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[2020] Oracle's Eye need to be improved in regards to "random effects"


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This is made worse by the current Labs, in which a "random card in your hand" is given the dead unit's stats. Since there is randomness involved, the whole combat math are simply not available whatsoever, so you have to actually do it by hand! The madness! Seriously though, the Eye is just too good at the moment, that's why we are so dependent on it.

Some suggestions:

  1. Whenever randomness are involved, just make an overlay over the whatever area the random effect is going to happen and write RANDOM in big red letters there. For Teemo's effect for example, the RANDOM overlay is on your library, while for the current lab, the RANDOM overlay is on each of your on-hand units.

  2. If the damage is actually variable depending on RNG like Make It Rain for example, make a ? mark at the unit/Nexus health. You can possibly do the slight math needed to check the actual range, so I don't need the range itself need to be put there.

  3. If the unit/champion summoned is random, eg. Thresh's level-up effect, just put a facedown card on the battlefield to let players know that there will be a random card being summoned there, similar to the additional card draw.

Of course the Riot devs are basically much better in this UX stuff than me, so I believe they'll figure out a way. But I would highly appreciate if the UX stuff doesn't get in the way of actual gameplay.

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almost 4 years ago - /u/JeffExpress - Direct link

Thanks for the feedback. Those are some great suggestions. One of the reasons we didn’t try to be more specific with how Oracl’s Eye handles random effects is because so many effects can stack up on to each other which makes all the other stuff random.

Like for example let’s say I had a card that dealt random damage to a unit. It’d be easy to be in a state where if that unit dies then another card could trigger and kill your nexus (phantom prankster) and so on. Then you’d have a board where effectively everything is just marked up with a random flag. It’s a slippery slope for sure.

So in the end we decided to use a pretty broad brush and just turn off Oracle’s Eye, but also we talked about our philosophy around randomness in the game overall. By and large our game doesn’t actually have that much random content, so Oracle’s Eye is usually available. I do think as new sets release we should keep an eye out that we’re still holding true. Thanks again!!!

almost 4 years ago - /u/JeffExpress - Direct link

Is it bad form for me to post another comment? Hopefully not! There’s a feature we’ve talked about that I really want which is a “check/checkmate” feature. Where if someone has lethal (including with random effects) the whole playmat changes color, special vfx, audio, oracle’s eye gets all excited, and those nexus’ start to shake. I think it’d both be helpful for clarity and be really exciting. Anyways thanks for listening to me ramble. Ha!

almost 4 years ago - /u/JeffExpress - Direct link

Originally posted by srulz_

Thanks for the response. I do understand the cascading effect, so I get where you are coming from. However, there are multiple states in which the randomness doesn't actually affect the on-board combat state, like Temmo's shrooms for example. Or handbuffs, like shown in the Labs.

Now I'm not sure how the programming is done for the Eye's judgement itself, but what if instead of marking individual random effects, you use a different color filter on the screen when random effects are introduced to the calculations? Some warning that the final calculations may be wrong due to some "random effects". Similar to the mouseover you have now when the eye closed, but the eye opens in a different color for example, while showing the non-random results on board.

Also, I do understand your randomness philosophy, but in my opinion, you are actually limiting your design space due to a UX issue. Sure the random handbuffs are for now a Lab thing, but who knows, maybe it will be such a big hit that it will be implemented as a Champion's skill, thus blocking the Eye everytime that Champion is used? I do believe that it's better to tackle the issue now, rather than keeping an eye out that it won't be an issue someday.

P/S: Please take a look at opp's Concerted Strikes as well. It's actually incredibly important to know the strike order especially when you have Barrier/Strike/kill effects, and now we are pretty much guessing which opp's 2 units strikes first, since there's no indication on the arrows whatsoever. Relevant thread:

https://old.reddit.com/r/LegendsOfRuneterra/comments/hv8c9d/concerted_strike_order/

That's a very good point u/srulz_ ! I definitely don't want to limit any of the design space for our designers due to what I think "good UX" looks like and I know that if I was I would definitely hear about it. Ha ha!

I'm sure there are teams where the UX designer comes stomping in with their black turtleneck, levis 501's and new balances dictating to everyone how the UX works and I bet those games are cool. On LoR we are a lot more collaborative and as a UX designer I see my job as to help game designers bring their vision to players in the best possible way.

Strike order is something we're going to be looking at as part of an overall effort on making the spell bar generally more clear. No promises there yet, we have a bunch of ideas and most of them won't stick. Thanks again for the note!!!!

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