f*ck Elder buff, Neeko is best reward
A reward of a buff that makes the enemy team confused and the game more chaotic sounds pretty on-brand to me.
Also there's a Bardle Royale with darkness everywhere, what about a Bardle Royale with health bars, pings and HUD disabled instead? Test your intuition about damage and cooldowns. Idk could be terrible but need to meet the character requirements for the post so have a half-baked idea.
External link →Oh woah! This design space is wonderful and had not been considered yet. Awesome idea, /u/gramineous :D
It sucks we don't get new events in blitz with each new run. Riot then wonders why modes fall out of popularity.
For this run of Nexus Blitz, we're starting it knowing it didn't get enough attention, but that will be taken into account when looking at the data. We, simply, ran out of time but changes are still planned.
Nexus Blitz is not one of the more popular modes to begin with (OFA and URF are the current reigning champions there), at least in terms of % of people played or how much folks are playing. For every release so far that has been true. But it's also not unpopular so we are interested trying more on it. :)
That's interesting, as it suggests (based on just that statement, of course) that the popular game modes may be those that adhere the closest to normal League play. ARAM is teamfighting-focused, OFA is one champion, and URF is faster, but all three have fairly normal League play outside of those additions.
I'd be curious to see if that's an actual trend, and if, say, reducing the value of Nexus Blitz events and using them more like Dragon buff-level rewards instead of the (often) increased power they have now might actually increase player interest, since that would make the normal gameplay a bit more similar to the apparently winning formula of Normal Gameplay + secondary gimmick. Right now NB does feel a bit event-dominant conceptually, even if in practice events aren't as large a tipping point as actual gameplay. That might also be due to the fact that the warning about where/when an event takes place isn't as pronounced, so we don't really have the same sort of pre-objective macro-game we often find in Rift.
Just sort of pondering aloud, because of course that would mean losing some of the zaniness that can be very appealing, and I'm not sure that's to the mode's advantage. I just know that in some of my games it often feels like Event Blitz instead of Nexus Blitz until the very end.
"SR variation" would be an incomplete analysis. Some of the least popular game modes, Nemesis Draft being perhaps the most extreme example, are also SR variations.
I also strongly believe that "SR variation" doesn't really capture why URF isn't played.
Our current hypothesis is that modes that present a strong - positive - gameplay fantasy are the most widely appealing and with an element of "changes every game" causes interest to stick. That is to say, folks play URF because they imagine all the cool sh*t they do in URF. They keep playing URF because each game has all the rest of the champions also doing cool sh*t (and different cool sh*t than last time), and that makes each game different and exciting. Really, the same is true with OFA as well.
That is to say, it's really about the champions. Not about the environment those champions are in. The environment, though, can be altered to support such spaces. "What does my champion get to do if we need to team fight all the time" is best supported by a map change (Howling Abyss) than it is with a gameplay rules change (that is, if we tried to do it on SR).
Generally, people play games for a variety of reasons. No one hypothesis will capture every motive and I would be skeptical if one did. I think that Nexus Blitz doesn't fit that bill and has its own reasons to be fun. And I think it would be a mistake to force Nexus Blitz into something that it's not, since then you end up with the worst aspects of each of their own reasons to be enjoyed.
On note of that, have you ever thought about bringing dominion map back only in customs though? Honestly it's an entirely selfish reason but I would love to play hide and seek again, it's just not the same on SR.
Crystal Scar is very unlikely to come back.
The Crystal Scar (and Twisted Treeline for that matter) were built for an old environment renderer that's no longer around. To return those maps, they will need to be rebuilt entirely. The only map so far that was built for the old renderer that was then rebuilt as-is for the new renderer has been Howling Abyss.
In turn, that old renderer also is unable to come back since utilizing it prevented League from adopting newer versions of DirectX. For maps, when things articles or comments mention the trade off between cost to keep around vs the popularity of the map or mode, most often that deprecation is one of the most significant costs we had to consider.
For that same reason is it unlikely to see Butchers Bridge return?
IIRC, Butcher's Bridge was built on a new renderer, so it could return. I would need to see where it's at though.
Hey Reinboom can you share how you feel about Nexus Siege and Dark Star Singularity, I felt both modes had some potential with a lot of the uniqueness added from the newer elements
Nexus Siege is unlikely to ever return. It's a very high cost mode to upkeep. Mostly in part due to the "game reset" part of it. And it wasn't really that popular.
Dark Star... I can't say for sure. Personally, I loved Dark Star. But it definitely got old fast. And this reflected in play rate as well. It was effectively a 1-weekend mode, in terms of a supportable queue size. It will definitely not return anytime soon, but I would love to be able to capture some aspect of it again eventually.
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