League of Legends
PostPosted:Sun Feb 10, 2013 5:51 am
I don't think you could possibly come up with a game that messes up more in areas that have nothing to do with the acutal gameplay if you tried. The actual gameplay may or may not be good. I'm not a huge fan of DOTA but I know some people are really into that kind of stuff. Yes some of the decision are clearly related to attempting to monetize but even there, not everything can be solely described as 'they're trying to make more money'.
DOTA back in War 3 was always a pretty gimmicky map since you never know if the guy hosting the game secretly changed a few things, and even on the official versions there's usually tricks that only the guys who designed the map and whoever he decided to tell would know about that will almost surely guaranteed victory. Sure there was supposed to be professional competiiton but there's professional competition for rock-paper-scissors too. This game maximizes the amount of 'not my fault' and unsurprisingly has one of the most toxic community because that's what you get when you maximize the amount of 'not my fault'. I've played all sorts of games and it's the first time I've heard of some kind of officially ran tribunal to police player behavior. If you take a game like WoW, it's usually pretty obvious who screwed up because you can see who stepped in the fire. You can see soandso only did X DPS when you're expecting 2X. Sure people always have a way to come up with why it's not their fault but it's pretty hard to blame other people if everyone is doing twice the damage you're doing. You usually resort to claiming you've some intangible value, which Balthier in FF12 would remind you that treasure whose value can be measured is more valuable than treasure whose value cannot be measured (i.e. worthless). Even in a game like EverQuest before there was parsing, you can see who was dying and who was not, and who was able to kill the mob they're responsible. Yes trying to determine people's DPS without a parser is kind of like trying to sense a disturbance in the Force but eventually you'd become Force sensitive if you played the game long enough to actually figure this out.
But you got none of that in LoL. First you got way too many heroes than anybody who can possibly know, so if you lose it's probably because your hero sucks and every hero you weren't playing was overpowered. Second, the roles of the game is not well-defined, and combine with first one it's not like you really know how your hero #152 interacts with the opponent's hero #178 so it wouldn't occur to you that matchup is an autolose for you. Maybe walking in and dying instantly really isn't your fault because your hero matches up poorly against the enemy, but neither you nor anyone on your team would be able to tell you whether this is the case for sure. Even the items/skill/masteries themselves have far too much needless complexity so that if you picked the wrong skils/items/whatever it wouldn't even occur to you that you did because it's not like the average person has any idea what's the difference between all the cryptic stats in the game do. In fact, buying items in some kind of optimal order seems to be more important than playing the game itself when you don't know what the optimal order to buy is.
By the way, while the stats of LoL is actually not very cryptic, how they interact with your character might as well be black magic. You simply have no idea whether +X HP or +Y Armor or +Z life steal or some combination of these stats is better, and not even from a min-max point of view. You could be choosing something that's flat out weaker by a significant margin and you'd have no idea. The game absolutely does nothing that'd even put you on the 'right' track, if one even exists. So since the game goes out its way to ensure you cannot possibly understand what's going on, of course everyone ends up blaming everyone else besides themselves because that's what people do.
The second issue of this game is that most games are totally a waste of time beyond a certain point. It is very clear that this is one of those game where at the high level you might as well forfeit as soon as some relatively modest set of condition is met because the winning team's advantage only gets bigger as time passes. Now it's true the lower skill level you go the more likely a team might make a catastrophic error to let you back in the game, but these miraculous comebacks are very rare, to say the least. For example in SWTOR at the high level on Alderaan the first team to cap the first turret wins about 95% of the time (game will end with a score of 5-0 in the worst case for the winning team), and at lower level of skill it's the first team to cap the first two turrets about 80% of the time (game will end with a score of 300-0). In the latter case there's enough of an uncertainty to not immediately give up but most of the time you can't do anything about it, and the likelihood of a reversal goes way down as both teams improve (a good team would never lose if they cap 2 turrets first against an equally good team, though an equally good team would almost never let the other team cap 2 turrets to begin with). Of course you don't really want people to quit the game the moment one team has an advantage even though comebacks are almost impossible, so you put in incentives for people to stick around. In SWTOR this is about 10-15 minutes. In WoW this is about 20 minutes. In LoL, it can go potentially way longer than that. Compounded with the game's cryptic representation of the metagame it's completely possible your team lost the game in the first 5 minutes but you never realized it. Perhaps this is why they have a new type of map (Dominion) where you will definitely lose in 15 minutes so people can stop wasting time. In fact this game reminds me a lot of Civilization 5 1on1 where you can completely fence someone in early on, ensuring they have no possibility of beating you but you cannot win the game until you have Artillery because it's pretty much impossible to siege a well-defended city without 3-hex range and if there are no computer players you're never going to get your unit to that level of promotion, and all this time whoever is fenced in is probably hoping you'd make some catastrophic error, or more realistically you'd get disconnected while he's stalling for as much time as possible until Artillery becomes researchable (because he's fenced in he'd obviously have less tech than you). You really can't win after a certain threshold has been crossed but the game encourages to waste as much time as possible and pray for miracles, mostly in the form of the enemy team spontaneously disconnecting.
In the end the non-gameplay problems of LoL greatly trumps any gameplay brilliance it may have (and I'm not convinced that it does).
DOTA back in War 3 was always a pretty gimmicky map since you never know if the guy hosting the game secretly changed a few things, and even on the official versions there's usually tricks that only the guys who designed the map and whoever he decided to tell would know about that will almost surely guaranteed victory. Sure there was supposed to be professional competiiton but there's professional competition for rock-paper-scissors too. This game maximizes the amount of 'not my fault' and unsurprisingly has one of the most toxic community because that's what you get when you maximize the amount of 'not my fault'. I've played all sorts of games and it's the first time I've heard of some kind of officially ran tribunal to police player behavior. If you take a game like WoW, it's usually pretty obvious who screwed up because you can see who stepped in the fire. You can see soandso only did X DPS when you're expecting 2X. Sure people always have a way to come up with why it's not their fault but it's pretty hard to blame other people if everyone is doing twice the damage you're doing. You usually resort to claiming you've some intangible value, which Balthier in FF12 would remind you that treasure whose value can be measured is more valuable than treasure whose value cannot be measured (i.e. worthless). Even in a game like EverQuest before there was parsing, you can see who was dying and who was not, and who was able to kill the mob they're responsible. Yes trying to determine people's DPS without a parser is kind of like trying to sense a disturbance in the Force but eventually you'd become Force sensitive if you played the game long enough to actually figure this out.
But you got none of that in LoL. First you got way too many heroes than anybody who can possibly know, so if you lose it's probably because your hero sucks and every hero you weren't playing was overpowered. Second, the roles of the game is not well-defined, and combine with first one it's not like you really know how your hero #152 interacts with the opponent's hero #178 so it wouldn't occur to you that matchup is an autolose for you. Maybe walking in and dying instantly really isn't your fault because your hero matches up poorly against the enemy, but neither you nor anyone on your team would be able to tell you whether this is the case for sure. Even the items/skill/masteries themselves have far too much needless complexity so that if you picked the wrong skils/items/whatever it wouldn't even occur to you that you did because it's not like the average person has any idea what's the difference between all the cryptic stats in the game do. In fact, buying items in some kind of optimal order seems to be more important than playing the game itself when you don't know what the optimal order to buy is.
By the way, while the stats of LoL is actually not very cryptic, how they interact with your character might as well be black magic. You simply have no idea whether +X HP or +Y Armor or +Z life steal or some combination of these stats is better, and not even from a min-max point of view. You could be choosing something that's flat out weaker by a significant margin and you'd have no idea. The game absolutely does nothing that'd even put you on the 'right' track, if one even exists. So since the game goes out its way to ensure you cannot possibly understand what's going on, of course everyone ends up blaming everyone else besides themselves because that's what people do.
The second issue of this game is that most games are totally a waste of time beyond a certain point. It is very clear that this is one of those game where at the high level you might as well forfeit as soon as some relatively modest set of condition is met because the winning team's advantage only gets bigger as time passes. Now it's true the lower skill level you go the more likely a team might make a catastrophic error to let you back in the game, but these miraculous comebacks are very rare, to say the least. For example in SWTOR at the high level on Alderaan the first team to cap the first turret wins about 95% of the time (game will end with a score of 5-0 in the worst case for the winning team), and at lower level of skill it's the first team to cap the first two turrets about 80% of the time (game will end with a score of 300-0). In the latter case there's enough of an uncertainty to not immediately give up but most of the time you can't do anything about it, and the likelihood of a reversal goes way down as both teams improve (a good team would never lose if they cap 2 turrets first against an equally good team, though an equally good team would almost never let the other team cap 2 turrets to begin with). Of course you don't really want people to quit the game the moment one team has an advantage even though comebacks are almost impossible, so you put in incentives for people to stick around. In SWTOR this is about 10-15 minutes. In WoW this is about 20 minutes. In LoL, it can go potentially way longer than that. Compounded with the game's cryptic representation of the metagame it's completely possible your team lost the game in the first 5 minutes but you never realized it. Perhaps this is why they have a new type of map (Dominion) where you will definitely lose in 15 minutes so people can stop wasting time. In fact this game reminds me a lot of Civilization 5 1on1 where you can completely fence someone in early on, ensuring they have no possibility of beating you but you cannot win the game until you have Artillery because it's pretty much impossible to siege a well-defended city without 3-hex range and if there are no computer players you're never going to get your unit to that level of promotion, and all this time whoever is fenced in is probably hoping you'd make some catastrophic error, or more realistically you'd get disconnected while he's stalling for as much time as possible until Artillery becomes researchable (because he's fenced in he'd obviously have less tech than you). You really can't win after a certain threshold has been crossed but the game encourages to waste as much time as possible and pray for miracles, mostly in the form of the enemy team spontaneously disconnecting.
In the end the non-gameplay problems of LoL greatly trumps any gameplay brilliance it may have (and I'm not convinced that it does).