[2023] Quick Gameplay Thoughts: 13.7 - MSI balancing, 13.6 Vayne changes, and notes on ADCs and Fighters

We have several different things we're looking at - sentiment, odds of victory given X lead at Y time, differences in odds of victory based on MMR gap within a lane, things like that.

The biggest confounding factor here is that bot lane's value to winning the game scales steeply with player skill and top lane's does not (unsurprisingly, since a lot of these measures are zero sum). Which means that when most ADC players feel fine, influencers and pros feel like we're in a pure bot lane meta, etc.

It's understandable that top lane players aren't happy when they see Vayne in their lane - but significantly exaggerated impact, yeah.

One of the really understated facts (good or bad) about role select is that players have sorted themselves based on what kinds of laning experiences they want to have. It doesn't matter which role Seraphine is highest win rate in or best in pro play in - players who like Seraphine as a character almost always queue support. It doesn't matter if Darius beats Teemo (he doesn't right now, but there've been many states of the game where he did) - Darius players are queuing up to have the melee 1v1 experience. And it doesn't matter how many mages are viable in bot lane - players who want to play them are mostly not queuing into bot lane.

We're still scoping things.

We're looking at a set of pro-targeted jungler buffs for 13.8 to supplement those nerfs.

I expect to be doing some item tinkering after MSI (e.g. buffing up the non-Sunderer fighter mythics, maybe with a Sunderer nerf). But we don't have any really large changes planned for the next few months.

Yes - and in 8.11, when we said "Hey, we're making absolutely sure non-ADCs are viable in the lane", the reaction wasn't a bunch of non-ADCs playing the lane, it was mostly people continuing to play ADCs while being sad about it. Getting players to change their behavior would require significantly more than that.

Honestly, we probably had to respond to the ADC-only meta in bot lane in something like season 2-3 if we wanted to head it off. People are so entrenched at this point that it's a bit hard to see what would get them to change.

I think we'd change them more than that if we went that direction. "There are different minions in the lanes", rather than having them look the same but give slightly differently tuned rewards.

But we're not at all committed to that direction, it's just an easy example of the type of thing that might give us another tuning lever.

Yeah should be out later this month/early next month

Did people like Nilah?

Not enough, but they did like Pyke enough to swap roles for. I personally suspect the difference is that if you like the thing Pyke does, he's the coolest champion in the game, whereas for a melee carry player, Nilah doesn't hit hard enough to get you to swap lanes just to access her, whether you'd like to play her or not in your main role.

So overall pretty bullish on that sort of direction, but we have to be careful with the targets we pick and have clear reasons why we expect to hit them.

I never said it was power neutral. I literally recorded a video that went up on this very subreddit where I said the role wasn't weak and that the changes in 13.1b were buffs.

Potentially yes, strategy is something that is on the table for changes for preseason.

As I said in a different comment, though, we're still scoping so I'm not committing to anything specific there right now.

Eventually yes, this year almost certainly no. We'd like to be able to change the environment more than we currently can (almost not at all), but it requires people with pretty specific skillsets, and our tooling in that area needs improvements for us to be able to do it more regularly.

I'd definitely agree that distinction between Fighter Mythics is a problem (and yes, Sunderer could stand to lose a property). Suspect we'll just be looking at simple tuning

But another problem they have is that they're not all that important to the patterns of Fighters - you'll buy them because they're very efficient with the stats you need to operate, but is it actually important that you have to choose between Goredrinker and Trinity Force, other than the fact that being able to buy both would make you statistically overpowered?

This ties into some of the problems we're having with the Mythic system in general, which we'll be talking about in the not-too-distant future.

She could be - but I will say that engagement with Nilah looks pretty different from, say, Rell. She found an audience, it's just not a huge one. Rell, on the other hand, is one of the least popular champions in the entire game, and not particularly deeply played even among players who play her.

So if we can find something cool, awesome, but it's not mandatory in the same way. Nilah's in an ok state in terms of audience; the point I was making is just that Nilah didn't move a whole bunch of melee carry players into bot lane or anything like that.

Should be end of this week