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I just got out of a game where the enemy team had Chemtech soul. It was a 55 minute game with a lot of fights, so I got to see the revive effect trigger a couple dozen times at least.

While the soul and map themselves feel pretty absurd to play against (but that's another topic), I feel like one thing which needs major fixing is the clarity when someone is a "zombie", revived by the soul.

Aside from a barely visible green "smoke" effect, and the minor health reduction, it's really really difficult to tell who's actually alive and who's been revived; just by looking at the champions.

Big fights with lots of stuff going on can already feel pretty difficult to navigate in and telling who's who, especially with all the effects flying around the screen, but this new soul really adds another new layer to make it even more so unnecessarily confusing.

I think clarity-wise, it would go a long way to simply add either a more noticeable effect, champion texture change (like becoming a lot more green) or some kind of additional effect around their health bar or champion name, or anything to make it feel less confusing in a big fight to distinguish who's alive and who's revived. More clarity never hurts.

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about 3 years ago - /u/phroxz0n - Direct link

There are some additional changes coming down the pipe to improve chemsoul readability. The name plate will read "zombie" and display an appropriate icon. We couldn't quite get it in for ship, so it is likely to be coming next patch.

about 3 years ago - /u/phroxz0n - Direct link

Originally posted by the_real_KILLGOREX

If you have summoner names turned off, will it still display "zombie"?

Yes, it overrides healthbar settings, the same way it will read "stunned" or "reviving"

about 3 years ago - /u/phroxz0n - Direct link

Originally posted by bz6

Did the League team get smaller? Across all departments? For such a small scope pre-season, adding "zombie" to a nameplate when affected by a soul doesn't seem to be much work. I don't mean to be rude but was legit wondering.

It's not really about how big or small the team is, it's that it's a cross discipline task. And most players also don't realize how complex game Dev can get behind the scenes.

Design needs to figure out how we are doing the representation (eg. We tried several different things before landing on the healthbar).

Once we decide this is the solution we're going for, Engineering then need to extend the UI system to include this zombie state in the UI system without breaking anything.

Visual design then needs to create several icons, before we settle on the correct one. And hooking them up in game to be playtested is not trivial either, you can't just throw a png in a folder and have a designer hook it up and call it a day. Textures also need to undergo optimization so they don't consume too much memory.

A producer will also need to weigh this work against the other priorities. Eg. Did the engineer have to tackle some emergent bugs that are negatively impacting game server performance? This might mean that even though design and visual is ready, it is bottlenecked on the engineering side, which may hold up play testing.

Tldr, cross discipline collaboration is a lot more time consuming than you would expect.