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Since this discussion seems to be going through different threads. I don't think bitching about it (no matter how good a set of ideas we might come up with) will change anything but might as well consolidate a thread similar to the Balance Bitching for Bozos thread in SC2. Also as a precursor I'd like to point out that I like both (counting HoN and DotA the same, even if some people might get angry over that generalization) a lot, I simply prefer LoL because I favor the non-single-hardcarry gameplay. My bias there is because I loved VS and CM and NA and I absolutely hated how I'd simply turn into a fucking CC bot even if I start like 5-0-5. My thoughts:
Fundamentally I think there is one key thing that Riot needs to take a look at, which is reducing margin of error. The reality is that better people will consistently make good judgments and reduce the number of stupid mistakes. This is why tower diving is actually done relatively often at low levels of play, while it becomes extremely rare in high-level organized play - people don't fuck around at their tower if they know the other player can pull off a successful dive. This means that generally the only way you die is if you either incorrectly commit to a fight that you can't win, make a play error, or have an extended chain of mistakes ranging upward to 30 seconds that grinds you down to your death. To no surprise this doesn't really happen when people aren't stupid. This is also why spells like Ashe's ECA is amazing - people have difficulty factoring in that stun, and it forces the chain of unfortunate errors. Otherwise people have to grossly misplay (think Soaz in GC) for someone to actually die.
The map
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/IBJN0.png)
This is obviously just my biased opinion but that is the total number of wards necessary to shut down both rivers. Yes, that's a whole whopping four on both sides. This is why I mention that a starting build of 6 wards can shut down HALF THE MAP for ganks for 9 minutes! And the only way you can prevent this is to invest in a high-risk medium-return item (Oracle) that is incredibly expensive.
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/eTMCz.png)
Look at the number of exits people actually have in getting to the playing field. 10 being nice and making the cross two exits (as they can leave two different directions), but primarily 9 exit points. and that's being nice and including the two funnels on the side of mid lane both exiting right next to your own tower. Again, this goes back to the ward placement - aside from sneaking through the outer edges of the side lanes to hide in the bush when the creep is just out of side range, there are only 4 logistic ways of crossing from one side to the other side without going through lanes. Yes, people might say "well DotA/HoN have big walls too!" but it's a difference in surface area.
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/1YMfj.png)
This is an extremely overly simplistic representation of like 2/3 the HoN/DotA map but the yellows are rough spots of solid wall (yes I know there're other walls that I ignored) and the pink are spots that are pseudo walls, similar more to like the brush in LoL. They're walls, but anyone can come barging through them, making them dangerous.
Furthermore, while this actually has a worse river outlet design that SR, you can't ward the place to hell because they have a team-wide cap on # of wards bought. This makes it more difficult to ward EVERYthing, allows for some sneaky jungle to river to jungle paths (push mid -> sneak out mid -> into jungle -> through -> gank), and makes it devastatingly costly when one of your wards gets sniped down. In LoL though, wards have taken more of a disposal clairvoyance role, and even if the other team has an Oracle people just plop wards left and right, if nothing else to force the oracle to go to clear the ward (positioning wins games).
You can also notice that the river/side are staggered, such that at top lane in order to remain at "neutral space" (ie. if the creep are dead center of the lane) you're "past the river" automatically and are thus exposing yourself to the danger of the enemy jungle. In LoL... there's a giant fucking wall. Also the river is the neutral ground, so you're not even in enemy territory. Hence, one map forces natural aggressive placement (and thus strategic hero selection due to the circumstances), while the other kinda lets you get away with whatever you want. I understand, of course, that a lot of SR's design is caused by Dragon... but this is, IMO, a bad trade-off.
To touch on towers, which some people feel are too strong (lol), the real issue IMO is this:
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/ZPsxk.png)
Yellow has ONE direction to dive (or two if you wanna come in through river, but that's extremely difficult due to the time required to actually position there, and also because wards make it blatantly obvious), and really three ways to extract from the tower dive, none of which are desirable because two sends you toward the rest of their team and also takes a while, while going "back" without creep means you take like 3-4 tower hits which is also undesirable. It's simply nearly impossible to get out. Furthermore for the man baiting the tower dive (assuming they're not just too stupid to back), you can dance around at the back of the tower which causes extra hits and does not provide an extraction route for the diver, or if you run all the way down you have a helpful little bush to fuck people up with, too (both red marks). This diving is particularly brutal when you consider that if you don't know where the opposing jungler is the likelihood of the guy baiting you increases exponentially.
By contrast in DotA, if you've played it, you've probably encountered at least one instance where you dive the guy and simply walk into the forest right next to the tower as a safe haven. You can then (given vision) extract whenever you wish and/or continue diving the guy after you've shed aggro via shaking vision in the forest. That's not to say this is a no-risk maneuver but it's a crucial "extra option" that gives the tower 360 degrees of dead zone, as opposed to the current "if they lock themselves between the tower and the wall they're a real bitch to kill."
Hopefully that clears up why I'd gradually become disillusioned with SR the map.
The heroes
I actually don't have big issues with this for the most part. Riot has generally done a relatively admirable job in balancing (aside from various random hiccups), and understand the suckiness of sustain heroes. There are still heroes with great innate sustain but I usually have no problems with them because they have trade-offs. The real problem I have is with...
The items
Let's talk about margin of error. As much as people would like to say they play flawless the reality is that they don't. Not even the top dota players from China play flawless. This is because of the course of laning people make very subtle positioning mistakes as they attempt to maintain/exert superiority. How often have you seen an Ashe slide juuuuuuuuuuust a hair too close to the creep and eat 3-4 Cait shots from stutter-step micro?
The problem as I see it is that there're too many items that improve sustain and increase margin of error. And for all intents and purposes, the only margin of error we care about is (e)HP. As long as they have more than 0 hp they had just enough margin of error to escape problems.
I laughed a month ago when I first picked up an AD hero and compared DBlade and Longsword, for instance. Really, Riot? Why would you ever buy a LS when one gives you sustain (however slight), margin of error (100 hp!), and the SAME DAMAGE, for a slightly higher cost (for starting purposes, one heal potion), especially when, get this...
Longsword doesn't even build into anything useful early for a ranged AD hero.
Why are they getting an extra 100 hp anyways (that's like a 25% boost at level 1 wtf). Remove the Doran items and everyone would be dicking around with like 400 hp at level 1. Two quick missteps against Annie and you DIE. This is how things used to be in ranged AD vs AP for instance before people realized you can just stack DBlades and be invincible. Three DBlades (relatively standard) and you get a whopping 300 HP, which is again like a 40% increase in max HP at that point in the game. That is beyond absurd.
Then you have shit like Catalyst, which not only gives you like a 20% increase in HP and mana (both of which are bottlenecks for AP in attrition lanes), but it gives you a nice sustain boost. What if you remove Cata? You'd see a hell of a lot more people dying, that's for sure. Or at least a hell of a lot more people being forced to back or invest in health potions, both of which are pretty damn good rewards for having a superior matchup.
Beating a dead horse but stuff like Wriggles is retarded too because it gives such cheap life steal. Lifesteal and HP Regen are terrible mechanics (PStone) because they come in early, are relatively cheap, and provide absolutely insane sustainability. It's one thing if the hero relies on it (Mord) but if the hero relies on it, give the damn hero better base regen stats. Don't make them have to itemize for it, because the moment you create an item that's required to counteract a hero's weakness you allow other heroes who SPECIALIZE in that area to get even stronger. This contrast is most blatant when you look at the synergy of items between support and tanks, and ranged AD vs tanky DPS. Always, one item designed for one and simply augments and OP's the other. It's silly.
Summoner spells
I don't have an issue with Flash, as I feel many heroes having it as an escape card become embolded to play more aggressive. Otherwise if the other team has Shaco and you're Brand you're not going past a few inches in your lane. You'd be stupid to.
It boggles my mind why they don't remove or nerf Clairvoyance, though, because as we've established, wards are pretty stupid, and so is a free map-wide scan with relatively low cooldown and giant-ass range.
My conclusion
There's no magic way to increase the number of kills, especially in a game like LoL where blue pill is free and accessible. To that end I've always taken the stance that if you force them to back you've accomplished the equivalent of a kill. Which is fine. But nowadays it takes so long to do that (if not the task just being impossible altogether) that people can just play passive, make a few mistakes here and there but still maintain position, and keep farming.
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Repost this on na lol forums please? I would LOVE if it baited a red response. Great op.
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Yeah, fantastic OP. We'll see what they do with changing bot lane sustain and changing the jungle, I think that'll have a huge effect on the balancing act between passive/aggressive styles.
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Would a reduction in the cost of Oracles (to, say, 275) and perhaps a buff to the other potions help the situation? I feel like the non ward/healthpot consumables would help aggressive play, but there may be unpleasant side effects.
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I'm not even sure if lowering cost of Oracles would fix it, because you'll always have the cost vs reward, as well as the money and TIME investment to deal with. For a jungler (who already lags behind in money... and if jungle changes go through apparently will struggle even moreso with the money) the cost of an Oracle is big - the cost of a single green ward is big too as it's essentially a whole creep camp. Then you have to think about the time it takes for a hero to actually go sweeping, and it takes 3 hits and you have to be weary of bait wards (I've been shafted by a Malz teleport onto a ward I was trying to sweep once) and such, and again you have to be so proactive with the sweeps because if you sweep a ward en route to a gank you're still letting them know where you are, which invites counterjungles and stuff. It's why I can't really offer much solutions other than the sustain items, because it's such a deep-rooted and multi-faceted issue 
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You should also note one of the main differences between LoL and other games: No denying and no gold loss on death. At first blush, these things seem to encourage passive play and in certain situations they do. However, if a player is getting outdenied and outfarmed, one of the main solutions to that problem is to just go fucking kill the offending party and make him lose his money. Even if you don't kill that person he has to spend 30 seconds out of lane and the cost of a tp scroll (unlike LoL where teleporting back to base is free).
These things won't be added into LoL but they are still important to note.
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I think it's an interesting concept but I'm not as sold as many people that they change too much. I'm not a firm believer that rewarding kills will increase aggression, especially when it's a penalty-based incentive, because it simply means that everyone will just as equally (or sometimes moreso) have incentive to play even SAFER to prevent the gold loss on death. It's something I can't say either way and end up believing that it really just cancels out. You either have it in a game or you don't, and it doesn't really change much.
Denying on the other hand definitely has a major issue in laning. My problem with deny though is that it really, hmm, it makes certain heroes really weak, and certain heroes really strong. It rewards lane superiority (ie. hero selection) far too much, and with all the other issues with difficulty in punishing someone who's not playing stupid, feels like it'd tilt the scales TOO much in favor of the sustain heroes. It's why for a long while DotA had very limited hero selection because certain heroes were so much stronger in lane, that they could rack up denies and completely axe the lane just at champ select. ... if you get what I'm trying to say, because I feel like I worded that really poorly.
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Another thing to take note of is that most junglers rely on Red to gank, this means a CV on red can tell you to drop a ward making warding even more trivial. Cutting of retreat paths is so hard in LoL, currently you need CV to do it decently which is a result of 1. Ganks have limited range. 2. Brush is very strong defensively and a huge risk(time wise) offensively.
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Sigh. Maybe at work tomorrow ill pull all my responses from the other thread and post them here.
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Personally I wish that green wards were not invisible. Lower the cost but make it so that you don't need an oracle to clear green wards. And by keeping the invis on pink wards, you have to make a decision on whether I try to spend money on green wards which would only be able to protect me for a single gank at most, or do i spend alot more gold just to be safe for that 3 mins of time.
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Decrease in tower damage to champions (but increase in health) is one minor thing that could be easily implemented.
I think the overhaul to sustainability and support characters will help a lot, so the upcoming patch might help things a decent amount. I think the ward problem is also a big one, as you talk about. I almost feel like decreasing the cost on wards but making them despawn much faster would help. That way, you can still be rewarded by warding properly and on time. However, now having to ward so much more often could leave you open to getting ganked or something along those lines.
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On August 22 2011 08:45 Southlight wrote:
I think it's an interesting concept but I'm not as sold as many people that they change too much. I'm not a firm believer that rewarding kills will increase aggression, especially when it's a penalty-based incentive, because it simply means that everyone will just as equally (or sometimes moreso) have incentive to play even SAFER to prevent the gold loss on death. It's something I can't say either way and end up believing that it really just cancels out. You either have it in a game or you don't, and it doesn't really change much.
Denying on the other hand definitely has a major issue in laning. My problem with deny though is that it really, hmm, it makes certain heroes really weak, and certain heroes really strong. It rewards lane superiority (ie. hero selection) far too much, and with all the other issues with difficulty in punishing someone who's not playing stupid, feels like it'd tilt the scales TOO much in favor of the sustain heroes. It's why for a long while DotA had very limited hero selection because certain heroes were so much stronger in lane, that they could rack up denies and completely axe the lane just at champ select. ... if you get what I'm trying to say, because I feel like I worded that really poorly.
I sorta get what you are saying and like I said, none of these things will be added to LoL but I think looking at other games in the genre (which you are doing in OP) will give you a better grip on why LoL is extremely passive.
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What is really funny about the ward problem is that Riot nerfed duration and QQ began and they then nerfed cost.
I thought it was a terrible Idea to nerf cost, it made wards more versatile while still basically being just as effective.
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On August 22 2011 09:06 Eppa! wrote:
What is really funny about the ward problem is that Riot nerfed duration and QQ began and they then nerfed cost.
Yeeeah... it's tricky. I dunno, there're so many causes and effects, I honestly dunno what to do. Hence why all I did was outline the glaring problems from my perspective. A game designer I am not :>
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On August 22 2011 08:57 I_Love_Bacon wrote:
Decrease in tower damage to champions (but increase in health) is one minor thing that could be easily implemented.
I think the overhaul to sustainability and support characters will help a lot, so the upcoming patch might help things a decent amount. I think the ward problem is also a big one, as you talk about. I almost feel like decreasing the cost on wards but making them despawn much faster would help. That way, you can still be rewarded by warding properly and on time. However, now having to ward so much more often could leave you open to getting ganked or something along those lines.
im a noob so take this comment with a large grain of salt. but wouldnt a better fix be to make the turrets scale with the average level of the team. in the early game they give you 100% protection as they 4-5 shot any hero, and yet late game they are almost a none factor.
sure they can not scale quite as well, causing them to become less important but if people want to feel less punished for attacking then (especially ranged) people shouldnt be able to so easily sit under a turret
if people were really set on anti-passive play they could change up the reward system to cause you to only get gold / more gold or whatever, based on how close you are to the river, forcing you to need to fight away from your turret.
but just from my perspective surely it must be a fine line to walk if you want to punish passive play? any changes that force people into attacking or dangerous play really favour mobility for increased ganking, as people will be likely to be too far from a turret to ever get back.
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United States47024 Posts
The question that I have to ask, because, just like Riot you do not clarify:
What do you consider "the problem of passive gameplay?" Is it
A) Lane play is too focused on farming, and not enough on aggression/harassment
OR
B) Mapwide play in early levels tends to be passive--there are comparatively few ganks overall, almost no lane-to-lane ganks, and even when they happen, ganks rarely turn into kills
Both have been referred to by Riot as a "passive gameplay problem", but Riot has unsuccessfully tried to tackle both issues, in part, IMO, because these are two opposed problems--attempting to "fix" one problem tends to exacerbate the other.
Flash is one example of this. Flash allows for aggressive lane play because if the jungler ganks you during an aggressive play, you have an escape, such that it does not turn into a kill--it reduces the risk of in-lane aggression and harassment. However, this also makes it much harder to achieve a kill or even a forced bluepill from a gank, disincentivizing ganking.
One might bring up that DotA accomplishes a good balance between lane aggression and map-wide gank pressure, but that is because of how the risk-reward is skewed by gold loss and the drastically higher importance of farm on carries than on non-carries. The gankers generally have an extremely different risk-reward to look at than the "gank-ees". LoL, however, has removed gold loss and almost completely evened out farm-dependence (at least to the point that between the 3 lanes, it's roughly of similar importance).
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I see one potentially big issue when it comes to nerfing sustain. Karthus. Karthus is the main champion that can wreck because a lot of people build him suicide mode as is. I do not put much survival on him because he can do more dead than alive. Nerfing survivability is going to lead to a ton of Karthus Q_Q. Karthus will go from minion farming early/ suiciding teamfighting late to kill farming as soon as he hits level 6.
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I think they should do things slowly. In my humble opinion, I think the first big change they should make is to put a timer/cap on number of wards a team can buy, similar to DotA/HoN. No other immediate change should be made.
I believe this for several reasons. By lowering the number of wards, it allows junglers and other laners to increase the possibility of successful ganks. The old roamer meta really only died out because people got smarter and starting warding better. With less wards, roaming and ganking will become much more profitable/less risky and we might be able to see a change in meta to something more aggressive. Maybe we'll even be able to see dedicated counter-junglers.
Additionally, I really like the point Uta touched on regarding items. I think an across-the-board dorans nerf would really help. I'm not sure a straight up removal would be best, but perhaps remove or lower the hp bonus of Dblade and Dring to like 50? 100 hp is quite ridiculous. The catalyst passive could have some nerfing too. Also, I'm never really quite understood why Wriggle's even gave lifesteal in the first place. It was my understanding that Madreds pink razor and Wriggles were originally intended to help champs clear jungle. So, imo, just make the Wriggle's proc % increase, and reduce or even straight up remove the lifesteal component.
The biggest reason why I think death/kill gold will never be changed (ie. loss of gold on death will never be implemented), denying will never be implemented, along with increase/decrease tower damage not happening, is because Riot needs to cater to casuals. Riot has a history of wishing to cater to casuals (hello random xin zhao nerfs!) which while I somewhat dislike, I can fully understand.
EDIT: Also, Riot's also had a history of buffing turrets if I remember correctly. I think they should just remove the armor pen/damage change they gave to turrets.
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Before I throw in my 2 cents I'd like to just state that I'm only lvl 13 but I have watched a lot of HoN and the new DotA streams, and am much more of a cerebral player than most my level.
I think nerfing tower damage and buffing tower health would be a great change. Getting a clear 1v1 kill before level 8ish is incredibly hard. Even when I am fully confident in my ability to kill someone, more often than not they can escape because it only takes a few tower hits to kill an AD carry. For example playing ashe i like to buy boots then rush Infinity Edge... I am glass cannon status at this point, and a tower would make short work of me. I understand that they are there to favor someone escaping but at this point it is just ridiculous. Dota 2 is a great example of how it should be done. I watched 3 people at level 6 stand under an enemy tower and kill a hero. How often does this happen in LoL? Not often is the answer.
Apparently I am not in riots target demographic because while I consider myself a casual, I am starting to get very irritated by the fact that most low level kills are via towers
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Wriggles gives lifesteal so as not to fuck over the champions like Shaco and Yi who don't have sustain as compared to say, Udyr.
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That's part of the jungle change imo, where they stated that sustain got out of hand mainly because you needed it to jungle well, but then jungle champs became way too strong in lane.
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On August 22 2011 10:17 TheYango wrote:
The question that I have to ask, because, just like Riot you do not clarify:
What do you consider "the problem of passive gameplay?" Is it
A) Lane play is too focused on farming, and not enough on aggression/harassment
OR
B) Mapwide play in early levels tends to be passive--there are comparatively few ganks overall, almost no lane-to-lane ganks, and even when they happen, ganks rarely turn into kills
Both have been referred to by Riot as a "passive gameplay problem", but Riot has unsuccessfully tried to tackle both issues, in part, IMO, because these are two opposed problems--attempting to "fix" one problem tends to exacerbate the other.
That's a really good post, I think it's necessary to this thread that we all look at this point that there are two different ways in which the game can produce action. Let's separate these into type A aggression and type B aggression as seen above. When you have lots of type A aggression, you have people trying to dominate their lane and crush their opponents out 1 vs 1 and 2 vs 2. When you have type B aggression you have people coming in for powerful 2 vs 1 and 3 vs 2 ganks frequently.
Lemme summarize how riot views things:
1) Lots of type B aggression prevents type A aggression. I think this is pretty much impossible to argue with, you can either have one of these or neither but there's no reason to think you can have both types of aggression at a high level. I think riot actually hopes to reduce aggression of type B because they feel type A is more rewarding.
2) Right now there is NO reward for type A aggression. This is the function denying has in dota. Watching the international I understood for the first time how the system works. I had been under the impression that good players were constantly both last hitting and denying off each other but actually if you look at the scoreboards in the game you see that the players usually have very few denies. Here is the purpose of denying:
If you are zoning your opponent in lol, they can hang back and your last hitting will eventually send the creeps to the tower. They will gain xp and gold - not as much as you, but more than enough to stay in the game. So they really have no reason to come out and be vulnerable.
If you are zoning your opponent in dota, you can deny and your last hitting will not push the lane. So they have to come out because the lane will never push to their tower.
So basically, in league of legends if you outplay your opponent with type A aggression, you hardly get rewarded for it at all by comparison, and you have the double penalty of opening yourself up to type B aggression.
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Great post snip. In my personal experience I've found that with a strong carry you can play incredibly passive 1v2 and still wind up outkilling your oppenent. I've gotten stuck 1v2 playing Wukong vs ashe and yi and ended up killing the both of them. All I had to do was hang back under my tower, farm when the minions got pushed, harrass under my tower a bit, let them get hit by a turret or two, and then at level 4 killed both of them. I literally did next to nothing and wound up on even footing.
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that's a great post. I think LoL tries that through lower costs and more harass, but as pointed out many times, conbinations of blue pill, tower, and cheap defensive items make it pretty ineffectual,
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So any ideas how to create a reward for effective zoning and lane control? I can't see riot ever adding denying to this game.
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The biggest problem Riot faces right now is that they are trying to cater to casuals while attempting to promote the game as a competitive E-Sport. There is a huge tension right now about which MOBA will be "the" e-sport in the future and it's certainly very profitable to be the company supporting that game. The issue is you can't address certain problems (the game is too forgiving on mistakes for example) at a high level of play while still attempting to cater to the casuals and bads. If League of Legends continues to cater to casuals and DotA 2 caters to the competitive scene, then that's where the scene will go.
The issue here is that it's not very good for PR to tell the majority of your client base "If you suck I don't care if you're not having a fun and balanced experience, learn to play before you bitch"
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On August 22 2011 13:27 STS17 wrote:(the game is too forgiving on mistakes for example) at a high level of play while still attempting to cater to the casuals and bads
I know it's amazing, but the matchmaking system is pretty good. If you suck, you get placed against other shitty players, removing most of the pubstomp issue.
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On August 22 2011 13:18 Azerbaijan wrote:
So any ideas how to create a reward for effective zoning and lane control? I can't see riot ever adding denying to this game.
I've no idea!
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On August 22 2011 13:27 STS17 wrote:
The biggest problem Riot faces right now is that they are trying to cater to casuals while attempting to promote the game as a competitive E-Sport. There is a huge tension right now about which MOBA will be "the" e-sport in the future and it's certainly very profitable to be the company supporting that game. The issue is you can't address certain problems (the game is too forgiving on mistakes for example) at a high level of play while still attempting to cater to the casuals and bads. If League of Legends continues to cater to casuals and DotA 2 caters to the competitive scene, then that's where the scene will go.
The issue here is that it's not very good for PR to tell the majority of your client base "If you suck I don't care if you're not having a fun and balanced experience, learn to play before you bitch"
I don't agree with the bold. It's the viewers that determines how big the scene will be, not the players. Since MOBA's are terrible to watch when you don't know the heroes, the game that the "casuals" play will have a huge advantage. It's the reason why competitive LoL has tons of interest, while HoN has very little.
As for the thread, I do like the idea of more type A aggression UniversalSnip mentioned (dominating lane opponents), as type B aggression is just more frustrating for players. Just not sure how to better reward the winner of the lane...
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I think the game is rather too unforgiving of mistakes, particularly in mid to late game and in organized play. One death can result in gigantic snowballs of some combination of baron/dragon/buffs/towers which all lead to tremendous pressure on the defending side, who on top of losing all the neutral free gold and buffs, will often have to defend with little to no map vision. Late late game one mistake will simply lead straight to a loss. That's the biggest reason teams are so hesitant to take any risks let alone engage. Mistakes don't even have to be getting caught, but just staying on bot side for a little too long or recalling at the wrong time, both of which can lead to a free baron. While the tremendous consequences of making mistakes will speed up the overall game length theoretically, it makes for very boring play. Tense, high level, extremely strategical, but ultimately boring to play and watch. In unorganized play anyone can do whatever they want and be as aggressive and risky and dumb and none of it will matter nearly as much because people won't capitalize.
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On August 22 2011 10:53 daxxus wrote:
Before I throw in my 2 cents I'd like to just state that I'm only lvl 13 but I have watched a lot of HoN and the new DotA streams, and am much more of a cerebral player than most my level.
I think nerfing tower damage and buffing tower health would be a great change. Getting a clear 1v1 kill before level 8ish is incredibly hard. Even when I am fully confident in my ability to kill someone, more often than not they can escape because it only takes a few tower hits to kill an AD carry. For example playing ashe i like to buy boots then rush Infinity Edge... I am glass cannon status at this point, and a tower would make short work of me. I understand that they are there to favor someone escaping but at this point it is just ridiculous. Dota 2 is a great example of how it should be done. I watched 3 people at level 6 stand under an enemy tower and kill a hero. How often does this happen in LoL? Not often is the answer.
Apparently I am not in riots target demographic because while I consider myself a casual, I am starting to get very irritated by the fact that most low level kills are via towers
Actually it is kind of common to get a 4 man gank bot lane around 6 to secure first dragon and you can easily dive at that level. I think one of the big things is sustain in top lane and support + ad bot lane that is just farm(to be fair in dota that is all the hard carries do for the first 30 or so minutes outside a couple of fights or counter ganks). In dota there is also op disables compared to lol. At level 6 a bm mid can gank with a vs, es roamers from the tri lane and have 7 seconds of disable and a fissure trap. It is quite often in a 4 man gank bot for first dragon in lol has one or 2 single target disables for a total of like 3 secs and normally at least one is a skill shot. Blue pilling really should have a cd i think as well as the trip from base to top is like 20 secs with boots, allowing you to not even miss a full wave and constantly reward.
On the plus side lol promotes much more mid to late game fighting from map objectives and smaller map size. If i had a nickel for every dota match that got decided in the first 25 mins and then turned into 15 mins of stale farming to extend the advantage I would have a lot of nickels. Fuck one of the early games this weekend went 2 hours and the last hour had like 2 teamfights.
And you are not safe on sidelanes from ganks with 4 wards as the brush from behind ganks are still there.
There are many differences as the games are very different for being in the same genre and both have their positives and negatives. Main thing that makes me sad busting out the old dota this weekend is how unresponsive and clunky the movement seems compared to lol.
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This might be slightly tangential to your original point Uta, but I'm going to make the argument that buyback would make this game a lot better. Especially in long games (30+ minutes) you hit a point where both teams are too afraid to do anything because losing one or two people to a small mistake can cost you the game or a really large lead.
Buyback gives you something to do with your money when you're capped and slightly increases the margin for error which makes people more likely to take risks/be aggressive.
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The issue with passive play in League of Legends is caused by a large number of different factors. I see people mention that it's too hard to kill people, and I agree but I don't believe it's just due to Flash or tower damage or the heroes not hitting hard or the heroes having too much HP (although it is this to a certain extent). Excluding all other factors, if you have 3 people hitting 1 person in LoL, that person will die just as fast if you had the same scenario in DotA.
The difference is that in DotA the crowd control is much stronger than it is in LoL and more heroes have it, so the other guy doesn't fight back or run away but spends more time stunned/snared leaving him extremely low if not outright dead by the time the CC ends. The CC in DotA lasts longer but has a longer cooldown. On the other hand, CC in LoL lasts much less but has a shorter CD.
Something else mentioned was that there wasn't as high a reward factor, ie. you don't lose gold on death. First, you have to keep in mind that gold in LoL is worth more than it is in DotA. For example, the gold you get from creeps in DotA is approximately 2x more than the ones from LoL, the trade off is that items are cheaper in LoL--but ends games items are not 2x cheaper. The rate of gold accumulation from farm vs end game item prices might be the same, but I'm unsure. It feels like DotA creeps take slightly longer to kill each other from watching the DotA2 stream but not that much longer.
Excluding other factors such as first blood and streaks, the gold from a kill in LoL is 300gold while in DotA it's 200+level*5 and the dead hero loses level*30. As mentioned above, LoL items are cheaper. So from early games kill, you actually work much faster towards end game items than you do in DotA. Could you imagine if you first blooded someone in DotA and got 650+ gold at under level 5, how much better your laning would be?
Not just that, but the distance between opposing towers is much shorter and the tower kills creeps much faster compared to DotA. You lose a lot more farm from dying to due to your lane getting pushed a lot quicker to your tower and your tower killing the creeps much faster. It's not so much that there isn't a high reward factor, but the reward factor for a successful kill is too much that it forces the opponent to play a lot more safe. If you watched the games, it wasn't that people weren't trying to setup ganks or go ganking, but that it was too hard because the other player was playing too safe. If the reward for killing someone at low level was scaled better, would people play more aggressive in lane, due to lower punishment, making it easier for the ganks to take place? Who knows.
Another point brought up was denying. While I do think it's an interesting mechanic that would add another strategy to LoL, it would make little to no difference to passive play. Yes, you could keep your creep wave from pushing towards the enemy tower to make the enemy come out. But what's stopping you from taking it to the extreme where you deny to keep your creep wave at your tower so you can turtle up and farm? Keep in mind that in DotA you can only deny creeps under 50% HP. The lane will eventually push either way unless you pull creeps from the forest to block (another mechanic not in LoL). The degree of lane control in DotA is higher but it can just as easily promote passive play.
I find it strange that people say that LoL is too forgiving of mistakes at high level. While it's true that it is forgiving of mistakes at low level since it's harder to kill people early game, I find it the opposite at high level. High level players know how to capitalize on mistakes while lower level players do not. The game is too harsh on mistakes at high level, especially late game. Out of position and the other team has 5 people at baron? Can't do anything about it unless you have teleport because by the time you get there, it'll be dead. Out of position and alone? Your team can't help you because they can't teleport to you. Get caught and killed? That's multiple towers because the death timer is too long, you can't buyback, the lanes are too small and the tower and building HP is too little. That is another reason why it's so passive, because if you screw up at high level, it just snowballs out of control since the other team can take out so many map objectives 5v4. Would buybacks like DotA, or limited buybacks like HoN, help this issue?
I think wards are an issue and limited wards would help, but going further a long that line of thought, the biggest issue is the map. As mentioned in the OP, there aren't enough different paths through the jungle, making warding chokes extremely easy. I think the biggest offender is that the distance between towers are too short, even if you push out a bit it's very easy to get back to relative safety. Ganks would also be easier if the distances between the two T1 towers and the T1 to T2 towers were further apart. Furthering what I mentioned in the last paragraph, mistakes result in multiple towers being lost because the distances are too short and the creep wave pushes to the next map objective too fast. Longer lanes and higher HP buildings would make mistakes of dying leading into snowballs a lot more forgiving. Would having an on demand, consumable fortify like DotA help?
From the DotA2 streams, it seems to me that people are willing to be more aggressive because the mistakes from screwing up your aggressiveness aren't as pronounced as they are in LoL and snowball out of control as much. If you screw up pushing into the enemy base (in one of the Navi vs Ehome games, Navi repeatedly pushed one lane over and over), the enemy can't just 5man rush your base taking out a ton of your buildings due to travel distance in the map. Similarly to that, if you make a mistake defending, chances are you can usually buyback and continue defending.
Anyway, I can't really think of a way to fix this simply without messing up somewhere else.
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Valhalla18444 Posts
Make Doran's items unique, problem solved. I don't think there's anything inherently wrong with letting players choose between a dead-end but beefy starting item, or something that's not so beefy early on but builds into something better. longsword builds into wriggles, brut (then ghostblade i guess), etc. it's just a problem with the item itself. wriggle's, for example, is quite a bit stronger than a doran's blade, and getting it 475g faster does make a noticable difference. the problem lies in the option to just buy 2 more doran's blades to get similar stats.
so yeah, i don't see a problem with doran's items, just the fact that you can stack 'em. i like the design theory behind them, but i agree the items would need a little workover if they aren't gonna make them unique (which they won't)
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Valhalla18444 Posts
i think they could go a ways toward fixing it by lowering the material costs of items, but increasing the combine recipe. Trinity Force is actually a really cool item because I can clearly see the difference each piece makes in my damage/survivability/etc. it makes the order in which you get them interesting as well, because all three pieces do something different. making more items like that would be cool, as well as adding more endgame recipes that just combine (and improve on) the stats of x base weapons. like, why can't we have madred's razors + brutallizer build into something? even if the item it builds into isn't that different from wriggle's or ghostblade or whatever, simply having the option to build DIFFERENT mid-item pieces to accomplish different things would do a lot to diversify item builds we see
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I figured one of the main reasons why it's difficult to be aggressive is how difficult it is to keep your towers alive. Properly keeping your towers alive is so incredibly important as they're incredibly powerful defensive structures which give you map control. However, at the same time they're incredibly easy to destroy when there isn't a hero defending the lane, so heroes are often pinned to a lane. One of the way DotA allows for heroes to be aggressive is with strong defensive options. Scrolls of teleportation allow heroes to leave their lanes for a gank and return quickly to defend a push. Glyph of fortification gives you some travel time. In LoL, you get inferior options in Teleport and Fortify, which are basically inferior options to other summoner skills and have huge cooldowns.
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Valhalla18444 Posts
I don't think teleport is necessarily inferior, it's just got very niche uses. it's incredibly strong under the appropriate circumstances and on the right champion.
I definitely agree with you on Fortify. It's absurd that it has a longer cooldown than Flash, which has superior utility by leaps and bounds. If they lowered the cooldown on Fortify to like 45 seconds, made it team unique (as in only one Fort per team), and made it target a specific tower instead of multiple towers, it would be much more useful, but in a different way. As it is right now it's a pretty stupid spell, essentially with the long cooldown you end up paying for the rest of your towers, that are not under siege, being protected as well. Enjoy your several meager seconds of invincible towers, cuz if it didn't come at that one specific time where you only need that 5-6 seconds or whatever to get to the tower and defend it with your team, it's just pointless, and you won't get another opportunity for a loooooong time. It makes very little sense to me, which is why i lambaste people who take it when they're on my team 
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On August 22 2011 14:39 arnath wrote:
This might be slightly tangential to your original point Uta, but I'm going to make the argument that buyback would make this game a lot better. Especially in long games (30+ minutes) you hit a point where both teams are too afraid to do anything because losing one or two people to a small mistake can cost you the game or a really large lead.
Buyback gives you something to do with your money when you're capped and slightly increases the margin for error which makes people more likely to take risks/be aggressive.
Buyback won't solve the early game passivity, which is where most of the problems lie.
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On August 22 2011 14:21 zulu_nation8 wrote:
I think the game is rather too unforgiving of mistakes, particularly in mid to late game and in organized play. One death can result in gigantic snowballs of some combination of baron/dragon/buffs/towers which all lead to tremendous pressure on the defending side, who on top of losing all the neutral free gold and buffs, will often have to defend with little to no map vision. Late late game one mistake will simply lead straight to a loss. That's the biggest reason teams are so hesitant to take any risks let alone engage. Mistakes don't even have to be getting caught, but just staying on bot side for a little too long or recalling at the wrong time, both of which can lead to a free baron. While the tremendous consequences of making mistakes will speed up the overall game length theoretically, it makes for very boring play. Tense, high level, extremely strategical, but ultimately boring to play and watch. In unorganized play anyone can do whatever they want and be as aggressive and risky and dumb and none of it will matter nearly as much because people won't capitalize.
I think this is the biggest problem with LoL as competitive game right now. Except it so all game long, First blood nets you almost another Dorans or a 3rd of a catalyst. Who wins the guy with or with out that boost in lane?
I played a game with a scrubby friend today, When I usually play every time we get an advantage we force a snowball. Bot is dominating? Remove support from bot go help mid, killed guy mid? get drake. When I played with my friend they simply got a kill = go to another lane and farm.
There are a bunch of strong snowball mechanics (400 for first blood? 300 for all other kills) this does not make sense, in DotA you got a lot less for kills, with ganks being so hard to get in LoL it is very hard to make a comeback after a death as the opponents are basically safe and can out sustain any lane with the gold advantage.
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On August 22 2011 11:45 UniversalSnip wrote:
If you are zoning your opponent in lol, they can hang back and your last hitting will eventually send the creeps to the tower. They will gain xp and gold - not as much as you, but more than enough to stay in the game. So they really have no reason to come out and be vulnerable.
If you are zoning your opponent in dota, you can deny and your last hitting will not push the lane. So they have to come out because the lane will never push to their tower.
So basically, in league of legends if you outplay your opponent with type A aggression, you hardly get rewarded for it at all by comparison, and you have the double penalty of opening yourself up to type B aggression.
As Riot will never introduce denying, we can maybe find another way to fix this problem. What if killing minions under/near your own tower would give reduced exp and/or gold? This way, if you outplay your lane (type A), you actually gain a significant advantage over them. It would promote pushing and aggressiveness to force your opponents to kill minions under their tower, and would promote inter-lane aggression as people would be crossing the river more.
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On August 22 2011 16:20 FakeSteve[TPR] wrote:I don't think teleport is necessarily inferior, it's just got very niche uses. it's incredibly strong under the appropriate circumstances and on the right champion. I definitely agree with you on Fortify. It's absurd that it has a longer cooldown than Flash, which has superior utility by leaps and bounds. If they lowered the cooldown on Fortify to like 45 seconds, made it team unique (as in only one Fort per team), and made it target a specific tower instead of multiple towers, it would be much more useful, but in a different way. As it is right now it's a pretty stupid spell, essentially with the long cooldown you end up paying for the rest of your towers, that are not under siege, being protected as well. Enjoy your several meager seconds of invincible towers, cuz if it didn't come at that one specific time where you only need that 5-6 seconds or whatever to get to the tower and defend it with your team, it's just pointless, and you won't get another opportunity for a loooooong time. It makes very little sense to me, which is why i lambaste people who take it when they're on my team
I believe they took a page from DotA on this one with the decision to have such a long cooldown. In DotA people could fortify their towers essentially by using a teleport scroll on it, what it did was just lengthen the game because it became hard to push towers. Especially when it came down to push the final towers in someones base, pushing in just became too difficult and it could easily prolong the game 20mins+ longer than it should. Eventually they had to completely remove nerf the ability to fortify towers, down to a single 5min cooldown ability that had a global effect but has a shared cooldown with all heroes in your team
Fortify having a long cooldown is a good thing, the shorter the cooldown then the longer it will drag out the game.
If you believe a few seconds is something to laugh at then I think the current Metagame for LoL really hasn't developed enough. Because people didn't think it was that bad in DotA, then people actually started to abuse it and play super passive games
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Valhalla18444 Posts
oh, i forgot to mention it should make the towers stronger for 5-6 seconds, not make them invincible. 45 seconds is pretty short even for that i guess. or make it something you can only use when you're dead, lol
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On August 22 2011 18:15 FakeSteve[TPR] wrote:
oh, i forgot to mention it should make the towers stronger for 5-6 seconds, not make them invincible. 45 seconds is pretty short even for that i guess. or make it something you can only use when you're dead, lol
Replace it with a SR version of Garrison imo. Shield + Damage on allied tower or -damage on enemy tower.
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On August 22 2011 17:51 theMarkovian wrote:Show nested quote +On August 22 2011 11:45 UniversalSnip wrote:
If you are zoning your opponent in lol, they can hang back and your last hitting will eventually send the creeps to the tower. They will gain xp and gold - not as much as you, but more than enough to stay in the game. So they really have no reason to come out and be vulnerable.
If you are zoning your opponent in dota, you can deny and your last hitting will not push the lane. So they have to come out because the lane will never push to their tower.
So basically, in league of legends if you outplay your opponent with type A aggression, you hardly get rewarded for it at all by comparison, and you have the double penalty of opening yourself up to type B aggression. As Riot will never introduce denying, we can maybe find another way to fix this problem. What if killing minions under/near your own tower would give reduced exp and/or gold? This way, if you outplay your lane (type A), you actually gain a significant advantage over them. It would promote pushing and aggressiveness to force your opponents to kill minions under their tower, and would promote inter-lane aggression as people would be crossing the river more.
Malz would instantly become the #1 champion as he relentlessly pushes wave after wave into your tower.
Such a change would just make it a pushing competition and leave many weak pushers out in the cold.
They could make towers deal random damage on minions though, thus making it very hard to last hit properly.
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something i didnt notice until watching like my 4th game of dota2 is that the sheer number of creeps is less, which would make one assume that the net value of each wave is less in dota than it is in LoL. Cant confirm whether or not this is the case in hon or dota1, kus i honestly dont remember and dont care enough to check. Also no idea how much impact it has on passive play, but was something interesting to be pointed out.
edit: On August 22 2011 18:59 zalz wrote:Show nested quote +On August 22 2011 17:51 theMarkovian wrote:On August 22 2011 11:45 UniversalSnip wrote:
If you are zoning your opponent in lol, they can hang back and your last hitting will eventually send the creeps to the tower. They will gain xp and gold - not as much as you, but more than enough to stay in the game. So they really have no reason to come out and be vulnerable.
If you are zoning your opponent in dota, you can deny and your last hitting will not push the lane. So they have to come out because the lane will never push to their tower.
So basically, in league of legends if you outplay your opponent with type A aggression, you hardly get rewarded for it at all by comparison, and you have the double penalty of opening yourself up to type B aggression. As Riot will never introduce denying, we can maybe find another way to fix this problem. What if killing minions under/near your own tower would give reduced exp and/or gold? This way, if you outplay your lane (type A), you actually gain a significant advantage over them. It would promote pushing and aggressiveness to force your opponents to kill minions under their tower, and would promote inter-lane aggression as people would be crossing the river more. Malz would instantly become the #1 champion as he relentlessly pushes wave after wave into your tower. Such a change would just make it a pushing competition and leave many weak pushers out in the cold. They could make towers deal random damage on minions though, thus making it very hard to last hit properly.
competitive players hate randomness, that would also throw the pushing mechanics totally out of whack. what happens when 1 tower gets a string of max hits and the other gets a string of min?
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On August 22 2011 17:51 theMarkovian wrote:Show nested quote +On August 22 2011 11:45 UniversalSnip wrote:
If you are zoning your opponent in lol, they can hang back and your last hitting will eventually send the creeps to the tower. They will gain xp and gold - not as much as you, but more than enough to stay in the game. So they really have no reason to come out and be vulnerable.
If you are zoning your opponent in dota, you can deny and your last hitting will not push the lane. So they have to come out because the lane will never push to their tower.
So basically, in league of legends if you outplay your opponent with type A aggression, you hardly get rewarded for it at all by comparison, and you have the double penalty of opening yourself up to type B aggression. As Riot will never introduce denying, we can maybe find another way to fix this problem. What if killing minions under/near your own tower would give reduced exp and/or gold? This way, if you outplay your lane (type A), you actually gain a significant advantage over them. It would promote pushing and aggressiveness to force your opponents to kill minions under their tower, and would promote inter-lane aggression as people would be crossing the river more.
that wouldnt solve the problem and it would be too complicated.
in dota the towers feel 2-3 times weaker. you can actually lvl 1 dive ppl if you set up a good gank.
in lol the turrets do way too much damage so everyone can farm safely there if he controls the minions right.
denying would solve a part of this but its ofc out of question for lol. Just nerf the goddam turrets and ppl will start to play aggressive and pick stuff/make strats that achieve aggressive laneing and ganking.
I find it very disturbing that riot thinks (or at least they thought that some weeks ago) roamers/junglers create the problem of uncertainty which forces the laners to play passive. LOL! This is obviously completely false. Roamers and junglers allow aggressive play and ganking. Just the turrets are so goddam strong that the opportunities are far less than they should be.
Also picking strong laners that shut down their opponent is, even if executed well, not allways a good thing. IMO if you have 90% health and your opponent has 30% then you should be able to dive him if he stays there. But NO the creeps do almost no damage so they can even tank them to keep a critical mass right before their turret and if you only think to engage then you suddenly explode because the turret 3 shots you.
the only longterm solution to prevent the abundance of passive play in the early game is to nerf the turret damage. riot can imo rebalance them and give em more health/armor.
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I don't know if Riot would want to make it so it's easier to gank and what not early because the majority of strong gankers scale really well in LoL where as in dota even if you go 10/0 you will still turn into support lategame. If an Annie, Lee Sin etc...go 10/0 they are just going to carry the game 90% of the time.
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On August 22 2011 19:00 barbsq wrote:something i didnt notice until watching like my 4th game of dota2 is that the sheer number of creeps is less, which would make one assume that the net value of each wave is less in dota than it is in LoL. Cant confirm whether or not this is the case in hon or dota1, kus i honestly dont remember and dont care enough to check. Also no idea how much impact it has on passive play, but was something interesting to be pointed out. edit: Show nested quote +On August 22 2011 18:59 zalz wrote:On August 22 2011 17:51 theMarkovian wrote:On August 22 2011 11:45 UniversalSnip wrote:
If you are zoning your opponent in lol, they can hang back and your last hitting will eventually send the creeps to the tower. They will gain xp and gold - not as much as you, but more than enough to stay in the game. So they really have no reason to come out and be vulnerable.
If you are zoning your opponent in dota, you can deny and your last hitting will not push the lane. So they have to come out because the lane will never push to their tower.
So basically, in league of legends if you outplay your opponent with type A aggression, you hardly get rewarded for it at all by comparison, and you have the double penalty of opening yourself up to type B aggression. As Riot will never introduce denying, we can maybe find another way to fix this problem. What if killing minions under/near your own tower would give reduced exp and/or gold? This way, if you outplay your lane (type A), you actually gain a significant advantage over them. It would promote pushing and aggressiveness to force your opponents to kill minions under their tower, and would promote inter-lane aggression as people would be crossing the river more. Malz would instantly become the #1 champion as he relentlessly pushes wave after wave into your tower. Such a change would just make it a pushing competition and leave many weak pushers out in the cold. They could make towers deal random damage on minions though, thus making it very hard to last hit properly. competitive players hate randomness, that would also throw the pushing mechanics totally out of whack. what happens when 1 tower gets a string of max hits and the other gets a string of min?
Gold per minion wave and in the jungle is actually a lot higher in dota than lol creeps are like ~40g and like 75 for a catapult and jungle is worth considerably more as well. It is needed gold though since a lot of items are more expensive(radiance 5k butterfly 6k) and constantly having to buy tp scrolls. And i believe amount of creeps spawned goes up as the game goes on if i remember right, though haven't played in a few years, as where in lol lane minions increase in value.
Also in dota if you are being zoned you can go behind your tower and creep pull as well to deny them which is what a support in lane would do to help the farmer, also a support like lich can deny a creep a wave kind of like pirate used to to deny exp and keep lane pulled.
You can also keep a wave frozen just out of tower range on your side if you control your lane well once a pushed lane comes back.
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IIRC every 7 minutes in DotA a new melee creep is added to every wave, like 12 for ranged and 40some for an extra catapult. In LoL the creepwave contains about 120 gold, in DotA it is around 200-210.
Pushing to the tower in LoL gives some benefits, as the other player is trying to last hit against something with about 3 times his AD, meaning that some last hits are just impossible to make. If there wasn't the threat of a jungler, just pushing the lane to someone's tower would be worth it because it cuts off about a third of most hero's farm, with some exceptions (Galio can last hit quite well under the tower because of his abilities, for example)
Creep pulling in DotA was great because it made it so any hero could get some XP from jungle at level 1, denied some experience, but also had the risk of getting ganked or making the tower take extra damage due to a delayed creep wave.
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My feeling is that pushing to the tower should not be the method of demonstrating lane control as some heroes are simply too good at pushing as part of their core design for that to work.
I think it would be better if, somehow, if you were just sitting there last hitting, it didn't cause your lane to push - for example a small, temporary armor buff on enemy creeps whenever you last hit, to offset the extra damage your side is outputting.
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I'm personally a fan of minion damage being adjusted based on the presence / absence of an allied champion, only to other minions of course. By raising minion-to-minion damage when an allied champion is not present, the lane will push slightly harder, which is evened out if the lane is empty, or neutralizes the "bonus" damage that is done to a wave by a champion last hitting.
This change is subtle, and allows a player to keep a minion wave from ever advancing to an enemy tower if he wants to and plays properly (making zoning an enemy champion much more effective). This improvement on zoning promotes aggressive play from everyone. Because pushing an opponent out of lane is much more effective then it once was, while if you're being zoned, you're completely zoned, and you will need to be aggressive (perhaps with the aid of a jungler or another lane) in order to regain control of your lane instead of simply waiting to last hit under your tower.
Not sure if I'm overlooking anything that may be abusable about this though.
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If you think about it passive play stems from the core philosophy of the game, team play. Team fights are the deciding factor of success, and playing defensive is naturally better for gaining advantages. The advantages culminate to a team fight and everyone wants the best chance of winning in a team fight.
Just looking at it through a broad picture. You can pick out things like summoner spells and how middle should be a better lane for ganking, better jungle structure wards less effective.But I think it stems from the emphasis Riot puts on the importance of gaining an advantage. The game is extremely harsh at high levels of play when it comes to advantages and disadvantages, top lane goes 2-0 and you win.
Basically playing defensive gives you an advantage in a lot of games, camping is easier in fps and in sc2 you have better chance of defending an attack if you are equal, that's how games work. Advantages are so important because of how balanced the gold/exp spread is in league of legends and they climax at a team fight which is usually quite deciding, maybe too deciding.
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On the subject of wards, remember early beta when the only ward was the vision ward at 150 or 200 or something and no one ever bought them and late game turned into a 5 man roam squad trying to catch someone out of position?
Was that a consequence of an undeveloped pro scene? Or would people have bought wards had they been cheaper?
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United States47024 Posts
On August 23 2011 13:10 UniversalSnip wrote:
My feeling is that pushing to the tower should not be the method of demonstrating lane control as some heroes are simply too good at pushing as part of their core design for that to work.
I think it would be better if, somehow, if you were just sitting there last hitting, it didn't cause your lane to push - for example a small, temporary armor buff on enemy creeps whenever you last hit, to offset the extra damage your side is outputting.
The thing is, I don't think Riot would ever implement this, because they seem to view a full deny as "anti-fun". That, I think they want to discourage the ability to create a situation where you can entirely zone an opponent off creeps while still getting all the farm you want for yourself. As it stands, this is still possible in many circumstances, but only if 1) you cede your own last-hits, or 2) the opponent makes the mistake to push slightly and give you creep control, despite being at a disadvantage.
On a completely different note, others have mentioned that more punishing deaths (e.g. gold loss on death or longer death timers) would cause people to be more passive--I would like to say that while this might be the case for solo laners, it would, at the very least, NOT be the case for duo laners. This is because while 2 solo laners against each other generally view similar risk-reward (your life is worth approximately equal to your opponent's), there is an unequal relationship in the duo lane--the carry's life is worth much more than the support's, because if the support dies, the fact that he misses farm is much less significant than if the carry dies. If a support can damage the opponent's farm significantly enough, even if his own death timer is long or he loses gold, the punishment will be less on him because he does not need to be in lane to farm, and he does not have gold to lose. Thus, punishing death (through gold loss or long death timers), while not necessarily affecting the passivity in solo lanes, will definitely have an effect on how aggressively duo lane supports play (which is probably where the issue of passivity is most prevalent right now).
You could even make the argument that oracle's (which usually ends up on the support's head) exacerbates the problems of passivity, because it suddenly makes the champion who has the least to lose on death into the champion with the MOST to lose on death. Similarly, while junglers normally do not have much to lose in death as laners (you lose no farm if you have no camps up to farm), buffs transferring on death forces them to be less aggressive in their role as gankers because the punishment of transferring a single/double buff to the enemy team is extremely high.
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Two things I want changed
1.) The map is too easily locked down with few wards, so redesign some chokes.
2.) Towers do 1/2 damage with 2x attack speed
A lot of the things brought up are silly or non-issues, especially regarding "how to make denying that isn't really denying but close enough." Any kind of convoluted system where exp or gold is based on proximity to a tower is just a bad idea. Denying itself will never be added, so I'm not touching on that.
Limiting wards is also a bad idea considering how punishing lategame miscues are and prevalent oracles are.
Yes, sustain lanes are not fun because you can harass 24/7 and accomplish nothing.
Doran's items are not the problem and I'm a little amused that so many people want to make them the culprit. You should look at the IEM footage -- there was less Doran's stacking there than in solo Q, but the game was still much more passive. Make ganks more practical and you'll see how much of a non-issue this is.
They're already addressing the issue of hyper sustain + carry bot, so the meta should shift to more CC heavy supports. Top sustain will be the next thing to address.
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Common fallacy I'm seeing is people calling the same issue a promoter of aggression or a promoter of passivity. e.g. increasing the cost of death: sure, it increases passivity in the sense that you don't wish to die, but equivalently the bonus is that much greater if you kill your opponent, so it likely wouldn't increase aggression or passivity.
As I see it, the key to rewarding aggression is a consistent bonus while a player is aggressive; a one time bonus both encourages passivity to avoid the cost and aggression to gain it (consider buffs: if the opponent has blue buff, aggression is encouraged to steal it, but the opponent is encouraged to be passive to hold it).
Now, I'm not particularly experienced with dota or hon, but look at starcraft. How does aggression give a consistent bonus here? It gives map control, allowing you to deny scouting (to some extent), scout for yourself, deny expansions, expand yourself, position properly, etc. What consistent bonus does aggression give in lol? Limited zoning, potential for damaging turret.
What I'd like to see, and I'm not sure exactly how to go about it, is some good reason to be aggressive AND REMAIN aggressive. A temporary buff seems too unnatural of a solution, and somehow too likely to be exploited. One possibility I can think of (completely unreasonable, but along the right lines) is to remove minion vision, in the sense that players only get vision from buildings/other players/wards/cv. Thus winning your lane allows you greater opportunities to invade other lanes without your lane opponent being able to tell you disappeared, assuming you can zone correctly. Unfortunately, it also forces players to stick to lanes to guard towers (or just ward the lanes I suppose), as if the other team has mia characters then any tower could be pushed and quickly destroyed at almost any time.
I don't know of a good solution to propose, but I'm pretty sure the key is to promote consistent aggression rather than one-time aggression/ganks.
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Craton, halving tower damage and doubling their attack speed will result in more damage taken from towers not less. Towers do increased damage to champions with each consecutive hit so your change will result in more damage taken within the same time span under a tower.
Yay, removing minion vision would be an interesting idea, but it would make it so much more difficult to know if a huge minion wave is pushing a lane or not until it is at your tower. Yeah you could say that the incentive to ward a lane is increased but so too is the incentive to clear opponents wards from your lane so it would likely balance out
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On August 24 2011 01:20 STS17 wrote:
Craton, halving tower damage and doubling their attack speed will result in more damage taken from towers not less. Towers do increased damage to champions with each consecutive hit so your change will result in more damage taken within the same time span under a tower.
Yay, removing minion vision would be an interesting idea, but it would make it so much more difficult to know if a huge minion wave is pushing a lane or not until it is at your tower. Yeah you could say that the incentive to ward a lane is increased but so too is the incentive to clear opponents wards from your lane so it would likely balance out
half the damage and double the HP!
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On August 22 2011 11:45 UniversalSnip wrote:
If you are zoning your opponent in lol, they can hang back and your last hitting will eventually send the creeps to the tower. They will gain xp and gold - not as much as you, but more than enough to stay in the game. So they really have no reason to come out and be vulnerable.
If you are zoning your opponent in dota, you can deny and your last hitting will not push the lane. So they have to come out because the lane will never push to their tower.
So basically, in league of legends if you outplay your opponent with type A aggression, you hardly get rewarded for it at all by comparison, and you have the double penalty of opening yourself up to type B aggression.
in what way is happening to be a champion that beats the other guys champion at that stage out playing them though?
im sure there are 100 situations for which you are outplaying them, and you should be rewarded, which you admited you are because of more gold.
but then you have a situation where you arent outplaying them, you just have a better/luckier hero and it feels shitty for them that they arent playing bad, but they are basically out the game in 4-5 mins because you denied them xp and gold and got even more ahead.
they didnt play bad, maybe they just needed the extra skills that come with a level up, but you fucked them in the ass and now the 1v1 game is over. sure the whole game isnt over, maybe they will get a good gank on your team. but it seems to me to be a bad design choice that really over emphasizes the early game (even more so than it already is) to make the lane phase out right 'winnable'
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If you really have an unwinnable matchup you should switch lanes, I would say deciding to stay in lane as ashe vs irelia or something like that shows a decisive lack of skill and legitimately indicates one player got outplayed.
If there are tons and tons of matchups like that it demonstrates a balance issue in my opinion, something that would have to be fixed even with the current setup.
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I was thinking about making a thread about this, but I'm not sure it quite deserves its own thread and it's related to this:
I have a huge problem with how little you are rewarded for early game kills. Several times me and my lane partner have gotten multiple kills on the enemy heroes and kept out tower at 100% only to have a single hero damage or destroy our tower when we were off buying items or helping in a team fight.
If you get a kill in the first few levels, you are hardly rewarded. Barely any gold, you can't kill creeps very quickly so your experience gain from them being gone is meager and even if you can get to the tower you can't damage it very well. Compare this to a herp derp hero who just afks behind the minions until level 8 and at the first sign of an empty lane wtfpwns two enemy minion waves and destroys a tower just like that. Minion waves should feel like a tug and pull and they just aren't, even at fairly low levels.
You can say that the game is about killing towers and not heroes, but when I take the risk and use the skill to kill an enemy hero I feel like I should be making a lasting contribution to that lane, not one that is so trivially negated. This also favors champions that are better at killing minion waves.
This ties in with Southlight's problem with rewarding passive play. Why should you bother trying to get kills when it doesn't benefit you that much? It benefits your lane more to be there, literally doing nothing, than it does getting a kill and porting back to buy and heal. Team fights? Why should I got to help in those? I lose more in gold and XP walking there than I could possibly gain. I'll just stay in my lane.
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On August 24 2011 06:26 Jerubaal wrote:
I was thinking about making a thread about this, but I'm not sure it quite deserves its own thread and it's related to this:
I have a huge problem with how little you are rewarded for early game kills. Several times me and my lane partner have gotten multiple kills on the enemy heroes and kept out tower at 100% only to have a single hero damage or destroy our tower when we were off buying items or helping in a team fight.
If you get a kill in the first few levels, you are hardly rewarded. Barely any gold, you can't kill creeps very quickly so your experience gain from them being gone is meager and even if you can get to the tower you can't damage it very well. Compare this to a herp derp hero who just afks behind the minions until level 8 and at the first sign of an empty lane wtfpwns two enemy minion waves and destroys a tower just like that. Minion waves should feel like a tug and pull and they just aren't, even at fairly low levels.
You can say that the game is about killing towers and not heroes, but when I take the risk and use the skill to kill an enemy hero I feel like I should be making a lasting contribution to that lane, not one that is so trivially negated. This also favors champions that are better at killing minion waves.
This ties in with Southlight's problem with rewarding passive play. Why should you bother trying to get kills when it doesn't benefit you that much? It benefits your lane more to be there, literally doing nothing, than it does getting a kill and porting back to buy and heal. Team fights? Why should I got to help in those? I lose more in gold and XP walking there than I could possibly gain. I'll just stay in my lane.
Early game is all about farm, and killing enemy champions absolutely is a good way to get gold.
This game isn't about kills and it isn't about destroying towers, it is about being the team with the most gold.
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real simple way to increase aggressiveness: you cant buy items worth more than 1k gold without having killed anyone.
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That would make everyone ultradefensive and ragequit once someone feeds firstblood.
Kills in LoL are VERY rewarding if you consider them in the objective based enviroment. Kills aren´t worth it in terms of pure gold for the risk alone BUT doing it properly means a kill leads to taking Dragon, a Tower, buff or even Baron.
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Kills in LoL aren't rewarding in the least. 300 gold is a minute's worth of lane creeps. Nothing more.
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Had this idea whilst taking a shit yesterday
First blood now worth 800g - 100x where x is the number of minutes passed by. Lowest value is 400
10x as much action early game with fb worth so much
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United States47024 Posts
On August 24 2011 08:37 gtrsrs wrote:
Had this idea whilst taking a shit yesterday
First blood now worth 800g - 100x where x is the number of minutes passed by. Lowest value is 400
10x as much action early game with fb worth so much
The problem is that more rewarding kills and more punishing deaths are not symmetric in terms of how they affect aggression, because of how different roles interact with one another. Compare a system where deaths cause the victim to lose 400 gold, vs a system where deaths cause the attacker to gain 400 gold. In the first scenario, it is more favorable for supports and gankers to take risks for kills--this is because knocking off 400 gold from a carry is very damaging, while dying themselves is not very punishing--they'll probably keep their gold spent on wards and small items anyway, and even if they had some money, there's not some big item they're trying to save for. Conversely, when the attacker gains 400 gold, supports are disincentivized from being aggressive. 400 extra gold on a support doesn't really go anywhere, whereas if they get counterganked and the carry gets a kill, that's a huge boon to the carry.
Carries by nature hold a passive role--this is because of the way farm scales on them. They do not need to get hugely ahead of everyone in order to do their job, because so long as they keep consistent farm, they will outscale everyone else lategame. As such, increasing rewards for kills is not an efficient way of attacking the problem of passivity because it rewards more aggression on carries--but by the nature of the role that's already discouraged. By contrast, punishing death favors aggression on supports, junglers, and early-game lane dominators much more efficiently, because that already ties into their role.
We see this as the case in DotA--the carries are never the ones to put their own farm hugely at risk. Most of the early game action happens between supports and gankers. Hard carries generally tend to play much more conservatively. This is because the gankers and supports' lives are worth less than those of the carries, and the carries will generally come out ahead lategame if they protect their own farm, even if they're not getting a ton of kills early on.
If i were to say 3 things I think might make the early game less passive, they are:
1) More punishing deaths -- longer death timers, gold loss on death (unfortunately Riot will never do this one), incentivizing supports, junglers, and gankers to gank more lategame-oriented champs.
2) Remove oracles, replace with some other means of detection (this would obviously have other effects, but I think right now oracles makes supports really passive because that big eye above their head suddenly makes death way more risky for them when they normally have very little to lose).
3) Jungle buffs no longer transfer on death (same as 2--double buff ganks right now are very powerful, but if you lose the buff, the opponent getting a full-duration buff makes the punishment for failure stupidly high)--again junglers should have less to lose in ganking, seeing as that's a major part of their role, and thus should be able to play more aggressively, but that buff risk forces passivity to some degree.
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Changing the reward doesn´t influence the risks in the slightest. FB could grant instant victory and people would still avoid any situation that might get them killed - in fact it might make it even worse.
LoL had PLENTY lvl 1 action when Dragon spawned right away - and lvl 1 champions dominated.
Solving passivity by sacrificing design integrety won´t happen.
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IMO people would push a lot harder if Towers had no chance to Aggro upon heroes if minions are there soaking the damage.
Just incredibly annoying sometimes to know that the moment you start attacking, something that does twice your damage will retaliate even if you kill your target.
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That would totally break the game as anyone who can push minions fast will auto win lanes because they can't fight back because of minion advantage while you don't worry about the tower at all.
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Remove the revive summoner and implement the buy back mechanic from dota, that way a single team fight doesnt decide the entire game once its past the mid game.
Also adds economic choice to the game - do i save for a buy back or that one item that might not make me die in the first place?
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So many of the things people are suggesting simply will not work.
I don't know why people keep thinking making things more punishing = people will be more aggressive. It's flat out wrong. If something is more punishing, one side might try harder to capitalize it, but the other side will try just as hard to be extra conservative. Losing gold or exp is not a fun mechanic -- it will never be implemented. Denying will never be implemented, either. Bringing these up over and over is a waste of time because it will not happen. Focus on things that might actually be done.
It may well be that the relationship between champion kills and minion kills should be adjusted, but it doesn't mean the game will be more active because you buff one or nerf the other. If a lane can see you coming, it doesn't matter how much more valuable that kill is because you aren't going to gank it.
Conversely, if you try to do something like make wards the scarcest resource in the game, people will also play conservatively because they're blind. Remember the height of eve? Playing against her was "claustrophobic" because you never knew where she might be so you spent the whole game roving as 5 or hugging a tower/oracle. The same effect occurs if you make wards super scarce, especially when they can be destroyed very regularly in the late-game. Watch the very last game of CLG vs TSM and see how TSM would not do anything involving their jungle without the entire team present because of 1.) how blind they were and 2.) how punishing a single death would be at that point.
You want people to have vision, but you don't want them to have vision of everything. You want people to be willing to come off their tower and favor one area because they know its relatively safe, just as you want people to have a blind side to gank from.
An additional point:
There are way too many people posting as if activity only equals kills and that if someone survives that equates to passivity (shoutout to the Doran's giving HP is ridiculous! crowd).
You want people to have skirmishes and ganks. You want people to sometimes all survive, to sometimes all die, and to sometimes just trade. That's the entire concept of a skillcap. Doran's giving people more hp and damage doesn't magically make people hug a tower harder or less willing to attack someone.
If I get a bunch of Doran's Rings, I can cast that many more spells. If I get a bunch of Doran's Blades, I'm more willing to get in a fight because I'm a little beefier. I don't see how being stronger = less willing to fight. Glossing over the extra damage Doran items provide just because they give HP is silly.
On August 24 2011 01:20 STS17 wrote:
Craton, halving tower damage and doubling their attack speed will result in more damage taken from towers not less. Towers do increased damage to champions with each consecutive hit so your change will result in more damage taken within the same time span under a tower.
Why would you only change one and not the other? If you do 1/2 dmg 2x attacks, you'd also cut down the armor pen amount.
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I'm sure this will never happen, but an interesting solution might be to slightly increase the experience gained after killing a hero, say through a temporary buff that gets applied after killing a hero that increases XP from minion kills. An experience leech from the presence of an enemy hero would be more sophisticated, but that would cause problems with stealth champions.
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It´s like a broken record. Another, slightly different version of "reward killing more". Shure this would make the dying champ more miserable than they are now.
But like all the other suggestions in this vein it´d make the disadvantage/defensive Player act even more passive.
There is no need to get players to act more aggressive when it´s in their clear advantage to do so - that already happens, just watch high elo players once the enemy jungler pops up on the other side of the map.
Neither is acting passivly when they are at a disadvantage - thats just smart.
The problem is situations that "reward" all players in a lane to act passivly. Junglers that punish offensive positioning severely. High substain lanes that nullify damage but not mana expenses.
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i dont know if this is stupid or brilliant
-reduce creep bounty by x% for lane, y% for jungle
-increase the price of all defensive items by variable amounts
-reduce hp on doran items, increase offensive stats to make up
shouldnt this encourage more aggression?
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All that does is buff champs with long range and nerf melees.
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I'd like to see what happens if you take out all the doran items and up the cost of health / mana pots by at least 2x.
Maybe if Riot had an actual PTR server.
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why would such a change favour long range champs any more than melees? gap close -> burst you down? if anything it might bring forgotten champs like shen and poppy back
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Frankly I don't even know wtf 90% of the suggestions in this thread would even *do*. People who say aggression of the leader leads to passivity of the lagger ignore that if you reward aggression enough playing passively becomes impossible. Passive play at that point isn't a matter of passive play being rewarded in general, it's a result of having no better options while you're on the losing team because you've lost your ability to farm, get buffs, and roam safely.
I mean in SC what do you expect a Terran with only floating CCs to do? Attack?!
Moreover, not all aggression is desirable. I imagine that soon people will either complain about all the burst and never being able to live through it, or people will complain about kiting/poking teams that will just wear you down because of nerfed sustain.
But I think our biggest problem is that we're not asking the right questions. Why is Dominion (or insert FPS/CTF/Zone control game here) more aggressive than SR? Or even, *is* Dominion more aggressive than SR or were all those players just super baddies? The latter question is sort of interesting but not immediately useful I think.
I personally wonder if it has something to do with map control. Map control is extremely powerful. In SR if you lose turrets you lose a ton of map control. Moreover, in SR if you feed the wrong champion you lose map control because you can no longer defend your turrets. Losing map control in SR is gigantic: you can't ward, you can't snag buffs, you can't dragon, you can't baron, you can't even farm when you want to. It also becomes much harder to push your opponent's turrets because you're so vulnerable to a gank and if you die you're dead for so long your team can insta-lose turrets or the whole game.
You sort of start out with some innate map control with your turrets, but once champ scaling and death timers kick in you will often get *severely* punished if you attempt to defend your base against superior force. If you die in your base that often accomplishes nothing and lets them push even more, whereas if you played passive and let them take inhib at least you can defend nexus.
Contrast this with Dominion. If they control all five points you can easily zerg a point or two and/or send mobility runners to other points on the map to cap them depending on the other team's positions across the map..Zones near your base are easy to defend from because of fast recall and low respawn timers so you have an strong defenders advantage (turrets in both maps become irrelevant late game but in SR they guard inhibitors and respawn timers mean that getting aced near your base = insta-lose). At the same time attackers want to hold as many points as possible so that they can win faster and suffer less from turret turnover,so they are encouraged to press for as many points as they can handle, perhaps 4 points.
That's just one part of it. Another is that having only 30 hp on your nexus in no way prevents you from obtaining equal ownership of the map against your opponents. Creep (and champ) farming opportunities always remain equal no matter how many turrets you hold. Buffs are powerful but are pretty easily accessible unless you're losing really badly, but often there are pretty good things to do outside of grabbing them. "Pushing" turrets is always as easy as channeling a spell on them even if you have zero HP as long as they're undefended, and a 1 for 1 trade at a turret 2v1 always results in the turret being capped.
At the same time, defending turrets against superior force is more of an option. If a tanky character defends a turret on SR he is either ignored and the turret dies or he is focused and dies and his team has one less beefy dude to protect its squishies/squish the other team's squishies. If it's anivia then later in the game clearing creep waves isn't even enough, because their tanky characters are so tanky they can just tank the turret.
Contrast this again with Dominion: tanky characters often still die when defending, but that's because they must be attacked before the turret can be capped. Rather than causing the game to be super ultra defensive, however, it gives the rest of the defending team a chance to go somewhere else and be aggressive.
Dominion does have one stat which gives map control, however: team power. If your team is super fed or has better champs you'll more easily cap points and defend points. It's hard to say in the future whether or not winners will become defensive, winning teams might simply try to defend 3 points rather than take 4. But it's now the onus of the losing team to *attack*. Even if they delay attacking they do so at the cost of their own clock with the intentions of waiting for respawn or grabbing a buff in order to have a stronger attack later.
I warn, though, that it can be just as un-fun to be losing horribly but forced hopelessly attack as it is to be losing horribly and forced to hopelessly defend. I've played many arathi basins where they had all five cap points and it felt entirely pointless to keep on running into them and dying. At least in Dominion though heals are nerfed so you can eventually wear them down...
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comparing SR to dominion is kinda meh
it's not even the same game apart from the champions
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Sure, but I don't think anyone here wants SR games to look more like Dominion, especially from what we saw on the weekend at IEM. I personally thought Dominion looked like shit, and I will definitely not be playing it.
My hate for "zone control" style games aside though, I don't think "relentless attack gogogogo" with absolutely no restraint is what people in this thread are looking for. I think it's some way to solve the current metagame which only really gives up 15-20 kills throughout the course of an entire match. The amount of kills is more symptomatic of the problem rather than the problem itself, and I think that most people would enjoy watching LoL more if the play style was made more aggressive rather than just the number of tower dives/champion kills is raised by any means. From what I understand, people just don't want to see players passively farming creeps, they want to see teamfights and competition for buffs and all that.... Naturally that will lead to more kills being secured.
Out of all the suggestions in this thread, I think changing the map to make it more open is the best one. If you can make it such that wards don't lock the river down so easily, there will be more early ganking and thus more "excitement," to use the term loosely. And if you make it such that there are more possible approach/escape paths to towers, then there will be more incentive to go underneath towers for kills, since your attack has a greater chance to result in yourself escaping. Ward cooldown is also a good suggestion that I'd like to see tried. Say, each team has 4 wards and you can't buy more than that until one of them expires.
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I definitely agree. They need to widen the area around tower and Make them more accessible for fighting around.
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If I wanted to make this game more aggressive I would really just make it so that dragon/baron/buffs are up more frequently with similar (slightly less) reward for baron/dragon, and higher reward for red/blue (some team wide stuff ideally). Also somehow make it so that they don't hurt a whole lot, can't be soloed quickly, but die fairly quickly to 3+ people. Possibly make buffs slightly more accessible from the enemy side.
Result: Grouping up for objectives becomes more important and is done more frequently.
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Ya I think a big late game issue would be fixed if baron did less damage. Like if you had 4 people it did no damage or little damage.
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On August 26 2011 03:29 nyxnyxnyx wrote:
comparing SR to dominion is kinda meh
it's not even the same game apart from the champions
You say that, yet your own suggestion from last page is more or less exactly the same as stuff Riot has done on Dominion. Your own idea reduces the value of cs, also a feature of dominion which happens to also reduce the power of map control. Devaluing defensive items compared to offensive items is, in fact, something that's done on Dominion (which gives you free %pen via a buff). And if you haven't noticed already, Riot's nerf on sustain champs shares similarities with dominion's own sustain nerf and has so far done a good deal to kill sustain duo lanes (though we're far from the end of that).
As much as you poo poo it the fact is that your own ideas run along the same lines as ideas Riot has already embraced on Dominion.
Hyp poo poos Dominion too but it's not like we need to turn the aggression slider all the way to "Dominion" to make SR a compelling aggressive game, and obviously not everything on Dominion fits the character of SR. When armchair tweaking, your options are nearly endless depending on the type of aggression you want to promote, and you can choose to borrow or not borrow whatever elements you please from anywhere. For instance, I actually wouldn't suggest that late game respawn timers be lowered on SR because, unlike Dominion, the nexus is the one place on the map absolutely necessary to winning. It'd just make it impossible to push and win after a long team fight.
Of course it's not like we need to go to Dominion for all our inspiriation. Personally, I *really* like the idea of red and blue buff not transferring on death, and that's something that's been on SR for a long time in the form of baron buff. Having a failed gank punish one of your lanes that hard hurts so dang much, even DotA doesn't make rune buffs pass on death.
Making buffs easier to take but have more HP would be pretty good too.
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I also think the set of "poke" champions makes the late-game very boring to watch, even if you know what's going on. Nidalee and Ezreal are two prime examples, instead of getting right in the midst of the enemy team and seriously making stuff happen, they tend to chill out and "poke". Do you remember that part of the 3rd game of clg versus tsm where CLG was trying to push TSM's exposed inhibitor, and they literally ended up poking back and forth for about 4 minutes with nothing being accomplished in the end? That's kind of what I'm trying to get at here.
Obviously nid/ez aren't going to be initiators, and there's not much you can really do about stalemate situations like the one I described above, but there must be some way to incent defending teams to push harder for objectives than what's currently in place.
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On August 26 2011 03:56 Two_DoWn wrote:
Ya I think a big late game issue would be fixed if baron did less damage. Like if you had 4 people it did no damage or little damage.
That would solve nothing. Getting baron is a massive advantage -- if you make baron easier, people have to be even more careful to not lose a man or ever leave the vicinity of baron.
Right now, there are situations where you can challenge a baron attempt down a man (sometimes 2) because you can let the baron wear them down. This lets people do something other than babysit next to baron all game, which already is heavily required the later games go.
Making a team snowball more easily != decrease passivity.
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On August 26 2011 05:02 HyperionDreamer wrote:
I also think the set of "poke" champions makes the late-game very boring to watch, even if you know what's going on. Nidalee and Ezreal are two prime examples, instead of getting right in the midst of the enemy team and seriously making stuff happen, they tend to chill out and "poke". Do you remember that part of the 3rd game of clg versus tsm where CLG was trying to push TSM's exposed inhibitor, and they literally ended up poking back and forth for about 4 minutes with nothing being accomplished in the end? That's kind of what I'm trying to get at here.
Obviously nid/ez aren't going to be initiators, and there's not much you can really do about stalemate situations like the one I described above, but there must be some way to incent defending teams to push harder for objectives than what's currently in place.
again the problem there is the insane amount of damage that turrets do. The inhib was exposed you say but if you initiate into this then you have to either attack the inhibitor and mb get aced or you attack the enemy team which can kite you into their turrets behind. mb not the best example but I really think the main reason why passive play is so strong throughout the game is the turret damage.
a secondary reason which only applies to the early game is the low minion damage. If the minions would do more damage early on then it would be much riskier to control the creepwaves by tanking them. This way you would at least do some damage to the turret with them and also the wave would push back for a while so you can play aggressive again.
minion damage up, turret damage down. problem fixed.
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The turrets easier to take down might be a good solution, due to how its nearly impossible to gank with the way the map is set up. With the massive amounts of map control you get from taking down turrets, and with them being easier to take down, the only way to truly protect your turret would be to push your lane.
Of course this could just completely change the current metagame for team compositions to being push-heavy champions.
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surprised no one has mentioned this, but there is a pretty simple solution to the lack of early game agression:
- add smoke. for people who don't know dota this is a buyable consumable which cloaks yourself and nearby teammembers and gives a movement speed buff. you are invisible for wards but are seen by heroes and towers. this allows a team to position themselves for ganks.
other things that would help:
- half dmg/double life for towers.
- some neutral power ups with spawn timer. similar to the runes in dota.
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United States47024 Posts
On August 26 2011 21:23 h0munkulus wrote:
surprised no one has mentioned this, but there is a pretty simple solution to the lack of early game agression:
- add smoke. for people who don't know dota this is a buyable consumable which cloaks yourself and nearby teammembers and gives a movement speed buff. you are invisible for wards but are seen by heroes and towers. this allows a team to position themselves for ganks.
Smoke wouldn't work in LoL, given how small the map is, and how smoke CD is much longer than summoner spell CDs.
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On August 26 2011 13:06 dignity wrote:
The turrets easier to take down might be a good solution, due to how its nearly impossible to gank with the way the map is set up. With the massive amounts of map control you get from taking down turrets, and with them being easier to take down, the only way to truly protect your turret would be to push your lane.
Of course this could just completely change the current metagame for team compositions to being push-heavy champions.
Push-heavy would only be one viable option then. Another one would be to get straight up strong early game champions that are adept at bullying the more passive/farmer champs who can now just tank creeps near their turret which they could not with this change (talking about increasing minion damage and decreasing turret damage). It would also promote roaming and more aggressive jungling, because even if you cover your lane with wards, you have to decide to stand a fight with your now weaker turret which possibly leads to your death or you could leave the turret alone and go back which leads to massive damage to your turret. with this change there would be no sitting back anymore and "outsustaining" your lane while hugging turret and tanking creeps. It would lead to double stun bottom being more viable instead of just sustain+carry. And it would lead to much more aggressive top lanes and possibly more roaming and more aggressive jungling. A sideeffect would be: lasthitting will be harder than it is now. But I doubt anyone has a problem with that.
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Ultimately, people need to be more able to be punished for over-extending. Since Riot seems unwilling to remove flash from the game then the most logical choice is to make the map larger.
Longer map distances means a lot of things:
- Over-extending without having the river warded makes ganks from the jungle easier
- Larger maps means going back to base / returning to lane after a respawn takes longer, meaning a successful early kill nets a larger advantage (promoting aggression)
- Larger distances between outer towers in lanes means you have to come out from your tower (exposing yourself more to a gank) in order to gain experience and farm. It should be noted that this should help counteract the "if deaths are more punishing people will be more passive" counterargument from the above point, because people need to be out in lane in order to, well, lane.
Note: Doing something such as this may require rebalancing of some champions, but this is a given with any change to core mechanics.
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you break up passive play by making flash have damage cd and nerfing the shit out of support. You could also run trilane top with some healing asshole bot and then just have like a morde or corki farm wraiths constantly in mid. the idea that there needs to be a jungler in every friggin game is annoying. its because of mandatory jungle that there are champs with silly amounts of sustain (read: warwick, udyr). If jungle is weakened against a two duo or trilane alternative games would be more interesting.
Also, if oracles was more expensive to compensate for the lack of gold loss (make oracles 800 gold) and pink wards were the same price as sight wards (but with less vision range) then the game would be far more interesting. Also nerf philostone, its like perserverence but far easier to get and far stronger regen + gp5.
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On August 26 2011 08:14 Craton wrote:Show nested quote +On August 26 2011 03:56 Two_DoWn wrote:
Ya I think a big late game issue would be fixed if baron did less damage. Like if you had 4 people it did no damage or little damage. That would solve nothing. Getting baron is a massive advantage -- if you make baron easier, people have to be even more careful to not lose a man or ever leave the vicinity of baron. Right now, there are situations where you can challenge a baron attempt down a man (sometimes 2) because you can let the baron wear them down. This lets people do something other than babysit next to baron all game, which already is heavily required the later games go. Making a team snowball more easily != decrease passivity.
Your thinking about it all wrong. The point is that right now, if you want to force a fight as a team, you have no way to actually get the other team to do it. Towers are a hair to strong, and baron even more so. Lowering baron damage to next to 0 if all 5 of your teammates are there means that you force a reaction by the other team without the downside of automatically losing the fight because of baron damage.
Of course, you compensate by giving baron more health so he takes longer to do, but right now there is literally NO way to force a teamfight and not have it backfire completely.
Force baron? Die cuz of baron damage
Fight under tower? Die cuz of tower damage.
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Fixing passivity means making people more willing to "overextend" not to punish them more for it. Passivity isn´t mesured in the amount of deaths per game but how often/long you activly engage the enemy players.
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EPT
