they're actually worse than they were even earlier this season.
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League of Legends |OT4| No Country for Old Karma
- Thread starter kayos90
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I do. Part of the reason I like Halo is because coming back is easily. Skill and teamwork come into play if you're behind 20 kills. Of course a MOBA an a FPS are worlds apart, but it's very entertaining watching a team come back from being very behind.
How does those statistics compare to other games in the genre?
poor Amumu so sad all the time.you would know better than me.
It's a problem with MOBAs in general. MOBAs lack an "okay, you're turn" like all other sports.
American football? You score, other team gets a shot. Football? The ball is changing teams so often it's a back and forth. Hockey, basketball, and so on.
If someone scores a goal in football the scorer doesn't suddenly get 10% stronger kicks or 10% more accurate shots. The reward for getting a goal is a goal. In MOBAs, the reward for a kill is time to push objectives, time to farm, AND gold on top of that. Of course, comparing the two 1:1 isn't fair either, but those sports do allow comebacks much more easily.
The system itself is incredibly snowbally. It's just the way it is. You can mitigate it all you want with increased global gold, decreasing champion kill gold, and so on, but it will forever be snowbally until the point where a kill gives no gold. Not that I want that, necessarily.
American football? You score, other team gets a shot. Football? The ball is changing teams so often it's a back and forth. Hockey, basketball, and so on.
If someone scores a goal in football the scorer doesn't suddenly get 10% stronger kicks or 10% more accurate shots. The reward for getting a goal is a goal. In MOBAs, the reward for a kill is time to push objectives, time to farm, AND gold on top of that. Of course, comparing the two 1:1 isn't fair either, but those sports do allow comebacks much more easily.
The system itself is incredibly snowbally. It's just the way it is. You can mitigate it all you want with increased global gold, decreasing champion kill gold, and so on, but it will forever be snowbally until the point where a kill gives no gold. Not that I want that, necessarily.
I have no numbers to back it up, but from what I saw in the TI3, comebacks didn't seem to occur at a significantly larger frequency than in LoL. You would probably have to look at different criteria however to find the emerging patterns.
Einbroch said:
I feel a bit dirty saying this, even though I enjoy the mode, but Dominion is the least snowbally mode in LoL and also the only one where the 90% of the gold and XP you gain are global. Draw your own conclusions.
dimb said:
I'll give you benefit of the doubt although I only recall Spellsy starting this stuff a few months ago. I do question however why things are worse. The parity within the regions (OGN, NA LCS, EU LCS) is greater than at Worlds, which likely accounts for the higher numbers. For instance, the picture changes significantly when GG.eu and Mineski are taken out of consideration.
Other games typically have a fixed time as well, rather than ending after X number of scores.
If the game didn't snowball, matches would last a ridiculously long time.
Maybe Riot could actually do something about the early game power champions that are low risk and still transition well into late game. There is so much stuff that is broken right now that Riot isn't even touching. Meanwhile they are futzing around with Garen and Xerath.
Not necessarily. Death timers are so long end game that one even teamfight could determine a game. It would come down to champion select, skill, and teamwork.
They could also increase death timers early on in addition to the nerf to kill gold. There is no easy solution, but knowing who is going to win a game 1/4 the way through is not exciting.
I agree completely. They have a fairly decent team who works 8+ hours a day balancing and reworking the game. I don't know what their issues are. Even common people can see issues with tons of champions and the way the game works. They don't need to kneejerk everything, but there's a PBE for a reason. Rework a champion's skill. Throw it on the PBE. See how the playerbase reacts.
Instead we get nothing. Skins, champions, and maps are trickling out. People make, in their free time, amazing looking skins. Players throw out pretty decent rework and balance ideas, and they aren't even being paid to do so. Reworks come only every 3 months or more and even then they aren't competitive. But yes, let's re-do the art on Garen...and nerf him...
I just don't know what they're doing.
FallingEdge
Member
I played Nami for the most part in Gold. You can definitely do it. She is incredible.
As mentioned, give Nami a try. Her kit is fantastic. Thresh as well (assuming he isn't banned).
Not sure how giving a player more time to free farm is going to help.
dimb said:
Or hell, just do a better job of differentiating champions, period.
Deadnames said:
Been ages, but his pre-level 5 (i.e. before rank 3 in flamespitter) is pretty weak, as is his level 1. Start with his harpoon, then max Q first with a point in W at level 3 or 4. Once you get to level 5, you can start being more aggressive and zoning out the opposing player with Q. Heat management is very important and more nuanced than it looks. While zoning/trading keep your heat around 50. Then W->Q into the enemy and back off. Rinse repeat. When you feel like the enemy is primed for a kill, get your heat to around 30 then W->Q->E->Q. It's your all in and it'll overheat you, but still allow for two rounds of flamespitter and the slow from E.
Well, it would be a bit sad if games could only be finished in late game. I agree that the current solution isn't ideal though. The game needs to be a bit snowbally.
I meant decrease. My brain is fried from work. Probably shouldn't be discussing League meta solutions.
You should be rewarded for dominating early game. But right now the rewards are too great.
At the same time, I think the current state of the game is better than when the rewards were lower and the early game was quite passive.
Once again I bring up Dominion. Gold and XP across every player is largely the same, but 10-12 minute stomps aren't abnormal. I'm not sure I buy the argument that short games and snowballing are inherently inclusive.
Maybe towers and dragon should give time-limited team-wide buffs that encourage grabbing further objectives while the team has an advantage. Buffs become stronger as the game goes on and somewhat stack. If the other team stops that buffed team, now they have an opportunity to grab an objective, get on a streak and even things out.
(also, get rid of blue buff, red buff, and smite, but that's me and only tangentially related to the snowballing issue).
Agreed, Dominion works well. It is kind of time limited, but it works.
Horse Detective
Why the long case?
Can someone explain the reasoning behind not being able to have multiple sightstones?
Terbinator
Member
Dreams-Visions
Member
yea. a lot of champs are very "samey" for lack of better words. many are super-unique...but many are not.
I'm not even bothered by some being aethetically or ability-wise similar (well to extent, everyone and their mother is getting a line skill shot slow these days), it bothers me to no end that some champions are so generalist there's no reason not to pick them. Seriously, in what comp is Jarvan a legitmately bad pick in the jungle? Yeah, he works best when others have AoEs that need area control (Rumble, MF) but he's never a bad pick. It's bland.
I agree with everything here except the example. J-man is one of the most fun champs in the game.
Not saying J4 as a champ is bland (although I don't particularly like him, art-wise he's pretty boring IMO), I'm saying that the decisions revolving when to pick what champion for what comp and purpose is bland because there are champs that can do it all.
Meddler said he's doing a gigantic pass of bruisers for S4. I really hope part of that is vastly improving champ definitions.
Yeah no they're not. I don't know why you would use the graphs which would include Mineski and ggeu at all.
Perhaps first blood could be worth 50g less or whatever, but I don't see what's wrong with winning 66% of the time if you secure dragon since it is meant to be a team fight objective. Perhaps make it a little harder to kill.
Another thing, the focus on champions is pretty much wrong if you are trying to lessen snowball as better champions will just replace them, and teams keeping their leads is much better influenced by the map itself.
The biggest culprit in snowball right is the absolute power of pink wards and vision control in general. When a team gets ahead, they get ahead in vision control which helps them get even further ahead. Which is probably why thankfully, they're changing the ward system in s4
PROGRAM_IX
Member
Hells. So the team that's dominating this little tournament of ours has at least one Platinum guy, while on every other team people are in Silver at best. Fair enough, the best people should win. But one of the guys was just like 'nothing can save you from Team 4!' on the Facebook group...was I wrong to call him out on that? I feel like I'm just being bitter, but I haven't even played against them yet. It just seems a bit lame, when they're going to win and everyone knows it.
The ward system makes me glad I'm not a game designer. What the heck do you do with it? Too many wards means there's a very safe lane phase with little jungler presence and the only action is in lane. Not exciting when it's a pretty high level game. Too little means junglers run rampant and you have to play very scared or risk getting ganked. Too many wards? Get an oracles. Oracles too strong? Limit it. Now oracles too weak. Buff it again? It's never ending.
I'm excited to see what kind of ideas they have because I don't have many. Maybe limit the number of wards you can have on the map period? Then it'll fall even more to the support. Or there will be bitching when someone places a ward selfishly. Who knows.
Give items vision like Grez's spectral lantern (which would be awesome, S1 CV on supports was way more fun than plunking wards everywhere), limit wards to a few per player, increase jungle camp health while reducing jungle camp damage a bit to slow down junglers, remove smite, correct XP and gold gains in the jungle and for assists so they aren't warped in favour of ganking...There's lots of stuff they could try.
There are graphs in there without Mineski/ggu, but they are not too great an abnormality to make the stats invalid. Those numbers are worse than standard LCS numbers from this season. It is not okay for 80% of games to be decided at the ten minute mark.
You don't understand the game. All you do is parrot whatever recent article you read that's popular or whatever Riot is currently selling as what will change the game. Vision is not the only factor. Different champions have varying degrees of area control. Area control is everything right now and the blatant offenders are mostly obvious. If vision options get cut from both sides it will change nothing, because the important areas of the map and lanes will still be controlled by that champion set and the team with the gold lead. If anything it could lead to more five man roaming to force team fights, which just benefits the team with more gold.
18% difference on towers and 13% difference on first dragon in a sample space of 12/20 statistically significant. so yes, you should only use the data without mineski/ggeu if you want better data. the 10 minute mark includes the mineski/ggeu values
since when do you immediately resort to personal attacks these days to make yourself seem right, dimb? there is no riot article on vision right now. their current conversation on wards right now are related to gold burdens, not snowball - so i have no idea what you are talking about. if you look at the OGN data, you can see that OGN is significantly more snowbally than the EU and NA information and at the same time, the korean midgame style is of absolute vision control in the midgame with pinks dominating the enemy jungle. now of course, im not arguing causation here, im just building up a body of correlations and circumstantial evidence. logically, the pink ward mechanics right now just allow map control to build upon itself since the only solution to pinks is another pink or to walk there with an oracle. The issue here is that pink wards themselves establish complete area control, giving you both vision, denying vision and giving you knowledge that the enemy have no vision in the area - this makes it much much harder for a team that is behind on control in the area to gain it back at it requires them to put themselves within the winning team's zone.
you are fixating on the solution being "Vision is cut" - my argument is that the vision system now is a huge factor in snowball, not that you should delete vision control, nor that removing wards/extreme limitation of them is a solution.
since when do you immediately resort to personal attacks these days to make yourself seem right, dimb? there is no riot article on vision right now. their current conversation on wards right now are related to gold burdens, not snowball - so i have no idea what you are talking about. if you look at the OGN data, you can see that OGN is significantly more snowbally than the EU and NA information and at the same time, the korean midgame style is of absolute vision control in the midgame with pinks dominating the enemy jungle. now of course, im not arguing causation here, im just building up a body of correlations and circumstantial evidence. logically, the pink ward mechanics right now just allow map control to build upon itself since the only solution to pinks is another pink or to walk there with an oracle. The issue here is that pink wards themselves establish complete area control, giving you both vision, denying vision and giving you knowledge that the enemy have no vision in the area - this makes it much much harder for a team that is behind on control in the area to gain it back at it requires them to put themselves within the winning team's zone.
you are fixating on the solution being "Vision is cut" - my argument is that the vision system now is a huge factor in snowball, not that you should delete vision control, nor that removing wards/extreme limitation of them is a solution.
Dota vision wards grant enormous stealth detection, but they grant little to no regular vision. You have to be in sight of the ward you want to clear or you have to put a normal ward on top of the vision ward.
Hell, I'm not even sure they grant any normal vision. If they do, it's microscopic.
Hell, I'm not even sure they grant any normal vision. If they do, it's microscopic.
it is pointless to exclude those teams when there are teams in the regular lcs that consistently underperform and skew the stats in a similar way. either way the worlds games are snowballing harder than regular lcs games.
Telling you that you don't understand isn't a personal attack. You are simplifying the issue. Vision control is only a small part of area control. A pink ward is not area control. If it were that simple teams could be back in games with just 125 gold. While there are fundamental issues with the design of the map and game systems that support snowballing, all of that is seriously complicated by a champion set that is strong early, low risk, and have that excellent area control. Level leads are a way bigger issue than item or vision leads.
saying "you dont understand - but I do" is pretty much one. it is much simpler to reconcile two understandings of a problem then outright try to deny one as if sitting from an ivory tower.
I agree levels are a huge factor in snowballing, but i am also aware that they are a core component of moba games. I think a really interesting idea from dota is to have non linear experience requirements - in effect, a team behind in levels have a point where they can catch up.
Right now, the experience required to hit the next level is 170 + level*110 - the level the "clamp" occurs on will depend the pacing Riot want, but for example leveling right now looks like-
5 to 6 720
6 to 7 830
7 to 8 940
8 to 9 1050
instead, you could have
5 to 6 720
6 to 7 720
7 to 8 1200
8 to 9 1050
where level 7 is the "clamp" - this could work like a 'come back mechanic', where a team that is behind can wait for level 7 and group up to make a midgame play on even level footing. but this also has the side effect of making casters a little stronger (hehe)
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another problem in regards to snowball is the itemisation in the game - every upgrade is designed to be gold efficient, with higher tiers of items being more and more gold efficient. which essentially means teams that are behind have no way to respond in terms of gold and items. there needs to be a group of mid tier items that are highly gold efficient but incredibly slot inefficient so that teams that are behind in gold can make the sacrifice on items in an attempt to make midgame plays to come back. Right now the only items that fulfill this slot are the doran's items, and the concept is similiar to buying an extra doran's item when you are losing the lane. However right now its not viable to buy 4x dorans items (unless you're genja) in the mid game to respond to being behind, not only because there's not enough stat variability in them, but also because they are barely more efficient than a legendary tier item, with a fraction of the slot efficiency...
tl;dr - stop the snowball - level clamp, vision mechanics and low slot efficient items.
I agree levels are a huge factor in snowballing, but i am also aware that they are a core component of moba games. I think a really interesting idea from dota is to have non linear experience requirements - in effect, a team behind in levels have a point where they can catch up.
Right now, the experience required to hit the next level is 170 + level*110 - the level the "clamp" occurs on will depend the pacing Riot want, but for example leveling right now looks like-
5 to 6 720
6 to 7 830
7 to 8 940
8 to 9 1050
instead, you could have
5 to 6 720
6 to 7 720
7 to 8 1200
8 to 9 1050
where level 7 is the "clamp" - this could work like a 'come back mechanic', where a team that is behind can wait for level 7 and group up to make a midgame play on even level footing. but this also has the side effect of making casters a little stronger (hehe)
----------------------
another problem in regards to snowball is the itemisation in the game - every upgrade is designed to be gold efficient, with higher tiers of items being more and more gold efficient. which essentially means teams that are behind have no way to respond in terms of gold and items. there needs to be a group of mid tier items that are highly gold efficient but incredibly slot inefficient so that teams that are behind in gold can make the sacrifice on items in an attempt to make midgame plays to come back. Right now the only items that fulfill this slot are the doran's items, and the concept is similiar to buying an extra doran's item when you are losing the lane. However right now its not viable to buy 4x dorans items (unless you're genja) in the mid game to respond to being behind, not only because there's not enough stat variability in them, but also because they are barely more efficient than a legendary tier item, with a fraction of the slot efficiency...
tl;dr - stop the snowball - level clamp, vision mechanics and low slot efficient items.
Just saying "vision control" and associating that with Pink Wards kind of misses the actual point: Vision Control comes from being allowed to win the Pink Ward war. Yes, suffocating an area by controlling the vision there with Pink Wards is a big deal. However, you don't just ... get to do that.
The bigger issue for the "snowball" in League is probably down to the items themselves: Higher tier items are more gold efficient. I think Riot's goal is probably more items like Hydra where some of the extra stats are "fluff" rather than core ones. Like, let's look at Phage. With the cost change, it's put at the same timing as a Brutalizer, roughly, and with the stats of them item actually not being gold efficient. More gold value is going to end up being put in "intangible" stats rather than AD, AP, etc. ones.
Edit: Figures it gets covered by a post while I'm typing.
So what happens when Level 7 -> 8 becomes a bottleneck and you can start aggressively trying to deny Level 7->8? Granted, it's relatively low power level but now any EXP leads here can hurt for a longer period of time.
Like, we can look at Twisted Treeline where it takes more EXP to go from 3 to 4 (3 -> 4 is 600, 4 -> 5 is 575 if I recall) so any won fights at Level 2/3 can turn into a longer term Level 4/5 advantage.
The bigger issue for the "snowball" in League is probably down to the items themselves: Higher tier items are more gold efficient. I think Riot's goal is probably more items like Hydra where some of the extra stats are "fluff" rather than core ones. Like, let's look at Phage. With the cost change, it's put at the same timing as a Brutalizer, roughly, and with the stats of them item actually not being gold efficient. More gold value is going to end up being put in "intangible" stats rather than AD, AP, etc. ones.
Edit: Figures it gets covered by a post while I'm typing.
So what happens when Level 7 -> 8 becomes a bottleneck and you can start aggressively trying to deny Level 7->8? Granted, it's relatively low power level but now any EXP leads here can hurt for a longer period of time.
Like, we can look at Twisted Treeline where it takes more EXP to go from 3 to 4 (3 -> 4 is 600, 4 -> 5 is 575 if I recall) so any won fights at Level 2/3 can turn into a longer term Level 4/5 advantage.
well im not exactly saying that pink wards just suddenly make you win the game, im saying they make you snowball harder. i.e. when you... "get to do that", you really get to fuck em up.
but yes, i forgot about itemization's relationship with snowball at the start of this discussion - and i agree, its a huge factor in snowball. I honestly hope they have a look at how they consider efficiency next season. It's a bit much to ask though, since it would require rebalancing of ALL the items
the experience clamp needs to go hand in hand with itemisation because as you identified, with much better items you can still deny experience - so in combination with better efficiency midgame items, a team that is behind can buy those "dorans" items for a level 7 fight and break the lead
the experience clamp should be enough to give teams the ability to make a play at level 7 when the enemy is at level 7 too. lowering the experience requirement before the "clamp" is so that teams that are behind can catch up to 7 as well.
Just wanted to make sure we're all on the same page here: Pinks let you control an area but being able to do that comes from other advantages (item advantages, EXP advantages, earlier champion power spikes, champion kits in general, etc.).
I'm thinking we'll probably see some simple things across the board. Finding the appropriate time that they want spikes to happen (e.g., Muramana changes) and work off of that. Like, that's one of Phage's strengths right now: 1250g is a lot earlier in the game than it appears to be.
The black leather skin. No one ever uses it unless they are a good Eve player. I'm not sure if it's still for sale, might be.
Pancakes
hot, steaming, as melted butter slips into the cracks, drizzled with sticky sweet syrup OH GOD
It's still on sale.
Same with Draven. You know a Draven is good if they have soul reaver. They're most likely bad if they're using gladiator.
Nah, it's more hipster/wildcard. You don't know what you're going to get.
Oddly enough I believe I was literally thinking this earlier today. I very much agree about these two skins.
So damn true, never seen bad soul reaver.
Mister Negative
Member
I have yet to win a game since my placements. I'm starting to get really discouraged.
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