[2021] Quick Gameplay Thoughts 12/17 - What's Next?

I don't think Riot should change champions exclusively to make them more popular.

I agree with this statement. It's hard to get much nuance into a blog post with this many topics.

In the case of Ahri and Janna, we're working on them because we believe that players who they have previously resonated with aren't enjoying them as much anymore. The goal is make them feel fun and well-supported. We do expect that if we succeed with this work, they'll be more popular, but that's a secondary effect.

I do want to be careful talking about concepts like who champions ought to resonate with - there are a lot of confounding factors and in Janna's case survivor bias is a real concern - she has lost approximately 50% of her pick rate since we pushed her lane phase so hard towards repeatable point-and-click harass, which implies that a lot of people who previously enjoyed Janna were hurt by those changes, but certainly some (most?) of her current players do like that playstyle.

I'm aware that I don't have to reassure this subreddit on this topic, but yes, it really is going to be a controversial topic with the larger playerbase.

Just to be clear about what the actual boogeyman is: the state we want to avoid is games where the actions you take in the gameplay (both moment-to-moment and at a broader strategy level) don't really matter.

This can happen when burst damage is so high that the correct play becomes staying far away from enemy champions for extended periods of time, and that's why we're investigating it right now.

But it most easily happens when defense outpaces damage - hitting individual skills matters less to the outcome of a fight, so fights become more stat-check-y; because fights become more of a stat check, it's easier to know that you shouldn't fight for very extended periods of time; it's much easier to start a comeback by picking and killing a fed glass cannon who is running over a game than a fed tank or juggernaut in a tank meta.

This is honestly the hardest thing about working on League - nobody is actually a League player, they're Kindred-Shyvana players and Kled-Pantheon players and Yasuo-Yone-Zed players and Tristana-Draven-Samira players, whatever their position preference and champion choice is.

This is a strength of the game and a big reason it has so much wide appeal, but it means that for any given player, they're running into unfair-feeling games routinely and then seeing Riot not do anything about, and it means we're always balancing one player's needs against another's. There are very few unequivocal wins for us to take and most decisions we make hurt the game for someone.

We pushed it back a patch to allow us to respond to feedback. I don't believe we've made final calls on what mechanics, if any, will change as a result, though.

We have recently playtested with all damage from champions to champions reduced by 20%, and all healing and shielding reduced by 20%. Some findings:

• Late game fights and especially teamfight become more legible and engaging, with better structure.
• Tanks become very overpowered.
• Healing becomes much more powerful - even at -20% healing, each point of healing is much more valuable than on the live game.
• Burst mages (especially ones dependent on a single rotation - Lux is a prime example here) quickly become borderline useless and it isn't clear how to buff them without undoing the reduction in damage output.
• AD assassins migrate to pure glass cannon builds to remain above burst thresholds - ironically, if AD assassins are common in the meta, the game could feel even burstier as a result. I don't think we got any clear read on AP assassins.
• Lane phase yields mixed results; there are more lanes where nothing ever happens, but some lanes that are more interesting as a consequence. Also suspect personal taste was a big factor in feedback on lane phase, would certainly want to understand it better.

This leads us to believe there is probably a better game out there to shoot for, but that there are a lot of ways it could go really badly. Hence the caution in exploring it.