https://strawpoll.com/polls/bVg8o470MnY
I'm curious what people thought of the dev stream and if it changed anyone's view on rotation. Personally I enjoyed getting more developer reasoning on the stream and I'm looking forward to hearing more during the Q&A with Plinq and Vriss on Thursday.
External link →If there is one thing Riot has learned from communication for years - it's that any time you say anything, people will A. Misinterpret it to whatever they want, and also B. Hold you to the exact letter forever.
Part B especially is rough when you're still figuring out your game internally, and evolving it. They talk about how they cut Bandle's draw cards because their reviewing of Bandle and how it had emerged, was that Bandle already had strong alternative ways to refill their hand. This is a change in philosophy that makes sense, but if they'd never specified that before, people would be up in arms about it now, and for months down the line you'd get people who missed that update to the philosophies still quoting old ones.
Even then they seem to view their region identities as objectives, but not immutable hard lines. That a region shouldn't do x, or at least shouldn't easily do x, not that it never, ever, ever gets to do z. But hard lines is, inevitably, how people would take it.
Card game designers are often treated as though their job is about slapping down some hard and fast rules and then sticking to those forever; like development in the game is a math problem to be solved. But there is a word they used constantly throughout the stream - experiment. And that's a lot more the truth of it all.
Also, sometimes card designers disagree on stuff. Designers aren't a hivemind. This even affects things you might not expect, like UI elements such as the oracle eye.
Some designers believe the oracle eye should never "lie" - meaning it never shows a result that won't necessarily happen. They believe if a player uses it to preview the future board state, that board state should always be true.
However, other designers are nervous about this because following that rule would mean we can't do a LOT of designs. For example, if a card says, "When you draw a spell, give me +1|+1". If this is combined with units that draw a card when they strike in combat, the oracle eye can't tell you if the card you're about to draw is a spell. It could result in situations where the oracle eye says that you'll survive at 1 health from this attacking unit, but in reality the opponent draws a spell and you die.
Some designers think we should minimize any effects that can cause the oracle eye to lie. Other designers think we should just commit to the oracle eye being "based on the stuff on board and the stack, this is what will happen - but other stuff might happen that you can't know about... I'm just here to make the math easier for you."
One argument for the second approach is that we already have flashbomb traps, which can cause the oracle eye to lie, so players know they can't always trust it... So where's the line? Does this mean it's okay to do more stuff like that, or is it already bad we did a little and we should avoid doing more whenever possible?
I've gone back and forth on this topic myself a few times, as have some others. And if we adopt an approach of wanting to minimize lying opportunities, but agree it's sometimes okay if the design is REALLY good, that's what's known as a "red flag" mechanic - something we can do in very small doses.
Design is complex and has many various factors. Learning to weigh them all in different situations is a major part of design. There is not one simple set of design rules we can commit to forever, and doing so would only limit our flexibility to solve specific problems.
When we talk in general philosophy terms, we aren't being intentionally vague - it's just how design works. There are few hard rules in design, everything has tradeoffs; and something like a UI element such as the oracle eye can spiral out to affect card designs too.
EDIT - Another designer just reminded me of the epic arguments over whether jhin should trigger after 3 or 4 inputs. If he triggers after 3 inputs, his skill is the 4th. However others believed his text box should have a 4 in it here, even though this would make jhin break the pattern he loves so much. This discussion went on a long long long time. At least a "fourt-night". :)
Designers SHOULD NOT be disagreeing on what is a Region Identity, though. That is one of the cornerstones of LoR gameplay. There has to be a common ground to what that means and it should be communicated to their players.
As of now, Runeterra design philosophy seems to be really random at what each region is, and that was shown not with a lot of champs designs in themselves, but in the way that worried me the most and worries me even more after the Stream: the way Rotation was handled. If you want to redefine what a Region's identity is, for sure, but if that isn't communicated to the playerbase and the game start lacking that... well, it honestly won't be a game me and many others will continue to play
Designers are humans and can disagree on what a region identity should be, what should be a hard wall and what shouldn’t. Some might think that a region should never be able to heal no matter what, even if one of their champions has a healing theme in League of Legends or their lore. Some might believe that region should be able to heal a little bit if there’s a good reason and they pay some big cost, or it’s restricted to a specific archetype (meaning decks not using that archetype in the region couldn’t heal, only that one archetype could).
Things can change too as we experiment and learn from player feedback, or discover new opportunities for design space.
We do align on what the current approach is of course, and there are always going to be ongoing discussions about whether changes should be made. Considering different points of view and discussing them as a team is valuable.
Just wanted to say I appreciate you responding to community feedback. I'm personally enjoying rotation and excited to see where the game goes from here
Thanks. Glad to hear it. :)
What if the eye was blue when it's guaranteed to be correct or yellow/some other colour when it's not? I've definitely lost one game due to eye shenanigans when it said I had lethal (little wings on the enemy nexus and everything), but the other guy lethaled me instead.
The general trick with that kind of signposting is we now have the additional problem of trying to get players to understand why the eye keeps changing color or shape. Solutions like this are often great for expert players that understand all the special things but the added visual confusion actually makes things MORE confusing for other players. It’s counterintuitive but often proven time and time again in experiments.
Additionally, many of the times the eye would be uncertain are based on hidden information, meaning the eye has to default to the uncertain state every time you play against lurk, or the stays uncertain as long as there’s 1 flash bomb or shroom anywhere in your deck, etc.
It might still be a good idea but there are a lot of surprising catches with it. There are few perfect solutions in design. That’s what makes it so fun to try and figure out the right trade offs.
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