Alberto Rengifo · @RNGCrumbz
21st Apr 2016 from TwitLonger
Do not make the game easier, instead teach players how to play the game better.
My name is Alberto Rengifo. Some of you might know me as Crumbz. I have been playing league competitively since there was competitive league. There I was during my vacation just relaxing and sipping on my homemade daiquiris while occasionally checking out what the mid season brings. Drama, Rosters, Balance changes,etc when I stumbled upon some balance change ideas. Now I have some issues with quite a bit of them but the one that struck a chord with me is the timers to the jungle. I will only talk about this change because the principle behind it is something I feel more knowledgeable in.
"When a camp that has a timer (Red, Blue, Dragon, Baron, Rift Herald) has less than 60 seconds to spawn, its timer is revealed to both teams (regardless of their vision of the camp), and an “about to spawn” icon appears in the minimap (will replace regular camp icon if you still haven’t seen the cleared camp)"
As a jungler myself there's a certain satisfaction behind being able to keep track of all the timers in your head. 1:40 for camps, 5 for buffs,6 for dragon and 7 for baron. Hell I feel proud and like a total badass being able to glance at someone's character for a second, look at the remainder of their buff duration and knowing exactly when the next one will spawn. Even after all these years keeping track of all the timers is an incredibly difficult skill and nearly impossible to do perfectly every single game. It's something that every pro jungler works on constantly. When you play versus someone and they are on every single buff of yours it's intimidating. I think to myself "Damn this guy is on top of his game today, I need to pick it up on my end or we're going to lose"
It's a skill that requires memory,problem solving and math and now that dynamic queue is so irregular in the quality of games it's always something that I can focus on improving during all of my games, a constant. I've worked giving countless lessons about league and a strong point is always teaching more novice players how to keep track of camps and buffs and reading jungle pathings that way so that they can separate themselves from the rest. Why would that be something worth emphasizing now if the game tells you 1 minute in advance. That's enough time to recall and make it to the objective to contest it.
I'm not going to go into detail about the impact that this would have on the game and simply mention some of the effects I can think of immediately.
Less likely to sneak objectives or forget them since now there is a visual reminder for everyone. (A team might be so focused on their lane or a teamfight that they forget a dragon or baron is comiing up) now there would be a reminder on the minimap.
2.Less need for wards, I could just play red smite junglers all the time and only contest buffs.
Impossible to mess up timers. Timer errors are usually 1-2 minutes off. Now you get to know for sure as opposed to the previous punishment where you drag your team around waiting for nothing since you messed up.
And don't even get me started on what this does to reading the jungler's past, present and future pathing.
Those are just a few of the specific problems that come to mind with the change. The benefits would be a higher chance for more fighting around buffs.(if you're a laner who doesn't look at anything now there's a higher chance you'll know when something to fight for is coming up) As well as everyone has a chance to inform the team when something on the map is coming up.
Continuing onto the principle behind the change. It makes the game simpler. It's one less thing to worry about and try to learn and master. One of the beauty's behind a game for me is devoting myself to it and being crazy about it. Immersing myself so deeply into it that years down the line I look back and wonder how did I manage to learn all that and why did I do all of that? Only to be answered by a mere satisfaction of that's who i am and are capable of when I set my mind to it. It's about having a bar be set at an intimidating high and reaching it and surpassing it just because of the love for the game. It's like school but self taught. A challenge, but I love it so I will accomplish it.
When you lower the bar,when you strip away the badges that were hard earned to separate the better from the good then the game loses it's purpose. Please reconsider this change. Remember the roots from where games came from. The challenges, the effort required. If it's a matter of catering to the mass audience remember that most of the players are students of some sort. They are In their peak of learning capabilities. How many students cut class just to play league? I was one of them. While I felt unable to fully understand and master what was being taught to me at university it was a worthwhile feeling coming home to play league and learn and master something challenging by myself. You could say there was a slight sense of fulfillment.
Naturally there has to be a solution, a compromise to the balance change and while the obvious thought is that nothing needs to be changed, period I offer something else so that the lowering of the skill cap of league is something that no player ever has to worry about again. Teach the game.
Have a REAL tutorial. In fact, have a LOT of them. Here's a handful already. Top Lane, Jungle, Mid Lane,ADC, Support. Objectives, Timers, Runes Itemizations anything! The best part is none of these tutorials have to enforce any champions for the roles or ideas all that you need to do is PROVIDE the information for the players and they can make the judgment calls by themselves and work on new ideas that might have been sparked from what the game taught them. None of this information has to be new by the way, it's all information that can be easily gathered by just playing the game and paying some attention.
I realize there is some information about these on the website but this needs to be not only WAY more in depth and detailed, but on the client. If I want to know the full details on camps or champions i have to go to another website. A lot of people would not bother doing something like that. Reading? Learning? Why not just play? That's an easy fix. Add incentives for players to follow some of the higher difficulty strategies. For example have your S+ mastery include lane control, impact of your spells, your counterjungling,etc. OR just something as minor as this. If you take 50 blue buffs from the enemy team you get a nice little summoner icon. Do the same for 100,500 and so forth.Whatever you feel like! You can do this for SO many things. Wards killed , wards spotted with your sweeper, enemies spotted with your blue trinket,have your pink wards last x amount of time.The world is your oyster!
At the end of the day I just want the game to not be made easier. I don't care if I don't agree with balance changes as long as it's a challenge and now that the game is many years old the amount of players that remember the days where the game was difficult is increasing. Don't let the game suffer, there are ways to improve it while maintaining a certain difficulty and more importantly, a committed, hardworking and ever learning player base.
TL;DR: Do not make the game easier, instead teach players how to play the game at a higher level and offer incentives to do so in the Mastery System or another new system.