Morello and Co I am a software designer/coder who works for a company in Canada that designs software for farmers so I have a lot of understanding of Riot’s focus on iteration and a better understanding of development and how feedback is incorporated than a lot of my fellow posters.
However your reaction to the jungle feedback confuses me greatly. I don’t know how things are done at Riot but I have always assumed you worked a lot like we do. When we make a new version of a product there are always a list of Design goals that looks a little something like this:
1. Enable tracking of milk production across multiple Herds per month.
2. Enable customers to quickly establish feed cost to milk production ratio.
3. Allow for separate feed tracking of heifers, bull calves and steers.
And so on and so forth. If any of those things fails to be properly implemented we want to know about it and fix it ASAP. I know it can be hard to decipher the difference between feedback from someone who just hasn’t adapted to a new system yet from someone who is legitimately telling you something is broken as a Chinese tractor.
But when it is obvious that something is indeed not working like you told the customer it would you need to identify it and fix it fast. So what exactly are your design goals with jungle? So far this is my understanding of what you were trying to accomplish:
1. Junglers had too much early pressure on lanes due to double buffs, fast xp gain, little health loss ect. At least partial success, though I have no doubt new and more optimized early jungle strategies will make early ganks slightly better than they are now there is no denying that early ganking will never be as powerful as it was in season two. So far so good on this change.
2. Making the jungle harder will make it more of an investment for laners to take the jungle early. This is the one that I really want to hear some feedback on because it has FAILED. We have frequently been told “Gold will start to stack up after 11 minutes.” Well guess what by 11 minutes anyone with sustain is already poaching jungle. This one is pathetic, when my 0/5 Katarina is taking wraiths by nine minutes and losing no health from it you have clearly failed to make wraiths scale hard enough.
3. We want Junglers to have more mid to late game presence. Again I don’t know how much feedback you need. Optimization will only go so far. Sure as people get better they will suck a little more gold out of jungle but it will not be enough to make up for the fact that we are getting less gold than laners and have to buy items like machete that give no bonus in teamfights.
Back in season two damage based Junglers were completely reliant on getting early kills to snowball because they were gold starved. The best junglers were tanks like Mundo or Amumu that could buy 2-3 gold per 10s to make up for the bad gold in jungle, buy oracles and be a second support. If you couldn’t land early ganks and snowball that was ok because you could still contribute.
Oricles has been nerfed, HoG is gone, Sightstone is in, the new jungle items are great at jungling but terrible in a PvP fight. Snowball junglers are worse off than ever, support junglers are worse off than ever, farm junglers are as bad as season two, counter junglers are as bad as season two.
4. We want more variety in jungle builds and more types of junglers. I don’t think it’s a case of asking if this failed but a case of discovering how hard has this failed. Yes sustain is a lot better now but you still can’t take anyone particularly gold reliant into jungle because there is still no guarantee of getting gold. Anyone who NEEDS gold to be good (Dps noc, Zed, Tryn ect) is still in a state of snowball early or be worthless.
This “Oh it is early days yet, wait and see what people discover down the line a bit,” line you are all parroting is starting to tick me off. If I told that to customers when I had clearly failed to deliver on promised features I would be feeding them bull excrement, and farmers know all about that and threaten you with shotguns if you try and feed it to them.
At least two of your stated design goals have failed utterly and a third is looking bad. You should admit your failures to your customers, then ask that they you give you a little more time to make sure you fix it thoroughly.
I say again NO AMOUNT OF PLAYER OPTIMIZATION WILL DIG JUNGLERS OUT OF THE GOLD HOLE THAT MACHETE AND JUNGLE ITEMS/HOG LOSS/SLOWER CLEAR TIMES/WORSE GANKS HAS PUT THEM IN. The question to me is not “does jungler gold need to go up and do camps need to scale harder?” it is a case of how much. I throw ALL my support behind the idea of adding a unique passive to the new jungle items that gives bonus gold on monster kill.
Please let junglers be as awesome in season three as you have made supports. Please be that company that listens and understand. Please display the understanding of your game that you all seem to have. Please make it so that if all lanes are winning we can go farm our jungle and get good items instead of making it so we are completely reliant on ganks and stealing lane creeps to keep up.
I love what you say you are trying to accomplish with season three, I agreed with what you said you were trying to do in all the previews wholeheartedly but really I think the jury has come back and it is time to start figuring out what needs to change and by how much.
Some of it is overblown (11 minutes is pretty early game...), while some we're running numbers in various scenarios on (XP). It's more like this, in your analogy;
The milk occasionally gets to the deliver point early, sometimes on time, but many of our vendors are telling us they're getting their milk late. When we look at certain tracking elements, the milk is reportedly getting there on time.
The improper response is "well, drive the milk faster." Instead, it's "do the customers get their milk on time and it feels late, or is the milk late?" If it is, where and why? Are some deliveries being slower? What about geographic differences? Was there a presidential motorcade in town the week they reported lateness?
Here's the certainty: many players feel the jungle is not rewarding enough. That's where we start - how they feel, and then bring that back to a cause.
C. This is objectively the best way to approach design feedback and you both reached the same conclusions independently.
This is referred to as "engineered problem solving," which is the backbone of good design. I do have a ton of respect for James Portnow, because he uses this similar focus.
Game design is rarely about what you know, and often about how you find answers to the unknowns.
Ok so to get out of the milk analogies that were a tiny part of the thread, what about how soon laners are taking jungle?
Is it intended that they should be able to clear jungle easily before we even get to the break even point? Because they are. Are you seeing the number of gold reliant junglers go up? Are junglers actually getting more gold in the long run? Were they ever supposed to? Were you actually happy with season two gold levels on junglers and the support jungler meta?
Are you factoring in the fact that the matchete and spirit stone are good at clearing jungle and nothing else?
Do you actually want a Nocturne to be able to build full Assasin and NOT GET SCREWED if he misses the first two ganks?
This is a good set of questions - exactly. We're still analyzing the results of this because it's not consistently true, and a lot of situational factors do come into play.
Excellent as long as those types of questions are being asked I am happy. I do understand that it takes time to figure out exaclty what and how much. I still throw my support behind the idea of at least INVESTIGATING the idea of putting a averice blade type effect on matchete based items, it isn't going to help the dude who is 8/0 ganking lanes like a BOSS all day but it sure as hell will help the 0/0 or 0/2 guy who desperately needs to farm up some gold to stay in the game.
Any big problems with that I am missing?
One of the big ones is there are cases of heavy jungle snowballing where the jungler is 1-2 level higher than the solo consistently, and has good gold. We want to make sure we aren't buffing that case when fixing the issues that players feel.
We're definitely considering all these factors, we just want to REALLY do our homework. We also want to watch creative strategies.
But morello, I've yet to see a jungler be a higher level than the duo lane. Most of the time they're 1-2 levels UNDER the duo lane. That's a HUGE problem. The jungler being overleveled is the exception, NOT the rule. The Jungler should be able to keep up with the duo lane if they're doing nothing but farming jungle, not 1-3 levels UNDER the duo lane.
That's right - but with a swing that wide, it's very important to understand the factors that create exceptions.
@Morello@Jatt@Statikk Feedback Design Goal Questions from a software designer.
However your reaction to the jungle feedback confuses me greatly. I don’t know how things are done at Riot but I have always assumed you worked a lot like we do. When we make a new version of a product there are always a list of Design goals that looks a little something like this:
1. Enable tracking of milk production across multiple Herds per month.
2. Enable customers to quickly establish feed cost to milk production ratio.
3. Allow for separate feed tracking of heifers, bull calves and steers.
And so on and so forth. If any of those things fails to be properly implemented we want to know about it and fix it ASAP. I know it can be hard to decipher the difference between feedback from someone who just hasn’t adapted to a new system yet from someone who is legitimately telling you something is broken as a Chinese tractor.
But when it is obvious that something is indeed not working like you told the customer it would you need to identify it and fix it fast. So what exactly are your design goals with jungle? So far this is my understanding of what you were trying to accomplish:
1. Junglers had too much early pressure on lanes due to double buffs, fast xp gain, little health loss ect. At least partial success, though I have no doubt new and more optimized early jungle strategies will make early ganks slightly better than they are now there is no denying that early ganking will never be as powerful as it was in season two. So far so good on this change.
2. Making the jungle harder will make it more of an investment for laners to take the jungle early. This is the one that I really want to hear some feedback on because it has FAILED. We have frequently been told “Gold will start to stack up after 11 minutes.” Well guess what by 11 minutes anyone with sustain is already poaching jungle. This one is pathetic, when my 0/5 Katarina is taking wraiths by nine minutes and losing no health from it you have clearly failed to make wraiths scale hard enough.
3. We want Junglers to have more mid to late game presence. Again I don’t know how much feedback you need. Optimization will only go so far. Sure as people get better they will suck a little more gold out of jungle but it will not be enough to make up for the fact that we are getting less gold than laners and have to buy items like machete that give no bonus in teamfights.
Back in season two damage based Junglers were completely reliant on getting early kills to snowball because they were gold starved. The best junglers were tanks like Mundo or Amumu that could buy 2-3 gold per 10s to make up for the bad gold in jungle, buy oracles and be a second support. If you couldn’t land early ganks and snowball that was ok because you could still contribute.
Oricles has been nerfed, HoG is gone, Sightstone is in, the new jungle items are great at jungling but terrible in a PvP fight. Snowball junglers are worse off than ever, support junglers are worse off than ever, farm junglers are as bad as season two, counter junglers are as bad as season two.
4. We want more variety in jungle builds and more types of junglers. I don’t think it’s a case of asking if this failed but a case of discovering how hard has this failed. Yes sustain is a lot better now but you still can’t take anyone particularly gold reliant into jungle because there is still no guarantee of getting gold. Anyone who NEEDS gold to be good (Dps noc, Zed, Tryn ect) is still in a state of snowball early or be worthless.
This “Oh it is early days yet, wait and see what people discover down the line a bit,” line you are all parroting is starting to tick me off. If I told that to customers when I had clearly failed to deliver on promised features I would be feeding them bull excrement, and farmers know all about that and threaten you with shotguns if you try and feed it to them.
At least two of your stated design goals have failed utterly and a third is looking bad. You should admit your failures to your customers, then ask that they you give you a little more time to make sure you fix it thoroughly.
I say again NO AMOUNT OF PLAYER OPTIMIZATION WILL DIG JUNGLERS OUT OF THE GOLD HOLE THAT MACHETE AND JUNGLE ITEMS/HOG LOSS/SLOWER CLEAR TIMES/WORSE GANKS HAS PUT THEM IN. The question to me is not “does jungler gold need to go up and do camps need to scale harder?” it is a case of how much. I throw ALL my support behind the idea of adding a unique passive to the new jungle items that gives bonus gold on monster kill.
Please let junglers be as awesome in season three as you have made supports. Please be that company that listens and understand. Please display the understanding of your game that you all seem to have. Please make it so that if all lanes are winning we can go farm our jungle and get good items instead of making it so we are completely reliant on ganks and stealing lane creeps to keep up.
I love what you say you are trying to accomplish with season three, I agreed with what you said you were trying to do in all the previews wholeheartedly but really I think the jury has come back and it is time to start figuring out what needs to change and by how much.
The milk occasionally gets to the deliver point early, sometimes on time, but many of our vendors are telling us they're getting their milk late. When we look at certain tracking elements, the milk is reportedly getting there on time.
The improper response is "well, drive the milk faster." Instead, it's "do the customers get their milk on time and it feels late, or is the milk late?" If it is, where and why? Are some deliveries being slower? What about geographic differences? Was there a presidential motorcade in town the week they reported lateness?
Here's the certainty: many players feel the jungle is not rewarding enough. That's where we start - how they feel, and then bring that back to a cause.
A. You watch Extra Credits
B. You secretly write Extra Credits
C. This is objectively the best way to approach design feedback and you both reached the same conclusions independently.
Game design is rarely about what you know, and often about how you find answers to the unknowns.
Is it intended that they should be able to clear jungle easily before we even get to the break even point? Because they are. Are you seeing the number of gold reliant junglers go up? Are junglers actually getting more gold in the long run? Were they ever supposed to? Were you actually happy with season two gold levels on junglers and the support jungler meta?
Are you factoring in the fact that the matchete and spirit stone are good at clearing jungle and nothing else?
Do you actually want a Nocturne to be able to build full Assasin and NOT GET SCREWED if he misses the first two ganks?
Any big problems with that I am missing?
We're definitely considering all these factors, we just want to REALLY do our homework. We also want to watch creative strategies.