Originally posted by
ketzo
I've always liked the Quick Gameplay Thoughts series, because I like getting in-depth thoughts on why game balance/design choices were made. I kind of thought this article was lacking.
There’s been some question of making power farming more worthwhile in order to reduce how often junglers gank—we’re potentially taking a small stab there
I think this is cool, but I wanna know the thoughts behind how this is happening.
How does the balance team go from "gank junglers are too powerful" to "we should nerf treat gold and increase xp per camp?"
- How did the team decide gank junglers are too powerful?
- In what ways are they too powerful?
- Why did they choose the "treat gold" and "camp xp" levers, and not something else?
- What do they plan to try next if this doesn't work?
/u/RiotAxes I'm always grateful when y'all take the time to write up stuff like this, and obviously, explaining every decision anyone makes would probably be pretty boring :D
I just think the QGT format is a great opportunity for brief deep dive into a popular topic. This felt more like "here are some things we're thinking about" -- which is still cool to know! I just wanna hear even more!
How did the team decide gank junglers are too powerful?
In what ways are they too powerful?
Why did they choose the "treat gold" and "camp xp" levers, and not something else?
What do they plan to try next if this doesn't work?
I can jump in to answer this! I'm about to start a playtest so might have to be a bit more brief than you'd like tho. Apologies of something comes off weird or needs clarification, ask away underneath
For ganking junglers we tend to look at what kinds of characters are dominating meta, what the high elo/pro strategy is around jungle pathing and so on. It's a mix of external information gathering and internal analysis (looking at expected value of ganking vs farming, testing, talking to the game analysis team, intuition, etc.).
After that we look at how their power is manifesting (gank bot at 3, snowball ahead) and whether we think it's beyond the pale.
Then it's about both what is best to do, and what can we do in the time allotted. We had like no time to test because of internal envs being down for 13.3 (which was sadtown) so we had to go with something relatively safe/high confidence that was directionally correct, even if it wasn't the full fix. Treat Gold is essentially GP/10 for junglers and so is flat across all junglers (you get the same amount on Karthus or Lee Sin) so nerfing it is a relatively larger hit to income for ganking junglers than farmers who are getting more gold from camps. We compensated experience to give back some of what was pulled out of the role with the 25% reduced lane experience change from preseason -- this might be a risky change though since it does open up a wolf 3 camp clear and early experience is very very valuable for the role. Increasing the risk of tower dives and adding more early wards was part of the same set of goals. Ganking should be weaker throughout even if it's not in the exact state we want longterm (that's for future changes to get us toward that state hopefully)
Next steps are in the works and I can't say too much about, but lots of stuff around timings and sustain and overall income of the role. I want to try some spicy things to see if they work, but they might all suck so we don't want to just drop them into the live game and hope it works out, right? There's a million different directions the jungle can go, and a million different players who want something different out of the role. There's no easy answers here but I do think we're going to end up in a good state after it all shakes out down the line
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