LoL takes #1 E-sport spot in Korea - Page 87

On March 16 2012 00:46 Rorance wrote:


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.

On March 16 2012 01:09 Exempt. wrote:


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.