Reign of Gaming

I used to think Riot was a great company, the LCS was the shining beacon of the future of e-sports, pro teams were the best LoL had to offer, and the struggle to the top was interesting. Turns out I was wrong, though, and I owe this discovery to the chat from the LoL tournaments. If you've never watched the tournaments, there's a running chat that anybody can type in, and boy was it eye-opening. Here are a few things I learned about LoL. Hopefully, some pro players will also read this blog, so they can learn from the wisdom of the masses the same way I did. hashinshin, you paying attention? You may be in challenger, but here's some advice from people who know better.

League of Legends is a pretty complicated game; it has over 100 champions to learn, many different roles, and a few mechanics that all demand your attention and mechanics. This can make it a little bit inaccessible to new players. Today, to make it a bit more accessible to new players, I thought I'd compile of skills to learn to be competent, and make a list of champions you can play to learn those skills. This is by no means an exhaustive list. I have also tried to stick to cheaper champions.

In response to my articles, I've received a lot of suggestions, some with merit and some without. Today, I'm going to talk about how to review changes, and go through some of the responses I've gotten with a critical eye to the results they might yield.

In my last post, I talked about how to change itemization to make life better for tank junglers, especially those who have gank-heavy and CC-heavy kits, with less sustained damage. Today, I'll be talking about supports. Through Season 2, Support was the role that a lot of people thought of as the short-end of the stick. There were both good and bad reasons to think this. On the one hand, people complained about the support role's 'inability' to carry games. By this, they typically meant 'you can't 1vX anybody'. Yes, this is true, for the most part. But support, as the name suggests, is about setting plays up. The valid complaints about support, on the other hand, were slightly more nuanced. These complaints alleged that the lack of itemization choices gave support little well to express knowledge of itemization as a skill. Yes, there was a distinction between a great support and a good support mechanically, but there was no difference between a great support and a good support itemization-wise. You could always tell the bad supports: they didn't ward, bought AP, and stole farm all the time. But a mediocre support and a great support were basically differentiated solely by mechanics, not by choices. This eliminates one of the key aspects about LoL for this class. Sightstone and the gold changes were supposed to change this in Season 3, but once the novelty wore off, things have gone back to normal, and if you look at LCS games, you see the same scenario of supports ending with no items, and dumping all of their gold into wards. I think runes, masteries, items could all be tweaked make support, as a role, a bit more dynamic.

One thing I've learned in my time at A Different View is this: imbalance is hard to fix.

It's very easy to see imbalance when it presents itself. Nobody didn't know Black Cleaver was crazy when it came out. On the other hand, it's much harder to propose explicit changes to fix that imbalance without overdoing it.

Even harder is seeing imbalance that's created by a lack of options. It's easy to see 'Black Cleaver is OP' when it's in every game. It's much harder to see why something's underpowered, when there are so many factors. It's difficult to see what you would have to add to fix a problem without creating another one.

So for my next 5 posts, I'm going to try and detail a problem League of Legends suffers from, then propose a fix. Today, we talk tanks, bruisers, and those horrible mutant bruiser-tanks (Jarvan/Vi/Xin) that are dominating LCS play, and what to do to open up champion selection a bit.

If you want to see this post get Riot's attention, I've posted it in GD here.