11 a5mod wrote: Teamliquid should stop supporting LoL streams.
this. What's the next step supporting up and coming angry birds players? I mean just because a game is popular doesn't make it interesting to play much less to watch. I think lol can be a good complement for players that find Hon/dota too hard but in the the competitive scene there should be only room for one game.
This post exemplifies why esports is a joke.
In real life, you never see people shitting on 100m sprint, saying how much easier it is than running 5000m, for example. In here, you see the equivalent every day, and this is something that is done by a lot of people. The "too good for you" attitude is not something the community can afford at this point of its development, and probably never will, judging by how it is going.
Dude... pretty sure avid sport fans do that shit all the time..
On March 16 2012 00:12 sluggaslamoo wrote: Also if you don't believe LoL has spectator appeal I wouldn't worry about that.
Recipe: Simply add Korean Commentators.
Hearing their voices kinda makes me sad.... however since I had no idea what the hell was happening and even SC2 is definitely more interesting, I think there's no need to worry about things 'taking over' other stuff, other than being insulted from an elitist's point of view, which we all should have been used to.
On March 16 2012 00:47 Sumahi wrote: No matter how hard I try, I can't really get into LoL, as a player or a viewer. Compared to SC2, it is like watching team tic tac toe. It's unfortunate that SC2 isn't getting more attention or credit.
No matter how hard I try, I can't really get into SC2, as a player or a viewer. Compared to BW, it is like watching tic tac toe. It's unfortunate that BW isn't getting more attention or credit.
On March 14 2012 20:07 S2Glow wrote: lol , this game i try to watch and to me is not really entertaining :/ i dont get why this is #1 , maybe gameplay is #1 but definitely not for watchers
the truth. fun as hell, better than sc2 for me in terms of pure fun to play. but to watch? like watching a towel dry.
I'm honestly not sure how pro LoL is popular. I mean I get how LoL is popular as a game, it's ridiculously easy and it's where people who fail too hard at dota/dota2/hon go, but how is professional LoL popular? Is it so all the lol fans can watch slightly better players play for money and go "hey that looks cool i can probably do that too, look im watching an esport yay!" I mean dota is a great game, and dota2 will be too once more of the heroes are in, but I just really don't understand how lol is so popular now.
On March 16 2012 00:05 Juicyfruit wrote: People like to bring up the Tic-Tac-Toe argument against this a lot but that just takes the conclusion to the far extreme. There's nothing inherently different about tic-tac-toe vs go except the number of possible combinations from the very limited moves that you can make. A race of super-intelligent aliens might perceive Go as being as easy as TTT and yet from our point of view they're world's apart.
People don't bring up tic tac toe to straw man you. They bring it up because it is instructive and helps remove confusion.
There is inherently also no difference between go and football. In American football they actually have set plays. But in football there is also theoretically a perfect decision. All others would be inferior. There's good and bad was to kick off. And then it just goes from there. Set pieces are the most similar parts of the game compared to go. Or compared to SC.
Also, no matter how infinitely smart you are and how easy it would be for a hypothetical intelligence to see a forced win in an average go game, by no means does that ever mean they are both equally easy. The enormous difference in complexifty always has to be many magintudes more obvious that the solution, The mind of these fictiious go players still have to make all the calculations to get the solution. That doesn't change.
I understand what you're saying, but what I'm saying is that gauging the relative difficulty in a game where the solution trivial, and one where it isn't, is not a good comparison. Tic Tac Toe is humanly solvable, which makes it inherently different from the games that are not humanly solvable (aside from using super-computers). Sure you can come up with a vague spectrum of difficulty for all the games that are not "humanly solvable" because there are some obvious inherent differences in difficulty, but what would be the point of that?
At the very least, we can say that since LoL, and naturally its counterparts, all have high enough skillcap that you can't realistically 'solve', then the difficulty of the said game ceases to be a relevant factor and that the main point should be focused on whether the game is actually interesting and fun. Calling LoL easy is stupid (not that you did). You can say that it's easier, but I would then argue that memorizing 10 billion digits is obviously much easier than memorizing 20 billion digits but that does not make it any more doable.
Now, at lower levels, LoL is most definitely easier to pick up than Dota. Most Dota players would instantly wish to claim that it's somehow a disadvantage to have a game that's noob-friendly, except that I would argue as a sports, being accessible can only be an advantage.
On March 16 2012 02:18 hunts wrote: I'm honestly not sure how pro LoL is popular. I mean I get how LoL is popular as a game, it's ridiculously easy and it's where people who fail too hard at dota/dota2/hon go, but how is professional LoL popular? Is it so all the lol fans can watch slightly better players play for money and go "hey that looks cool i can probably do that too, look im watching an esport yay!" I mean dota is a great game, and dota2 will be too once more of the heroes are in, but I just really don't understand how lol is so popular now.
Most people only want to watch the game they play is all that it comes down to.
On March 16 2012 01:11 a5mod wrote: Teamliquid should stop supporting LoL streams.
this. What's the next step supporting up and coming angry birds players? I mean just because a game is popular doesn't make it interesting to play much less to watch. I think lol can be a good complement for players that find Hon/dota too hard but in the the competitive scene there should be only room for one game.
This post exemplifies why esports is a joke.
In real life, you never see people shitting on 100m sprint, saying how much easier it is than running 5000m, for example. In here, you see the equivalent every day, and this is something that is done by a lot of people. The "too good for you" attitude is not something the community can afford at this point of its development, and probably never will, judging by how it is going.
Sprinting is so fucking easy anyone can just run around a track, right?
Yeah man, 100m is over in like 10 seconds. 5000m lasts around 13 minutes. When you run 5000, you have to pace yourself and save enough strength that you're able to make the final push without falling so far behind that your final push is meaningless. When you run 100m you just go as fast as you can, without any actual strategy. I have to say 100m has a really low skill cap and is for casuals. (Obviously, this is sarcasm.)
On March 16 2012 01:11 a5mod wrote: Teamliquid should stop supporting LoL streams.
this. What's the next step supporting up and coming angry birds players? I mean just because a game is popular doesn't make it interesting to play much less to watch. I think lol can be a good complement for players that find Hon/dota too hard but in the the competitive scene there should be only room for one game.
This post exemplifies why esports is a joke.
In real life, you never see people shitting on 100m sprint, saying how much easier it is than running 5000m, for example. In here, you see the equivalent every day, and this is something that is done by a lot of people. The "too good for you" attitude is not something the community can afford at this point of its development, and probably never will, judging by how it is going.
Dude... pretty sure avid sport fans do that shit all the time..
No, not really. There's the MY TEAM > YOUR TEAM people, but those exist in every sport and you can't actually fault them for anything.
Just take a look at the fighting games community. Their tournaments have like 1500 different games together and nobody complains about game X being much easier. I'm beginning to understand why they're wary of being bagged in with the esports crowd.
On March 15 2012 23:18 Exempt. wrote: There are a lot of posts and arguments I can't address nor does addressing them accomplish my points. I hope everyone will be able to go into reading this post in a rational sense without getting heavily invested in emotions. Emotionality, although impossible to ridden of, can reasonably be lessened to an extent as to help logic true for atleast a decent discussion.
I hope everyone from this point can discuss an argument with avoidance of emotion in an attempt to give a discussion that is useful. At the very least I have accomplished my point of simply throwing my ideas out not to prove that I'm correct, but merely providing an alternate possibility that some agree with. In the end of this it does not matter whether I'm right or wrong, nor does it matter if any of you are correct. That's not the point of argument.
As thus since there is no emotional outcome of this discussion, and little reason in pointing out semantics and sensationalism of proposed ideas. I'm sure people can point out the common sense behind these ideas and that their overall idea is the obvious, true, and meaningful idea.
And with that, I believe that the problem is:
People blindly believe that it's impossible to reach a skillcap. Which is a highly silly assumption. There is nothing that proves human beings CANNOT perfect something.
The reason why this matters is that the game won't last long enough if isn't difficult enough to be competitive enough to warrant spectation for the game. This hurts the business in esports, thus hurting esports, and possibly ruining something i've grown to love.
I think the majority of problems is that people are viewing the concepts of skill, knowledge, and skillcaps in somewhat incorrect ways.
Skill isn't the result of knowledge, knowledge is just a means as a basic tool to allow access to skill.
And a skillcap is simply the highest possible peak human beings can achieve. In which case you could argue that Broodwar was somewhat "solved" or neared it's skillcap as it's highly unlikely for another human being to achieve a higher level of "skill" than Flash, etc.
A high level of all three result in the ability of the game to become an esport as their is a higher level of interest in spectating. As well, the measureability of all three result in our terminology of the competition of the game.
In which case under these definitions we can definitely measure the difficulty, spectatability, and competitive nature of any video game, including League of Legends. There is no reason saying we CANT argue these points.
you are really trying too hard man
You think it's a bad thing to constantly try to think, argue, debate? If anything there isn't enough of it. Just people like you who can't remove their emotions and even try to attempt rationality. If people tried harder there most certainly would be less wars. And probably better games.
On March 15 2012 23:21 Zergneedsfood wrote:
On March 15 2012 23:20 Exempt. wrote:
On March 15 2012 22:52 SmoKim wrote: Why the FUCK is every fucking thing regarding the games we enjoy an act of war where everyone picks a side and throw shit against one another?
Great news for LoL, nothings changed for BW, SC2 still going. Can't we just be happy/passive about it?
Because theirs absolutely NOTHING wrong with arguing, it's people like you who get so emotionally involved that ruin the experience for everyone else.
Yeah dude, because picking a side and throwing shit at another side is a great demonstration of arguing.
There's nothing wrong with calling the game uncompetitive because whether or not it's competitive or not, or whether you're good or bad at a game or anything else, does. not. matter. It's only flinging shit to you because you care too much about opinions of others about the game.
It doesn't matter whether I'm right or wrong, like I said stop getting so emotionally involved in things that don't matter.
It's like it hurts peoples souls when someone tries to tell them that what they think or believe is wrong. It doesn't fucking matter if you're correct or not. Engaging in the activity is the important part. Fuck.
Wow...
There is nothing to argue about, so why argue? You haven't said one constructive thing at all this entire thread.
I posted this with the expectation that people would find this as good news, that e-sports are growing outside of just SC2. We aren't losing anything, nobody is... Well some people are freaking out over this like somebody is ruining your birthday party by having more people over to their house with a bigger cake 10 blocks away.
I've seen amazing discussions over the years on this site, actually arguing back and forth and not fighting like a bunch of spoiled brats over something that has no effect on them. I'm just going to ask a mod to lock this thread if people keep trying to smear other games and don't have any reasoning besides "LOL DOESN'T MAKE YOU HIT BUTTONS AS FAST SO IT MUST BE EASIER!!"
Well because it's just your opinion whether or not there is something to argue about. If you don't feel it's worth arguing then the obvious decision is to not engage in argument. You flinging shit because some people want to argue doesn't make you any better than anyone else.
The constructive argument I placed was that I felt LoL was bad for esports as it didn't support competition that would last many years to come for reasons such as lack of differentiating skill and what not. My conclusive thesis was that because of this lack of competition LoL would just hurt esports in the long run. Not help it.
The problem is people didn't go with retorting my opinion. They shit talked it. All that needed to be done with this argument was someone to post what juicyfruit said recently in his opinions as to why lol is worth competition and thus esports by talking about:
- How many competitors there are - Potential for skill improvement (i.e. skill cap) - Balance
if someone simply, academically brang those points up to disprove my opinions on lol as a competitive game I would of left the discussion more open-minded.
But no, that didn't happen, because people can't think in a logic fashion, they get too clouded by their emotions because of the fact that I was arguing something that they certainly didn't believe in.
Here's one to hoping public school systems slowly improve / college is stressed more in society so that some day a larger portion of the human race can participate in a scholarly debate that so many simply aren't prepared to do now.
Okay, understood.
I'm going to try and parallel E-Sports with Sports in order to draw a comparison most people can grasp, I hope.
You can look at any sport that makes people compete on an individual level such as table tennis or golf and argue that they require more individual skill to succeed in. Which is of course correct, but that's only because if you make a mistake it's a lot more unforgiving then if you make a mistake in a team oriented sport like Hockey or Football (CFL/NFL variety).
What hurts my head is when people say team games require less or no skill because they aren't punished nearly as hard for making individual mistakes. If a table tennis player over shoots and misses the table, bam the opponent is up a point, if you are a quarterback and throw an interception you at least have the rest of your team on the field to stop an immediate touchdown and the defense to recover the ball. Taking away individual accountability doesn't make any team based sport require less skill on an individual level, they aren't mutually exclusive. We wouldn't have individuals on teams like Wayne Gretzky or Peyton Manning getting held up on people's shoulders and being heralded as masters of their craft if individual skill didn't matter.
Of course no sport really has a skill cap, it would lead to a very uninteresting viewing experience. If two people hit the skill cap in table tennis i'm sure it would be fun to watch for the first 3 minutes but after that when you realize no player is going to drop the ball so to speak it removes any aspect of suspense. I think this holds true for e-sports as well, if you had even 10 people hit the skill cap in LoL and pitted them in a 5vs5 the game would simply never end. People would realize the game isn't a viable competitive medium and move on, or Riot would fix it somehow, maybe make people maintain 300+ APM or get booted as so many people hold that number as a measure of skill these days.
Balance is also a relatively easy thing to address, even in a game with as many diverse pieces as LoL has. Day[9] summed balance up really well on an episode of the Daily or SotG, I can't quite remember. To paraphrase he said something along the lines of if something is overpowered then every single person would simply use that race/class/strategy/character. That of course would mean the game would get very stale very quick and not be a viable competitive medium. Of course the volatility of LoL simply means this won't happen, if one combination of characters seems to be unbeatable somebody will find a crack in that and exploit it with another combination of characters. It's like mixing boxing, rock paper scissors and chess into a sport between two opponents who have 5 hands that act on their own but are guided by one person.
Let me break that down a bit and explain... The boxing aspect comes from the fact you are trying to beat your opponent in a set number of rounds either by knocking him out or through a much longer game plan and simply out playing him. Rock paper scissors covers the randomness that is inherent in every game and sport; you, you're team and your opponents can't be predicted and individuals will have advantages over others but generally balance over all as a team. Chess simply because each person has a set amount of pieces to play with, 5 in the case of LoL with their active skills (You can go into items but shhhh), knowing what to use and when and being able to make those decisions in a split second repeatedly and accurately over a 20-30 minute game is exhausting. Doing all that is hard enough, but doing it with 4 other people while trying to act as a coherent whole is a difficult task.
I agree with you when you say knowledge gives you the tools you need to improve and be skillful. You don't see many pro golfers using a driver on the green >.<' Having the knowledge to know what tools to use and when is what really separates E-Sports from sports in my opinion.
Just as a followup I believe the reason why most people say team games like LoL are less skilled than sc2 is because if one is to be punished less severely on a mistake it slowly discludes the mistake over time. The problem with LoL is exactly that -- it discludes a lot of mistakes into a severely nasty punishment to the team in the end where one team wins a teamfight and ends the game.
That's a huge problem with the game because it emphasizes the skill needed for the singular teamfight and less on everything that leads up to the teamfight. This leads to the game being less dynamic / strategic. With the game being less strategic players can then focus more practice in perfecting a smaller number of mechanical skills in the first place. When the player can then focus more energy into a singular skill at hand they can then reach the supposed skillcap for that mechanical skill and perfect it. At this point we're at a dilemma as to whether or not players can do this as there is no proof or not this is theorteically possible. My proposition is that this is possible for players to perfect the mechanical skills required in LoL and thus hit or enclose the skillcap unlike ever seen before in any other competitive esport seen yet.
That's why I believe LoL in it's current state won't last as a competitive game.
You bring an interesting point about if 10 players hit then skillcap then a 5v5 would never end. I think this will happen to a lesser extent. Games will continuously get longer and longer if something isn't done to fix it because pushing and ending a near even game is too highly difficult for either team to do. As well, when games get longer and longer those mistakes we were talking about before will continuously become less important -- ever much so that the team fight becomes increasingly more important.
I think you are completely correct about balance, it's a pretty easy fix to design the game to be better. In order to make the game better I feel they need to rebalance the game in a way where the end team fight plays a slightly less importance in the grand scheme of things. In which case LoL certainly would be a more competitive game in my eyes.
One area in which I think they could do this is revamping their summoner spell system, the game would be much more dynamic and strategic if it were possible for players to change their summoner spells during the game. This would further increase the skillcap by adding larger strategic depth to the game. The means by which they do this whether by cooldowns, gold use, whatever, doesn't matter.
TL;DR: I simply don't understand why people are so vehemently against my opinions when their were thousands upon thousands of SC2 related threads stating that starcraft was designed wrong and was a bad game. Well it was, and blizzard redesigned and balanced the game until shit like 4 gate weren't so predominant. LoL NEEDS to go through this same phase in design change or it flat out won't deliver as a good competitive game.
To follow up on your follow up I would like to point out that your experience with LoL appears to be very lacking as you only describe one of the ways to play the game.
In your limited assessment of how LoL is played you have missed an ENTIRE playstyle called split-pushing that focuses on avoiding team fights altogether, knowing this it is difficult for me to agree with your very narrow view of "The problem with LoL is exactly that -- it discludes a lot of mistakes into a severely nasty punishment to the team in the end where one team wins a teamfight and ends the game."
If you had put more effort into researching your argument rather than arguing it, you would find that your argument is composed of many glaring flaws that individuals who are more experienced with your subject matter (LoL) will recognize with ease.
Also to address the myth of skill cap I pose you the question of" what if anything has ever hit a skill cap?" I for one believe it is impossible to hit a skill cap. You can only ever approach a skill cap never hit it, think of it as an asymptote on a graph.
I'm aware of split pushing. Pretty much one of the only ways I play the game is master yi, zilean, and anivia. In my argument I also talked about the problems of pushing in my portion of 10 skillcapped players 5v5. Since you misconstrued my arguments you've made assumptions on how to interpret the information I gave.
You think I really would lack understanding of the game if I went through all the effort of defending myself the last 20 pages? Common sense would say I obviously feel confident about my knowledge of the game in this case.
Whether or not skillcaps can be reached is theoretical, it's been discussed and might as well be discarded for lack of evidence.
Even if I didn't address split push in my previous post the fact that the only solution to the problem is to split push even further proves my point of the simplicity of the game. In which case my points of how players have few mechanical skills to focus on and perfect come into play and into my conclusion that the skillcap of LoL can be reached or at the very least closest to attainable compared to any other competitive gaming. Making it a shit game for competitive play.
I believe you have misunderstood my post as I was simply pointing out that your assumption that a game of LoL rides entirely on a late game team fight is false.
You now also state that the only way to avoid team fights is to split push; retreating from the things you implied earlier; however even in this area you have once again made incorrect assumptions. I had only provided one piece of proof (split-pushing) because I believed it was going to be sufficient to enlighten you, however I can see that was a mistake so I will now present you with 2 more ways to avoid team fights.
Solution Number One: Poke compositions; Poke compositions are teams of heroes put together to try to whittle the opposing team down before a team fight occurs. So how does this prevent team fights? you may ask, simple because an injured team will not engage a healthy one for lack of advantage a team fight will not occur.
Solution Number Two: Kiting compositions; Similar to Poke Compositions these teams work to avoid a full team fight engagement and seek to damage the opposing team and avoid being damaged through their superior mobility.
I hope this evidence is enough to make you aware of the inaccuracies and fallacies you have portrayed.
Finally I once again pose you the question. "When has a skill cap ever been reached in anything?"
On March 16 2012 01:11 a5mod wrote: Teamliquid should stop supporting LoL streams.
this. What's the next step supporting up and coming angry birds players? I mean just because a game is popular doesn't make it interesting to play much less to watch. I think lol can be a good complement for players that find Hon/dota too hard but in the the competitive scene there should be only room for one game.
This post exemplifies why esports is a joke.
In real life, you never see people shitting on 100m sprint, saying how much easier it is than running 5000m, for example. In here, you see the equivalent every day, and this is something that is done by a lot of people. The "too good for you" attitude is not something the community can afford at this point of its development, and probably never will, judging by how it is going.
Sprinting is so fucking easy anyone can just run around a track, right?
Yeah man, 100m is over in like 10 seconds. 5000m lasts around 13 minutes. You have to pace yourself and save enough strength that you're able to make the final push without falling so far behind that your final push is meaningless. I have to say 100m has a really low skill cap and is for casuals. (Obviously, this is sarcasm.)
On March 16 2012 01:11 a5mod wrote: Teamliquid should stop supporting LoL streams.
this. What's the next step supporting up and coming angry birds players? I mean just because a game is popular doesn't make it interesting to play much less to watch. I think lol can be a good complement for players that find Hon/dota too hard but in the the competitive scene there should be only room for one game.
This post exemplifies why esports is a joke.
In real life, you never see people shitting on 100m sprint, saying how much easier it is than running 5000m, for example. In here, you see the equivalent every day, and this is something that is done by a lot of people. The "too good for you" attitude is not something the community can afford at this point of its development, and probably never will, judging by how it is going.
Dude... pretty sure avid sport fans do that shit all the time..
No, not really. There's the MY TEAM > YOUR TEAM people, but those exist in every sport and you can't actually fault them for anything.
Just take a look at the fighting games community. Their tournaments have like 1500 different games together and nobody complains about game X being much easier. I'm beginning to understand why they're wary of being bagged in with the esports crowd.
Uh no. There's that whole football vs soccer thing where people are calling each other grass fairies / shit talking / beating the shit out of each other IRL. Pretty much way worse than any shit people pull with video games. Or even the sports vs esports stuff during barcrafts. Dunno where you've been all these years.
On March 16 2012 02:18 hunts wrote: I'm honestly not sure how pro LoL is popular. I mean I get how LoL is popular as a game, it's ridiculously easy and it's where people who fail too hard at dota/dota2/hon go, but how is professional LoL popular? Is it so all the lol fans can watch slightly better players play for money and go "hey that looks cool i can probably do that too, look im watching an esport yay!" I mean dota is a great game, and dota2 will be too once more of the heroes are in, but I just really don't understand how lol is so popular now.
Most people only want to watch the game they play is all that it comes down to.
You do know that WoW didn't get nearly as many viewers back when it was more popular than LoL is now right?
On March 15 2012 23:18 Exempt. wrote: There are a lot of posts and arguments I can't address nor does addressing them accomplish my points. I hope everyone will be able to go into reading this post in a rational sense without getting heavily invested in emotions. Emotionality, although impossible to ridden of, can reasonably be lessened to an extent as to help logic true for atleast a decent discussion.
I hope everyone from this point can discuss an argument with avoidance of emotion in an attempt to give a discussion that is useful. At the very least I have accomplished my point of simply throwing my ideas out not to prove that I'm correct, but merely providing an alternate possibility that some agree with. In the end of this it does not matter whether I'm right or wrong, nor does it matter if any of you are correct. That's not the point of argument.
As thus since there is no emotional outcome of this discussion, and little reason in pointing out semantics and sensationalism of proposed ideas. I'm sure people can point out the common sense behind these ideas and that their overall idea is the obvious, true, and meaningful idea.
And with that, I believe that the problem is:
People blindly believe that it's impossible to reach a skillcap. Which is a highly silly assumption. There is nothing that proves human beings CANNOT perfect something.
The reason why this matters is that the game won't last long enough if isn't difficult enough to be competitive enough to warrant spectation for the game. This hurts the business in esports, thus hurting esports, and possibly ruining something i've grown to love.
I think the majority of problems is that people are viewing the concepts of skill, knowledge, and skillcaps in somewhat incorrect ways.
Skill isn't the result of knowledge, knowledge is just a means as a basic tool to allow access to skill.
And a skillcap is simply the highest possible peak human beings can achieve. In which case you could argue that Broodwar was somewhat "solved" or neared it's skillcap as it's highly unlikely for another human being to achieve a higher level of "skill" than Flash, etc.
A high level of all three result in the ability of the game to become an esport as their is a higher level of interest in spectating. As well, the measureability of all three result in our terminology of the competition of the game.
In which case under these definitions we can definitely measure the difficulty, spectatability, and competitive nature of any video game, including League of Legends. There is no reason saying we CANT argue these points.
you are really trying too hard man
You think it's a bad thing to constantly try to think, argue, debate? If anything there isn't enough of it. Just people like you who can't remove their emotions and even try to attempt rationality. If people tried harder there most certainly would be less wars. And probably better games.
On March 15 2012 23:21 Zergneedsfood wrote:
On March 15 2012 23:20 Exempt. wrote: [quote]
Because theirs absolutely NOTHING wrong with arguing, it's people like you who get so emotionally involved that ruin the experience for everyone else.
Yeah dude, because picking a side and throwing shit at another side is a great demonstration of arguing.
There's nothing wrong with calling the game uncompetitive because whether or not it's competitive or not, or whether you're good or bad at a game or anything else, does. not. matter. It's only flinging shit to you because you care too much about opinions of others about the game.
It doesn't matter whether I'm right or wrong, like I said stop getting so emotionally involved in things that don't matter.
It's like it hurts peoples souls when someone tries to tell them that what they think or believe is wrong. It doesn't fucking matter if you're correct or not. Engaging in the activity is the important part. Fuck.
Wow...
There is nothing to argue about, so why argue? You haven't said one constructive thing at all this entire thread.
I posted this with the expectation that people would find this as good news, that e-sports are growing outside of just SC2. We aren't losing anything, nobody is... Well some people are freaking out over this like somebody is ruining your birthday party by having more people over to their house with a bigger cake 10 blocks away.
I've seen amazing discussions over the years on this site, actually arguing back and forth and not fighting like a bunch of spoiled brats over something that has no effect on them. I'm just going to ask a mod to lock this thread if people keep trying to smear other games and don't have any reasoning besides "LOL DOESN'T MAKE YOU HIT BUTTONS AS FAST SO IT MUST BE EASIER!!"
Well because it's just your opinion whether or not there is something to argue about. If you don't feel it's worth arguing then the obvious decision is to not engage in argument. You flinging shit because some people want to argue doesn't make you any better than anyone else.
The constructive argument I placed was that I felt LoL was bad for esports as it didn't support competition that would last many years to come for reasons such as lack of differentiating skill and what not. My conclusive thesis was that because of this lack of competition LoL would just hurt esports in the long run. Not help it.
The problem is people didn't go with retorting my opinion. They shit talked it. All that needed to be done with this argument was someone to post what juicyfruit said recently in his opinions as to why lol is worth competition and thus esports by talking about:
- How many competitors there are - Potential for skill improvement (i.e. skill cap) - Balance
if someone simply, academically brang those points up to disprove my opinions on lol as a competitive game I would of left the discussion more open-minded.
But no, that didn't happen, because people can't think in a logic fashion, they get too clouded by their emotions because of the fact that I was arguing something that they certainly didn't believe in.
Here's one to hoping public school systems slowly improve / college is stressed more in society so that some day a larger portion of the human race can participate in a scholarly debate that so many simply aren't prepared to do now.
Okay, understood.
I'm going to try and parallel E-Sports with Sports in order to draw a comparison most people can grasp, I hope.
You can look at any sport that makes people compete on an individual level such as table tennis or golf and argue that they require more individual skill to succeed in. Which is of course correct, but that's only because if you make a mistake it's a lot more unforgiving then if you make a mistake in a team oriented sport like Hockey or Football (CFL/NFL variety).
What hurts my head is when people say team games require less or no skill because they aren't punished nearly as hard for making individual mistakes. If a table tennis player over shoots and misses the table, bam the opponent is up a point, if you are a quarterback and throw an interception you at least have the rest of your team on the field to stop an immediate touchdown and the defense to recover the ball. Taking away individual accountability doesn't make any team based sport require less skill on an individual level, they aren't mutually exclusive. We wouldn't have individuals on teams like Wayne Gretzky or Peyton Manning getting held up on people's shoulders and being heralded as masters of their craft if individual skill didn't matter.
Of course no sport really has a skill cap, it would lead to a very uninteresting viewing experience. If two people hit the skill cap in table tennis i'm sure it would be fun to watch for the first 3 minutes but after that when you realize no player is going to drop the ball so to speak it removes any aspect of suspense. I think this holds true for e-sports as well, if you had even 10 people hit the skill cap in LoL and pitted them in a 5vs5 the game would simply never end. People would realize the game isn't a viable competitive medium and move on, or Riot would fix it somehow, maybe make people maintain 300+ APM or get booted as so many people hold that number as a measure of skill these days.
Balance is also a relatively easy thing to address, even in a game with as many diverse pieces as LoL has. Day[9] summed balance up really well on an episode of the Daily or SotG, I can't quite remember. To paraphrase he said something along the lines of if something is overpowered then every single person would simply use that race/class/strategy/character. That of course would mean the game would get very stale very quick and not be a viable competitive medium. Of course the volatility of LoL simply means this won't happen, if one combination of characters seems to be unbeatable somebody will find a crack in that and exploit it with another combination of characters. It's like mixing boxing, rock paper scissors and chess into a sport between two opponents who have 5 hands that act on their own but are guided by one person.
Let me break that down a bit and explain... The boxing aspect comes from the fact you are trying to beat your opponent in a set number of rounds either by knocking him out or through a much longer game plan and simply out playing him. Rock paper scissors covers the randomness that is inherent in every game and sport; you, you're team and your opponents can't be predicted and individuals will have advantages over others but generally balance over all as a team. Chess simply because each person has a set amount of pieces to play with, 5 in the case of LoL with their active skills (You can go into items but shhhh), knowing what to use and when and being able to make those decisions in a split second repeatedly and accurately over a 20-30 minute game is exhausting. Doing all that is hard enough, but doing it with 4 other people while trying to act as a coherent whole is a difficult task.
I agree with you when you say knowledge gives you the tools you need to improve and be skillful. You don't see many pro golfers using a driver on the green >.<' Having the knowledge to know what tools to use and when is what really separates E-Sports from sports in my opinion.
Just as a followup I believe the reason why most people say team games like LoL are less skilled than sc2 is because if one is to be punished less severely on a mistake it slowly discludes the mistake over time. The problem with LoL is exactly that -- it discludes a lot of mistakes into a severely nasty punishment to the team in the end where one team wins a teamfight and ends the game.
That's a huge problem with the game because it emphasizes the skill needed for the singular teamfight and less on everything that leads up to the teamfight. This leads to the game being less dynamic / strategic. With the game being less strategic players can then focus more practice in perfecting a smaller number of mechanical skills in the first place. When the player can then focus more energy into a singular skill at hand they can then reach the supposed skillcap for that mechanical skill and perfect it. At this point we're at a dilemma as to whether or not players can do this as there is no proof or not this is theorteically possible. My proposition is that this is possible for players to perfect the mechanical skills required in LoL and thus hit or enclose the skillcap unlike ever seen before in any other competitive esport seen yet.
That's why I believe LoL in it's current state won't last as a competitive game.
You bring an interesting point about if 10 players hit then skillcap then a 5v5 would never end. I think this will happen to a lesser extent. Games will continuously get longer and longer if something isn't done to fix it because pushing and ending a near even game is too highly difficult for either team to do. As well, when games get longer and longer those mistakes we were talking about before will continuously become less important -- ever much so that the team fight becomes increasingly more important.
I think you are completely correct about balance, it's a pretty easy fix to design the game to be better. In order to make the game better I feel they need to rebalance the game in a way where the end team fight plays a slightly less importance in the grand scheme of things. In which case LoL certainly would be a more competitive game in my eyes.
One area in which I think they could do this is revamping their summoner spell system, the game would be much more dynamic and strategic if it were possible for players to change their summoner spells during the game. This would further increase the skillcap by adding larger strategic depth to the game. The means by which they do this whether by cooldowns, gold use, whatever, doesn't matter.
TL;DR: I simply don't understand why people are so vehemently against my opinions when their were thousands upon thousands of SC2 related threads stating that starcraft was designed wrong and was a bad game. Well it was, and blizzard redesigned and balanced the game until shit like 4 gate weren't so predominant. LoL NEEDS to go through this same phase in design change or it flat out won't deliver as a good competitive game.
To follow up on your follow up I would like to point out that your experience with LoL appears to be very lacking as you only describe one of the ways to play the game.
In your limited assessment of how LoL is played you have missed an ENTIRE playstyle called split-pushing that focuses on avoiding team fights altogether, knowing this it is difficult for me to agree with your very narrow view of "The problem with LoL is exactly that -- it discludes a lot of mistakes into a severely nasty punishment to the team in the end where one team wins a teamfight and ends the game."
If you had put more effort into researching your argument rather than arguing it, you would find that your argument is composed of many glaring flaws that individuals who are more experienced with your subject matter (LoL) will recognize with ease.
Also to address the myth of skill cap I pose you the question of" what if anything has ever hit a skill cap?" I for one believe it is impossible to hit a skill cap. You can only ever approach a skill cap never hit it, think of it as an asymptote on a graph.
I'm aware of split pushing. Pretty much one of the only ways I play the game is master yi, zilean, and anivia. In my argument I also talked about the problems of pushing in my portion of 10 skillcapped players 5v5. Since you misconstrued my arguments you've made assumptions on how to interpret the information I gave.
You think I really would lack understanding of the game if I went through all the effort of defending myself the last 20 pages? Common sense would say I obviously feel confident about my knowledge of the game in this case.
Whether or not skillcaps can be reached is theoretical, it's been discussed and might as well be discarded for lack of evidence.
Even if I didn't address split push in my previous post the fact that the only solution to the problem is to split push even further proves my point of the simplicity of the game. In which case my points of how players have few mechanical skills to focus on and perfect come into play and into my conclusion that the skillcap of LoL can be reached or at the very least closest to attainable compared to any other competitive gaming. Making it a shit game for competitive play.
I believe you have misunderstood my post as I was simply pointing out that your assumption that a game of LoL rides entirely on a late game team fight is false.
You now also state that the only way to avoid team fights is to split push; retreating from the things you implied earlier; however even in this area you have once again made incorrect assumptions. I had only provided one piece of proof (split-pushing) because I believed it was going to be sufficient to enlighten you, however I can see that was a mistake so I will now present you with 2 more ways to avoid team fights.
Solution Number One: Poke compositions; Poke compositions are teams of heroes put together to try to whittle the opposing team down before a team fight occurs. So how does this prevent team fights? you may ask, simple because an injured team will not engage a healthy one for lack of advantage a team fight will not occur.
Solution Number Two: Kiting compositions; Similar to Poke Compositions these teams work to avoid a full team fight engagement and seek to damage the opposing team and avoid being damaged through their superior mobility.
I hope this evidence is enough to make you aware of the inaccuracies and fallacies you have portrayed.
Finally I once again pose you the question. "When has a skill cap ever been reached in anything?"
Nope only thing I implied was the only way to reduce emphasis of teamfights results in split pushing. Which simplifies the game. If you're going to just try and make my posts look contradictory I think we're done here, both solutions one and two are obviously part of teamfighting.
You can keep trying to tell me I know nothing by acting technical but anyone looking for the overarching idea in my arguments could of found it. You chose not to and instead try to nitpick useless comments which makes me believe you actually have no argument to back on in the first place.
Everything you've mentioned enlightens my point that all that matters in a game of League of Legends is ultimately how the teams engage a fight. Simplistic.
On March 16 2012 02:18 hunts wrote: I'm honestly not sure how pro LoL is popular. I mean I get how LoL is popular as a game, it's ridiculously easy and it's where people who fail too hard at dota/dota2/hon go, but how is professional LoL popular? Is it so all the lol fans can watch slightly better players play for money and go "hey that looks cool i can probably do that too, look im watching an esport yay!" I mean dota is a great game, and dota2 will be too once more of the heroes are in, but I just really don't understand how lol is so popular now.
Most people only want to watch the game they play is all that it comes down to.
You do know that WoW didn't get nearly as many viewers back when it was more popular than LoL is now right?
On March 16 2012 01:55 DonKey_ wrote: So apparently posts that criticize games without any substance are acceptable and standard now.
Well it is the internet, hardly lacking in one liners.
However, I would have thought my comment was self evident in its references.
The Dreamhack sponsorship by Riot to increase the exposure of LoL as a top tier competitive game at the expense of HoN and their response to Valve's million dollar DOTA2 tournament were to a great extent using their commercial success to promote the idea that LoL has enough depth to be a lasting esport.
The majority of other games in the genre have far more complexity via the oft mentioned denying that LoL lacks as well as inherent differences in map design leading to a far safer early game and (to a certain extent) a homogenisation of roles within the champion selection due the blurring of attributes.
Combined with the lack of 'punishment' for mistakes, this leads to both much less back and forth gameplay but a much less dynamic game and therefore a more boring spectator experience.
EPT
