I am doing this post to open a discussion about game design principles, applied to LoL. I have made a first draft of my thoughts about it on a reddit post (http://www.reddit.com/r/leagueoflegends/comments/36zkrj/some_thoughts_about_game_design_principles/), and feedback would be most welcome, as well as a more general discussion.
What do you think about the game design, especially of champions, in LoL? Wat do you think about the design of abilities/champion in Dota/Hots/etc.?
EDIT : Here is the content of my post, as it has been asked here :
I have always been interested about game design (mostly strategy games), discussed about it a lot with various friends and on several forums, but I had never really took the time to formalize my thoughts into a coherent text. So here is a draft of the first part. This still needs a lot of work, but I would like to collect some feedbacks and discuss about it. There are still some points where I am not satisfied about my explanations, so feedback is really welcome, as it will also help me for the second part. As stated multiple times in the following text, the game design principles I will discuss are applied to League of Legends, and not another game. I insist on that part, as design should really depend on the player base you are targetting (see my first paragraph). Another important mention is that this is strongly influenced by other writings, especially Zileas's forum post about "anti-patterns" some years ago. This is quite interesting to see how the game has evolved from that point, and how those patterns have been avoided or not. Lasty, English is not my first language, so if there are some obvious mistakes that make you cringe, feel free to tell me. Acknowledge the player base you are targetting
Before everything else, game design is the art of creating fun experience for the players. As fun is something highly subjective, it goes without saying that it will differ for everyone, and consequently, that game design will always be highly controversial. An ability that is hard to use or counter correctly can be really fun for some players, while others will find it overly complex. It is thus primordial to be aware of the type of players you want to appeal, and design your game accordingly, as good design for one group of players could be considered as bad one for another.
As far as League of Legends is concerned, the game has regularly been considered as designed for a relatively "casual" market, aiming to reduce the complexity of the genre principles, compared to some others MOBAs, DotA being the best example. While this can be true to a certain extent, what lot of people often fail to grasp is that League of Legends is still a game primarly designed for a midcore/hardcore audience. This may seem like over-exaggerating a bit, but we are looking at a game primarly designed for PvP purpose, where you need hundreds of hours just to know each and every champion spells, tons of damage games to be able to only start ranked games. A game in which you can be in a loosing position after 5 minutes, get snowballed and shred to pieces for 15 minutes before being able to surrend. Or loose a 40 minutes game because of a misposition from you or one of your teammates. Now comparing that to most solo games where you can hardly loose, or to real casual games (mobile, facebook, etc.), should put some common critics about the game into perspective.
That being said, League of Legends is definitely simpler, in its principles, than DotA for example. The deny and pull mechanism has been removed, the callback has been added, the shops have been centralized, champion abilities have more obvious purpose, etc. This leads to the primary philosophy of LoL design, which is the "Easy to use, hard to master" sentence. This simple sentence has been used and re-used, but for a very good reason, as it should really be the main objective when designing a game aiming to appeal to a audience as broad as the one of LoL. This has been the moto of most Blizzard games, and is in fact a quite old concept, as it goes back to an aphorism by Nolan Bushnell (founder of Atari, among others), stating :
"All the best games are easy to learn and difficult to master. They should reward the first quarter and the hundredth."
This is strongly linked to the concept of learning curve and skill cap. I will not discuss those concepts here, as I could write a full article about them, but in short, all the complexity of designing such games consists in being able to reward the beginner and offering a fast learning curve at the start, while having a skill cap high enough to retain the player on the long term. One of the best example of games that present simple rules while being impossible to master is still Chess. You can teach the rule to a child in less than 5 minutes. For him to master it, it will probably take a bit longer than that.
More modern examples could be used, such as Starcraft, but I prefer to further illustrate it with an example coming from League of Legends. Rumble's ultimate is indeed an ability that I consider as one of the finest example of that concept. In fact, Rumble's ultimate can take a bit of time to get used to, as the "drag with the mouse to give a direction" is quite an under-used mechanic in LoL. However, once used to it, this ability is really simple : a long burn that deals damage and slow enemies standing upon. Nothing complex to understand, and yet, this ability can be really hard to use in an optimal way. Even better, it can be used for very different goals AND allows some counterplay, demanding decision making from both team.
Here is a short summary on how Rumble's ultimate can be used, and for what purpose : - Used with some other CCs, from you or your teammates, to maximize the damage output. - Used aggressively, starting from your opponent feet to his runaway path, so that he will be slowed and damage when trying to flee from you. - Used defensively, starting from your feet and going away of your opponent, so that it can provide you a safe escape road where your opponent will not be able to follow you. - Used for zoning purpose, for example splitting the enemy team backline from the frontline, so that you can shred their tanks without having to deal with their backline, blocked behind your ultimate. It also allows counterplay from their (backline) part, leading to the decision making process : "Should I go through the ultimate, taking damage but helping the frontline, or should I stay behind and wait for the end of the ultimate?" - Etc.
We can thus see that from a very simple design, it can gives birth to very complex decision making, that requires experience and skills, while still being satisfying to use for a beginner. Design/implementation/balance
A mistake that is commonly made, when evaluating the strength of an ability, is to confuse the design, with the implementation and the balance, and jumping to the conclusion "This spell is bad and should be reworked", while in fact, the fault may not be linked to the design but to the two other parts.
The design is really what gives its identity to an ability. For example, Irelia's E design can be summed up to this : an melee ability that deals damage and can slow/stun depending on the enemy life. No number involved here, we just assume they are revelant enough to justify it being a part of the identity of the spell. Indeed, if you would reduce the damage dealt by Irelia's E to 1, the damage part would become irrelevant and should not be considered anymore as part of the design.
The implementation part can goes from the particules used to create the visual of the spell, to the sound triggered by the ability. It encapsulates everything that is done to render the spell in the game.
Finaly, the balance is all the tuning involved, going from the actual damage dealt by the spell, to the stun/slow duration, the mana cost, the ability cooldown, the range, the type of damage, the hitbox, etc.
Consequently, when evaluating an ability, it is particularly important to make the difference between those concepts, especially the design/balance part. Indeed, a lot of abilities that can seem as badly designed are often simply not correctly tuned and balanced. Less obvious, the implementation can also have a role, as a badly rendered ability, especially visually, can cause a lot of frustration, or misunderstanding for the opponents.
In conclusion, the following question should always been asked when trying to modify an ability that seems badly designed : "Is the ability bad because of its core design, or because of bad/incoherent implementation/balance?" Goals that should be pursued when designing champion
Champions should at least have some abilities that aim at :
involving decision making or/and being mechanically fun to use
Promoting decision making is quite obvious. Players want to be active, want to take decisions and rewarded for taking good ones, so that they can feel involved and proud of their victory, as it comes from their decisions. Decision making should not be limited to the ability a player can use, but should also involves reacting to the enemy plays. This leads to another recurrent concept, which is counterplay. This notion has not always been as present as it is now (think Karthus R, Olaf old R, etc.), but should indeed be actively looked for, as it promotes decision making for both players, and reduce the frustration that can be involved for the victim, as he does not feel as powerless.
The mechanical part is a bit less obvious, and can often be achieved with a good implementation. To illustrate it, I will give a very simple example : my most played champion has always been Irelia. The main reason for me still playing her after hundreds of games? Her Q spell. Not because of its gap-closing component, but because of the sound that triggers when dashing on a target, combined with the reset mechanic. It is as simple as that, a simple sound on an ability and a reset, can give you such a huge amount of satisfaction and power (and waste half your mana on minions just to proc it, but that's another story...) that it is enough for you to play this champion over and over.
Another example would be Yasuo Q and E. While it involves some decision making, most of the fun comes from the feeling of power and speed get while dashing and slashing through a wave or an enemy team (note however that Yasuo E presents quite strongly an anti-pattern, linked to its non-reliability as it is quite minions dependant).
And this ends the first part, as it is already long enough. In the following, I will mostly present the patterns that should be avoided in my opinion, and then, will dissect and analyze some champions/abilities, and see how those patterns are avoided or not, and if it was worth it.
DotA heroes are much more extreme and make for a greater strategic diversity (it's not even close), while LoL champions are streamlined in alot of ways.
The powercurve for example is much more similar between LoL champions than between DotA heroes. Same goes for builds. In LoL there is very little you can do with your build. The most varying is toplane and maybe support. Mid sometimes has to get hourglass and that's it. In DotA not only picks have more impact but also builds. There are also hereos you will build the same in most games but the items are so diverse and powerful.
But there is a beauty in the way LoL champions are designed too. The streamlining and focus on counterplayability makes for some extremely interesting designs. My personal list of best designed champions in LoL is roughly:
Orianna, Lee Sin, Thresh, Maokai, Janna.
There are others which are good or even great but those are the top of the top in my eyes (as soon as I would put one more in there then I had to grow the list with too many others).
What makes those champions absolutely great is that they can always do someting impactful in almost any given situation and there are alot of ways they can be played in those. The best thing is to watch a very good player on those. Again there are more like this but you get what I mean.
There are ofc also champions that fail in that regard and don't live up to the LoL champion design greatness. Such as Yorick, Vlad or Xin. Those designs are very one dimensional so they are in a very fragile balance state. Riot could lower the damage on Janna's Q but she still would be almost the same etc. But they can't do that with some of the other champions.
What bothers me a bit about both LoL and DotA is that their developers don't have the guts to remove champions/heroes when they clearly are design failures. At least there are major reworks but when the core design is broken you can rework all you want, you'll never fix the problem.
I totaly agree with your analyze about DotA heros. This is nothing new, and it has been stated several times, half jokingly, how everything is OP in DotA thus balanced. In my article, I did not present the "anti-patterns" yet (it will come later), but briefly, I think that DotA heroes violates a LOT of them, which leads to a game where the frustration is huge, at least for a wide audience. I also dislike how strong the items are, especially how they can hard counter some abilities, as the concept of hardcounter should IMO be avoided, as once the hardcounter is there, it really nullify counterplay and decision making.
I also agree with your list of good design champions, as those are some of the best examples from LoL. I think maokai is a bit too one dimensional and the plays are most of the time quite obvious, and I would personaly add Rumble, but w/e.
I agree that Yorick is really among the design failures (I could explain more why I think so if you want), but I think that xin and vlad are not. While they are for sure one dimensional, they have their place as they can appeal to some players, while not being a problem for others. Moreover, I do not see how they are harder to balance than Janna for example. While Janna is not one dimensional in how she can be played, she is in her purpose (support), and your example of lowering her damage is a bad one IMO, as dealing damage is not her main purpose. Which means that lowering damage on a champion like Xin, or lowering the cc duration (or increasing cd, reducing shield, etc.) on Janna will both affect the respective champion balance, as it impacts their core purpose.
I do not follow the Dota scene anymore, so I do not know of the reworks, but I think that they are doing a pretty good job about it with LoL. For example, Sion is a totaly different champion than before, the core design has been changed, so for me, this is more or less the same than removing the old one and adding a new champion.
On May 24 2015 14:40 Sufficiency wrote: Have you watched this before?
I did not, but I agree 100% with it, and this is the reason why I stopped playing chess and even sc2, where I realized than even at the high master/low gm level that I was, I did not have the time/skills/etc. to be able to really enjoy the strategic part, and that my games were mostly a mechanics contest to decide the winner, as everyone is using meta BO. But I do not think this is really linked to the champion design, but more on its balance part, so that the meta-game rotates quickly enough to not be established.
Dota heroes = Long CD abilites intended to be more powerful with less counterplay. LOL = Riot believes that its the interaction between useage of abilites and how the opponent reacts to that that makes the game fun. Thus, they are balancing the game around frequent useage of abilites (low CD) with lots of counterplay (e.g. skillshots).
I personally prefer Riot's design philosophy by a large margin here. There are however some issues with League in terms of the item-system being inferior (stat buffs rather than changing how you play the game) and the balance guys aren't doing as good of a job as the design-team.
Riot also does a good job of fulfilling the easy-to-learn hard to master concept for many of the champions in the game.
"Counterplay" is such a meaningless buzzword. Equating skillshots and cooldown to counterplay is grossly misrepresenting the facts.
Riot tends to focus solely on movement as "counterplay" when the fact of the matter is that's ignoring so many aspects of the game. Positioning, health,mana, items and cooldowns are all forms of "counterplay". Building the correct items is important and fighting with your item spikes are all skills that directly tie in to "counterplay". Acting as if the only way to put in "counterplay" is to make something dodgeable just dumbs down the game completely.
"Counterplay" is such a meaningless buzzword. Equating skillshots and cooldown to counterplay is grossly misrepresenting the facts.
Counterplay almost always refers to interactions during combats. That's the way the majority of the playerbase uses it in the context of the MOBA-genre. In other contexts it may refers to other scenarios, but that doens't make it a meaningless term if the majority of the audience understands what you are talking about.
Positioning, health,mana, items and cooldowns are all forms of "counterplay". Building the correct items is important and fighting with your item spikes are all skills that directly tie in to "counterplay". Acting as if the only way to put in "counterplay" is to make something dodgeable just dumbs down the game completely.
The way counterplay is used in the RTS/MOBA-genre doesn't refer to those instances. Rather you would use terms such as "precombat positioning" or "decisionmaking/strategy" when you refer to those aspects of the game.
It does refer to those instances. The classic example of this is say Tidehunter's ultimate where the instant reply to being unable to deal with it is "position better ,get bkbs and fight around cooldowns". In your "example" that would mean being dodgable isn't "counterplay" either as it's an aspect of "precombat positioning". So what then is counterplay?
"Counterplay" is such a meaningless buzzword. Equating skillshots and cooldown to counterplay is grossly misrepresenting the facts.
Counterplay almost always refers to interactions during combats. That's the way the majority of the playerbase uses it in the context of the MOBA-genre. In other contexts it may refers to other scenarios, but that doens't make it a meaningless term if the majority of the audience understands what you are talking about.
Positioning, health,mana, items and cooldowns are all forms of "counterplay". Building the correct items is important and fighting with your item spikes are all skills that directly tie in to "counterplay". Acting as if the only way to put in "counterplay" is to make something dodgeable just dumbs down the game completely.
The way counterplay is used in the RTS/MOBA-genre doesn't refer to those instances. Rather you would use terms such as "precombat positioning" or "decisionmaking/strategy" when you refer to those aspects of the game.
Positioning is a form of counterplay. This is the reason why the design team in Riot has stated multiple times that they did not like most of their bruiser iterations (irelia, xin, jax, etc.) as the primary counterplay to melee which is range (and consequently the positioning to abuse this range) was too often nullified because of low cd dash. "Better" bruiser design would be (for Riot) Udyr for example.
Notice that I wrote pre-combat. During comebat, positioning is related to how you move relative to the enemy champions = counterplay.
But it's not counterplay if you need to be 2 screens away at any given point in time because one champion will just 100-0 always if you get anywhere near.
In your "example" that would mean being dodgable isn't "counterplay" either as it's an aspect of "precombat positioning". So what then is counterplay?
The laning phase is part of what I'll define as being part of combat. Generally as long as two champs has some ways of doing damage to each other, it's part of a "combat". So for instance if the only viable way of avoiding dying to a certain hero/champion is to avoid being within damage-range of that champion/hero, then your simply "avoiding" comebat.
But the "cast abilities on the enemy while last-hitting"-interaction is a part of the the "combat"-definition here.
The classic example of this is say Tidehunter's ultimate where the instant reply to being unable to deal with it is "position better ,get bkbs and fight around cooldowns"
From being part of the League and Sc2 community, noone would ever define fight around CDs as a viable form of counterplay. In Sc2 that would be equal to: This unit has 100 mana and therefore it can auto-kill a couple of units. That doesn't mean it cannot be balanced and that the unit doesn't have counters, but a "counter" is different than "counterplay" in this context.
And if a long CD ult in League would always kill a specific champion, noone would argue that that has counterplay either. It would surprise me if people in the Dota-community has a completely different terminology here as well. I would expect they would phrase it more like "this is what you should do vs XX or talk about strategic options while avoiding the term "counterplay"".
Anyway, the point here is that the implications of terms can change dependant on the context, and counterplay (given the context) is a term that makes a lot of sense to describe the differences between Dota and LOL design.
TLDR: You are probably confusing "counter(options)" with "counterplay". It's understandable, but it's simply much easier to write "counterplay" rather than writing "counterplay during combat," (and then following up with a definition of combat).
When most people know you refer to stuff like - Low stun duration - Skillshot-interaction - "Have to be close to enemy to deal full damage" - No hardcounters,
it becomes easier to write "counterplay" to describe that type of design-choice..
When riot (and most people at least in the LoL community) use the term counterplay, they are talking about a players ability to use skill and decision making to effect the outcome of their interaction with another player. This can be manifest in a number of ways, one of which is adding skill shots, a much more common way (in my opinion) that Riot have been using is giving champions defined strengths and weaknesses.
If your champion's "personality" is having lots of range, and we're going to accept that in a competition of range your champion will surpass my champion, there should be an aspect of my champions "personality" that allows me to use decision making or skill to overcome that. (as your range allows you to "outplay" me, I should have a way of "outplaying" you)
Perhaps my champion has high sustain, and by picking which cs to contest, and which cs to leave and when, I can come out even in the lane by out sustaining your poke. Perhaps I also out scale you thanks to my sustain? Perhaps the sheer fact I never have to leave lane means I can get ahead in farm? Who knows!
Perhaps my champion has high burst, and I need to commit to trades so that once I manage to close the gap on your range (your advantage) I now find myself at an advantage, and depending on how well you exploited your advantage, will determine if I can capitalise on my being closer.
Perhaps my champions numbers have been tuned up, but my abilities are all dodgeable so the burden is on me to correctly predict how you will react to my play, and now even though you out range me and are getting off consistent harassment, perhaps when my harassment -does- lane, it will be enough to even up the odds.
Perhaps my champion is much stronger than your champion, and has more sustain, but is extremely vulnerable in terms of mobility, meaning that if I try to punish you with my powerful champion too much, your team can react and kill me repeatedly.
It does not much matter -what- a champions character is, or if its a jack of all trades, or whatever, but what I think you should be able to agree with, is that if both of our champions don't have some sort of way to punish each other, it makes the game very one sided with no room for you to utilise your decision making or skill in a way that will yield a fun interaction between two players.
I think we can all agree that if my champions character is "range" and yours is "burst" and when you all in my champion it is also stronger than yours in an all in situation, there is not really anything you can do unless you have a tool to mitigate my champions power (such as dodging skill shots)
That is what they means by counterplay:
"ways a player can use their champions strengths, and exploit an enemy champions weaknesses, in order to gain an advantage"
On May 24 2015 18:42 Rainbow3 wrote: I totaly agree with your analyze about DotA heros. This is nothing new, and it has been stated several times, half jokingly, how everything is OP in DotA thus balanced. In my article, I did not present the "anti-patterns" yet (it will come later), but briefly, I think that DotA heroes violates a LOT of them, which leads to a game where the frustration is huge, at least for a wide audience. I also dislike how strong the items are, especially how they can hard counter some abilities, as the concept of hardcounter should IMO be avoided, as once the hardcounter is there, it really nullify counterplay and decision making.
TBH the "anti-patterns" are really outdated for LoL too, as there have been many design aspects about them that have been violated by LoL since then as the design team has realized that following them ultimately does not lead to better game design.
Mostly they're the product of Zileas over-philosophizing the process of game design to the point where his philosophies over what people would not find fun/intuitive/interesting were directly contradicted by empirical examples against them.
Notice that I wrote pre-combat. During comebat, positioning is related to how you move relative to the enemy champions = counterplay.
But it's not counterplay if you need to be 2 screens away at any given point in time because one champion will just 100-0 always if you get anywhere near.
In your "example" that would mean being dodgable isn't "counterplay" either as it's an aspect of "precombat positioning". So what then is counterplay?
The laning phase is part of what I'll define as being part of combat. Generally as long as two champs has some ways of doing damage to each other, it's part of a "combat". So for instance if the only viable way of avoiding dying to a certain hero/champion is to avoid being within damage-range of that champion/hero, then your simply "avoiding" comebat.
But the "cast abilities on the enemy while last-hitting"-interaction is a part of the the "combat"-definition here.
The classic example of this is say Tidehunter's ultimate where the instant reply to being unable to deal with it is "position better ,get bkbs and fight around cooldowns"
From being part of the League and Sc2 community, noone would ever define fight around CDs as a viable form of counterplay. In Sc2 that would be equal to: This unit has 100 mana and therefore it can auto-kill a couple of units. That doesn't mean it cannot be balanced and that the unit doesn't have counters, but a "counter" is different than "counterplay" in this context.
And if a long CD ult in League would always kill a specific champion, noone would argue that that has counterplay either. It would surprise me if people in the Dota-community has a completely different terminology here as well. I would expect they would phrase it more like "this is what you should do vs XX or talk about strategic options while avoiding the term "counterplay"".
Anyway, the point here is that the implications of terms can change dependant on the context, and counterplay (given the context) is a term that makes a lot of sense to describe the differences between Dota and LOL design.
TLDR: You are probably confusing "counter(options)" with "counterplay". It's understandable, but it's simply much easier to write "counterplay" rather than writing "counterplay during combat," (and then following up with a definition of combat).
When most people know you refer to stuff like - Low stun duration - Skillshot-interaction - "Have to be close to enemy to deal full damage" - No hardcounters,
it becomes easier to write "counterplay" to describe that type of design-choice..
Combat isn't set in mobas. This is not a jrpg. Everything you do affects the results of the game. You're just arbitrarily choosing that dodging (I think) has counter play but space and time control doesn't. Regardless of the game, controlling space and time is counter play and has counter play even in a non abstract way.
The sc example makes no sense. Opponents techs queens you make more siege tanks and push. Its counter play.
On May 25 2015 05:57 Hider wrote: Dota heroes = Long CD abilites intended to be more powerful with less counterplay. LOL = Riot believes that its the interaction between useage of abilites and how the opponent reacts to that that makes the game fun. Thus, they are balancing the game around frequent useage of abilites (low CD) with lots of counterplay (e.g. skillshots).
There's a give and take here that you're really not recognizing.
I'm going to use a DotA example here: a Storm Spirit with 15 minute Orchid can basically solo-kill any hero in the game at that point in time. From outside vision, he can zip in from an arbitrary distance outside vision, silence his target with an instant cast, point-and-click non-projectile silence, and perma-slow and kill his target from full HP to 0. From Riot's perspective, this is absolutely a classic no-counterplay case. In the micro-level scenario of a carry farming by himself, there is simply no option to outplay the Storm Spirit within reason.
There then leaves only two options to deal with this development: be where he is not, or countergank him with heroes waiting in the wings. The thing is, both of these options shift the focus of the game away from the micro-level scenario, and toward certain higher-level interactions--predicting a player's map movement with imperfect information, and optimizing your own map movement and farming efficiency without exposing yourself to these threats. And DotA's entire gameplay is centered around this shift toward macro-level thinking--for example, TP scrolls facilitate long-distance map movement for all team members, and limited ward stocks and Smoke of Deceit enforce the state of imperfect information.
The case of powerful long-CD teamfight abilities similarly falls into this. Maximizing/minimizing the effectiveness of these abilities then becomes a game of team-level map movement, with the teamfight team with these abilities aiming to get an advantageous fight in a position where they can take an objective, while the team without such abilities is aiming to outmaneuver them on the map in a way that allows them to force the use of such abilities in an acceptable loss.
The obvious follow-up question is "Why can't you have both? What about LoL's design doesn't jus make it "better", and why can't it also have this macro-level emphasis while maintaining the micro-level counterplay interactions?" There's a two-part answer to this:
1) When the option is available, the option to outplay is always better. There's no such thing as an "acceptable loss" to the extent that there is in DotA. If there is always the ability to outplay, then it is always better to take that option to maximize your returns. Avoiding a fight and taking a temporal disadvantage is better than losing it, but winning the fight is likewise better than avoiding the fight if the ability to win the fight exists through the ability to outplay. Fundamentally, the idea of skill and improvement shifts toward playing better on a micro level, exploiting your counterplay options, and winning those fights, rather than the high-level decision of avoiding them altogether.
2) Imperfect information. In order for this entire paradigm behind DotA's design to work, imperfect information must be preserved to a large extent. In a game of DotA, the vast majority of the map is always dark for the entire game. You have a very limited number of wards, while your ability to remove them is not on a limited stock, and even with wards, the enemy always has options like Smoke of Deceit that can circumvent the vision provided by your wards. In order for such oppressive micro-level abilities to be fair, the ability to use them needs to be limited by restricted knowledge of the enemy's movement.
But conversely, imperfect/limited information to this extent is a problem within Riot's paradigm of counterplay. If the option of counterplay in micro-level scenarios is to always exist, then vision going into those scenarios has to be relatively balanced in most cases. This is a realization Riot made over several seasons, as the number of vision options vastly expanded in the game, while their counter-options were cut back. On the vision side, Sightstone and Trinkets added more and more vision to the game; while conversely, Oracle's was first turned from permanent to limited-duration, then removed altogether as a buyable item from the shop, and Vision Wards were made visible, with the jungle buff and sweeper instead taking up roles as very limited options. Imperfect information creates "no-counterplay" situations, but is paradoxically required for the map movement/map reading gameplay that that they emphasize.
Also, the difference in complexity between Dota and LoL is largely overblown at this point. The contrast was huge when LoL was first released and even when DotA 2 came out, but Valve has repeatedly and consistently sought to simplify DotA while Riot has repeatedly and consistently made LoL more and more complex. At this point, while it could be argued that LoL is still the simpler game, the difference is not nearly as large as it once was--and while DotA was once derided for its glut of arbitrarily complex game mechanics, LoL has accumulated a sufficient number of similarly complex arbitrary mechanics over the years (such as the nightmare that is slow %/MS diminishing returns calculations, the XP bonus/penalty to junglers depending on their level relative to the monster as well as the mechanics of monster scaling itself, and the asymmetry of tower survivability to discourage laneswaps) that it no longer has any advantage in this regard.
What I also want to add to the above above, about the more macro oriented part of Dota2 is this: When I watched a Dota 2 game I was so surprised that when people dissapeared from vision or went to gank, the players realized, when they were in the corner of the map, they were being collapsed upon. But here's the thing, my surprise came from the fact the the collapse took SO long. And what was also crazy was it seemed like the player being ganked knew he was screwed, so he tried to go into the trees at the lower right corner or something. Anyway, my point is: the map is much bigger and collapses are orchestrated in a much fine tuned manner, since the map is so big. In LoL if the collapse isn't happening from 2 screens away, you are most likely safe.
Combat isn't set in mobas. This is not a jrpg. Everything you do affects the results of the game. You're just arbitrarily choosing that dodging (I think) has counter play but space and time control doesn't.
Your missing the point here. I created a definition that in order to make sense of the term "counterplay" so it matches the way people frequently use it. That's not to say its the only "right" definition of counterplay, but rather you need to merely have one so people aren't confused to what's being talked about.
But conversely, imperfect/limited information to this extent is a problem within Riot's paradigm of counterplay. If the option of counterplay in micro-level scenarios is to always exist, then vision going into those scenarios has to be relatively balanced in most cases.
I don't understand how you are getting to that conclusion. You could easily have champs with more counterplay but no wards in the game. It surely would be a completely different game (and more luck-based), but counterplay during combat would still exist.
But at the end of the day, good game-design comes down to what people enjoy playing, and I think that without any doubt, the majority of the playing audience prefers Riots counterplay. Otherwise the game simply wouldn't be as popular.
That's not to say other people can't prefer Dota's design or that Dota doesn't have other advantages. In many ways League soloq is lackluster from a strategic perspective, but at the end of the day most people play the game because the battles/champion vs champion-interactions are fun rather than to proove they are some type of strategic mastermind.
TBH the "anti-patterns" are really outdated for LoL too, as there have been many design aspects about them that have been violated by LoL since then as the design team has realized that following them ultimately does not lead to better game design.
Mostly they're the product of Zileas over-philosophizing the process of game design to the point where his philosophies over what people would not find fun/intuitive/interesting were directly contradicted by empirical examples against them.
I am not so sure about that. It is true that they are quite old, but most of them make sense IMO. And again, it is all about trade-off, so the design team may have violated some of them for some champions, if they felt like it was worth it. But a lot of really interesting champions have been designed while avoiding most of those patterns, Tresh being the best example.
On May 25 2015 10:08 TheYango wrote: Also, the difference in complexity between Dota and LoL is largely overblown at this point. The contrast was huge when LoL was first released and even when DotA 2 came out, but Valve has repeatedly and consistently sought to simplify DotA while Riot has repeatedly and consistently made LoL more and more complex. At this point, while it could be argued that LoL is still the simpler game, the difference is not nearly as large as it once was--and while DotA was once derided for its glut of arbitrarily complex game mechanics, LoL has accumulated a sufficient number of similarly complex arbitrary mechanics over the years (such as the nightmare that is slow %/MS diminishing returns calculations, the XP bonus/penalty to junglers depending on their level relative to the monster as well as the mechanics of monster scaling itself, and the asymmetry of tower survivability to discourage laneswaps) that it no longer has any advantage in this regard.
True, but the major difference is that for the most part, you do not need to be conscious of those mechanics, at least at a beginner level. At a higher level, you have to know them to be able to play optimally, but LoL does not suffer from this huge wall of overly complex mechanics that you can find in Dota, and that are often quite counter-intuitive.