Category: League of Legends

[LoL] ARAM

I have been enjoying the new mode in League of Legends. “All random all middle” is even more frantic fun than Dominion, although almost all strategy is gone in favor of tactics.

  • You can reroll your champion every few games, so it is not fully random. This is especially a good thing for people who bought packs like the one when League of Legends launched. Have seven champions you’ve never played because they were not really your style? Rerolls minimize that punishment.
  • But then you get the chance to try new things. Ryze? More fun than I remembered from the time or two I played him, although see below for why his spells aren’t the best for ARAM.
  • The most important thing about ARAM is that team fights start NOW, often before minions spawn. When the whole game is team fights, the values of various abilities and champions change.
  • AE is obviously far more valuable.
  • Skill shots are also far more valuable. You do not need much skill to toss a skillshot into a crowd and hope for the best. Even given that, skill shots are even more valuable than you think because the enemies are boxed in one lane. You don’t need to spray and pray to appreciate having a shooting alley.
  • Juking is less valuable, with far fewer options, although the people who can pull it off are impressive.
  • Support wins games, above and beyond what you are used to. Healers are fabulous with no healing fountain. Soraka and Sona are great support combined with offensive powerhouses in ARAM.
  • Alistar is similarly amazing, enough to merit his own bullet point. Tank with AE heal and CC, plus the R of “soak all the damage”? I have only seen a team with Alistar lose once.
  • Team composition is very important. Four melees? You’re probably dead already. Opposing team is the MMO contingent of tank, healer, and three DPS? Yep, that’s bad. Because team composition is mostly random, the game can be randomly unwinnable before you even start. This is an intrinsic hazard of randomness, but still generally unfun.
  • It is still hard to find 10 people who can stay connected and play a video game for 10-20 minutes. While I have had a good streak today, I have had days where half my games were 4 vs. 5. This is not a satisfying way to win or to lose, and if there is any punishment for quitting once you see the previous bullet point, it is not visible to the people who must suffer through it.
  • Remember, the most important thing in the game is to make sure everyone knows it is not your fault that your team lost. Everyone else was bad, you had lag, the opposing champs are OP, and team comp sucked gg lol noobs

: Zubon

Supply Creates Its Own Demand

The blade itself incites to deeds of violence.
— Homer, The Odyssey, although I cannot find a translation online that uses that exact phrasing.

It is not a slippery slope argument to say, “Developing the capacity to X makes X much more likely.” Beyond the tautology that you cannot do X if you cannot do X, we find that humans are more likely to pursue options that are readily available. Once you have the ability to do something, you start finding occasions for it. This is a driver of progress and source of anguish.

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Rebalancing

Continuing with the random flash games, Kingdoms CCG recently did rebalancing. “The goal was to remove the tiers and the associated power gap between Heroes to create a much more versatile and interesting meta game and battle experience.” This means that the free heroes got better and the heroes you might have bought with the RMT currency were nerfed. On some changes, you might argue about whether it was a “nerf,” but it was definitely a significant change, like turning an AE buff into a stronger single-target buff. Oh, and “The Hero Trade In program will no longer be available after this update.”

League of Legends does this sort of thing, but so far only with a few of its dozens of champions, and there will be a few with similar functions, and it is rare to completely change the role of a champion. Also, you probably bought most of your champions with the in-game currency rather than the RMT currency. Also also, they did not explicitly establish tiers of champions, make the higher tiers more expensive, and then eliminate the tiers.

While I have played some Kingdoms CCG, I don’t really have skin in the game. I had a tier 3 hero, but I used the RMT currency you receive free in-game. The rebalancing included resetting all achievements, and earning them now awards some of that RMT currency, and they removed grind, and they added free rotating heroes like the LoL champions, so this is an almost unalloyed good for me in the game, except for needing to grind achievements to unlock things I already had access to and changing my favorite hero’s abilities into something I like less.

But that is a heck of a thing to do to players who are your revenue source. How do you expect people to trust you enough to spend money after you do something like that? It’s like a tiny little NGE.

: Zubon

On the Same Team

There were two feelings I really liked when trying the GW2 beta. The first is the playground between the sandbox and the theme park. The second, and I have not felt this for a long time in an MMO or even most team-based games, is that the players were all on the same team.

If the design is working as intended,* everyone on the same server is on the same team. If someone is fighting, you should help him. There is no kill-stealing. If someone is on the ground, you should rez him. You’ll get experience points and achievement progress, and then there’s someone else around to help you with the event.

Continue reading On the Same Team

Default Appearance

There is nothing wrong with having stripperific outfits in game. Many people like them. Just don’t make them the default option. I logged into the GW2 beta, and of all the female norn default appearances, only the engineer has invented the “covered midriff.” We justified half-naked norn by their tendency to turn into bears, so they can’t be encased in metal … except that the men are. The human women seem to be a good mix, mostly with reasonable outfits, although we have the Asian lass in the orange bikini with some sort of metal exoskeleton floating around her. Except for the mesmer, the rest are great, classically stylish. (The charr look silly, clothed, but silly. The furred race uses more cloth than the giants?)

If people really like the stripper outfits that much, put them in the cash shop. This benefits your bottom line and your first impressions. League of Legends had people lined up to demand the chance to pay for a bunnygirl outfit for Riven. I have no idea how much money Riot made off that, but it seems like a wise business decision. Give people pants for free. Make them pay to take them off.

: Zubon

A Stable Bass

This is one of the occasional music posts, so depart here if those annoy you. This one gets the WoW tag: we have a five-person group with three in the flashy front roles, but I’m focusing on the two in the less visible roles. Rather than one song, our music of the moment is Pentatonix in the third season of The Sing-Off. You can see all their performances in this compilation, but I encourage you to pursue the YouTube links for videos from “mrduckbear11,” who posts clips from the show, because the judges’ commentary is actually useful rather than just “the nice one, the mean one, and the overly excited one.”

The Sing-Off is essentially American Idol a cappella, skipping the part where you humiliate the lousy singers. The winners in the third season were a small, young group that was mostly noted for their interesting and risky arrangements. Five people, three lead singers, lots of interesting sounds. Listen to at least a few, and then listen to a recurring theme in the judges’ commentary: their percussion and beat box are great and tie everything together so that their lead performers can shine. Try starting at 4:30 on OMG or 6:08 on the Forget You/Since U Been Gone mix. Shawn Stockman’s phrase is “meat and potatoes”: they are strong on the fundamentals, not just the flair. Compare that to Delilah, another group from season three that started with one of the best performances in the series but was eliminated after a performance with a brilliant lead but a failure of support. The lead on that is actually better than The Band Perry, but the commentary is on-point: it becomes discordant without a base to stand on. Compare to Ben Folds’s discussion of their first performance, when the support worked well.

Do I need to unpack the analogy at this point? We even have the perfect analogue with a 5-person, 3-DPS group. You need those big, shiny numbers to win, but they don’t matter without your tank and healer. It got me thinking about the offensive line in (American) football: it is an unglamorous role with almost no statistics to support who is better or worse, and the camera is on the guy running the ball, but you can definitely tell when the offensive line fails and the quarterback is crushed before he can try to do anything interesting. If you know to watch, you can see the tank quietly being a superstar, but good support is usually invisible. (Grabbing another game, a friend loves to watch StarCraft replays at LAN parties and should about how the player trying to do something flashy or cheesy gets crushed on fundamentals. Grabbing a third, I still play League of Legends Dominion occasionally; people chase for kills, but capping the points wins the game.)

Do you have a favorite fight where the tanks and the healer really take front stage, rather than seeing people compare kill counts and damage meters? Flip back to the mix video and try 2:53, where the background gets center stage, the a cappella equivalent of a drum solo. Part of the appeal of City of Heroes was how support could be strong, essential, flashy, and featured, while a damage source is a damage source, and then there is the difference in LotRO DPS compared to WoW.

: Zubon

This comes on the eve of the Guild Wars 2 launch, a game eliminating healers and tanks, and I’m nearing the end of my time in Guild Wars playing a ranger as a support class.

Differing Dailies: Reliable, Rotating, and Random

In our world of quest-based PvE MMOs, repeatable content is a necessity for extending longevity. If there is nothing to do, players go elsewhere. The most popular approach to this is daily (or occasionally weekly, twice weekly, etc.) quests, and that is our compare-and-contrast essay of the day. (Do not steal it for high school English class unless you define many of the terms we are taking for granted.)

More specifically, the topic is how you structure those daily quests. I call some “reliable” in that they are unvarying. The same daily quests are available every day. “Random” dailies will have a pool from which some unknown ones are pulled each day. “Rotating” is the halfway point: a pool that moves in a consistent manner, so what is available is reliably known but not constant.

World of Warcraft is the trope codifier for dailies. When I played (late WotLK), they limited you to 25/day, and everything was always available. That is one of the great merits of reliable dailies: everything is available. There is no artificial scarcity. If you want it, it is there. If you like X, X will be there for you every day. You can set up a routine, and as a developer, you want to promote having your players log in consistently. Consistency is a kind of virtue. WoW also included some randomness, like the daily fishing and cooking quests. Didn’t they extend that with the Cataclysm solo endgame, with so many of the daily quests available per day?

I find randomness good for mixing it up, breaking up routines that lead to doldrums, but it is frustrating when you want something to come up and it does not. If you are randomly picking one of four quests, there is a 53% chance that one of them will not appear in a given week. When instant gratification takes too long, this can be bad. It forces on the player what is probably a good plan (not doing the same thing every day), but players resist being forced into anything.

The Lord of the Rings Onlineâ„¢ is another “always everything” game. Skirmishes extended this by giving a daily bonus to a menu of instances you could pull up. That content was usually available at all times, but the quest bonus was 1/day. (I say, “was,” but I presume this continues in Isengard.)

The daily or weekly bonus seems to be the easiest approach. You can get a bonus for doing each piece of content over each time period X. The numerically equivalent but less friendly-sounding version is to have diminishing returns for repeating content.

Guild Wars goes for pure “rotating.” The wiki has a list of when everything is coming up for the 7 dailies. This contains some of the merits of the other two approaches, in that what is available is known in advance and can be planned around but is not a constant each day. Embark Beach is a Schelling point; hundreds of options would spread the players everywhere, while a small set of daily options focuses grouping. Of course, as with random, if you do not like the daily option (any of the 7?), you are out of luck, and everyone with whom you might want to group is being channeled away from you. You do not even get the hope that your choice will randomly come up tomorrow; you can see on the calendar that it will be up in mid-March, that day you will be on a business trip. Guild Wars has the additional interesting bit that you can pick up but not complete the Zaishen missions and get to them tomorrow. I am a new player still going through the campaigns, so if the mission of the day is one I expect to get to later this week, I can store that bonus.

League of Legends has a generic “first win of the day” bonus. You get it for any map, PvE or PvP. That seems to be just a “come back every day!” incentive, as it cannot channel the players anywhere, although there are few enough options that channeling seems unnecessary.

Because I have not played every MMO, the door is wide open for reader commentary on how game X did it. The hard part on doing the comparison is that daily content is usually at the level cap, and how many MMOs have you played at the level cap for any meaningful length of time? Oh wait, you read MMO blogs.

I know which site I am writing for, but please resist the urge to say, “Guild Wars 2 events will solve this” unless you can tie it back to the daily-specific focus. You know how much it pains me to have skipped City of Heroes because their repeatable content has (had?) no time limits on repeatability, although there is a task force of the week bonus.

: Zubon

[GW, LoL] Half-Naked Women of the North

Having met GW’s Norns and LoL’s newest champion, I notice that Jora and Sejuani have about the same costumes, certainly in terms of square millimeters covered. The Norn men are similarly attired, so I presume they have human-looking skin that is actually warmth-preserving hide? They turn into bears, so I can see why you might not want to be encased in metal when you hulk-out. Sejuani must be hide-bound as well, because she is a mounted champion with no pants. She has big furry boots but no chaps. I might go for “maybe their shaggy boars are soft rather than prickly,” but she has a saddle. Any stories about how your legs felt the day after you rode a horse in just bikini bottoms? Not a gentle ride, mind you, since this is a war mount going full out, and she has no reins (and both hands full anyway), so she is steering a raging boar with her legs while also clinging on to anchor herself while swinging her flail. The big WoW shoulderpads that are presumably stapled to her bare shoulders are a nice touch.

Looking at the other snow-themed champions, Nunu (little boy) is in a full parka; Anivia is a bird; Frostfire Annie (little girl) gets a knee-length dress; Freljord Ashe (female) is just as covered as Ashe (mostly, with bare thighs and upper chest); Arctic Warfare Caitlyn (female) gets full marks for snug wool; Frost Queen Janna (female) is about as covered as Janna (bikini with some trailing cloth); Freljord Rammus is an armadillo; Volibear is a bear; and I don’t think most of the holiday skins (Snowmerdinger, Reindeer Kog’Mow, Festive Maokai, Candy Cane Miss Fortune, Silent Night Sona, Earnest Elf Tristana) count. I’m sure there are more examples, but I’m tired of looking through champion skins.

TV Tropes has several hundred examples of chainmail bikinis and their variants in fiction (and some in real life). Sejuani seemed especially noticeable as someone wearing almost nothing (1) while going into combat (2) in the frozen north (3) riding on a saddle. Or is the idea that she actually wears clothing in the snow, but the Summoner’s Rift feels like the balmy tropics to her (but she really likes the furry boots)?

I’m thinking of putting together a variation on the Bechdel test for video games. For human-like player characters and major NPCs, take the number of male characters showing more than 20% of the skin below their necks and divide by the number of female characters covering more than 20% of the skin below their necks. This has the added bonus of automatically factoring in how many games have important male characters outnumber important female characters 3-to-1.

: Zubon

But I totally want Sejuani tanking and Ashe as our AD carry when I’m playing Anivia. Easy double-damage on E, woo!

2012 Predictions

I will now get the highest score of any MMO pundit making predictions. Ready? “It will not go live in 2012.” Whatever we’re talking about, I’m predicting that it will slip into 2013, or later, or just never ship. The game, the expansion, whatever: not in 2012. I’m going to lose a few points, since something will ship in 2012, but I don’t see how anyone can beat my accuracy rate here.

: Zubon