Chordata's Game Design Blog

I'm a competitive gamer through and through, focusing currently on League of Legends and Super Smash Bros. Melee. This blog will hold all of my musings about game design, from analyses of the games I play, to ideas for personal projects of my own.

[chordatagaming]

How to Play like a Team

If you've ever tried to play ranked 5s in LoL, chances are, you've experienced that awkward situation where no one has any idea what to do, and no one says anything. You do well in your lanes, only to find yourself in the mid game going "uh... Dragon?". Or even worse, you get into a team fight (possibly over no objective) and either no one says a word, or everyone is yelling randomly just to make noise.

Communication is the most crucial part of team play. And similarly to having different roles such as carry, jungler, and support, you should have different roles in your communication. The first and most important aspect is to set up a priority list for who gets to talk. If two people are talking at once, the person with the lower priority shuts up. For my team, it looks like this: 

1. Jungler

2. Mid

3. Support

4. Top

5. AD Carry

With positions 1 and 2 switching in the mid-late game. You should also have one person dedicated to telling everyone to shut up when they start chatting about something unimportant. For us, this is our support, but it can be anyone who has the presence of mind to notice when something isn't relevant to the game and is willing to call it out.

After sorting out your priority list, you need to decide who is going to focus on what during the game. There's so much in LoL to pay attention to: target calling, ward timers, where to pick fights, map control, enemy item choices, etc etc etc. All of this information should be covered by at least one and at most two people on your team. so that your communications can remain crisp and clear, and everyone has to focus on a smaller portion of the game while playing. Here is the way we divvied up our communication roles on my team. And while this isn't the only or even the best way to split up these roles, I will list our justification for each.

Jungle: Our jungler is our primary shotcaller in the early game, focusing on early dragons, jungle invades, and ganking/counter ganking. This one is fairly obvious, as the jungler is most involved in all aspects of the early game, across the entire map. As the game moves on, the shot calling shifts to me in the mid lane, and his focus is keeping an eye on MIA opponents and calling out engages, as well as mid-fight target calling. This works well for us, as I tend to be more decisive in closing out the game, but he can yell a lot louder than me, so it's easy to listen to him during the middle of a fight. 

Mid: I am the mid laner for our team, and my focus is on calling out my early roaming in the early game. This is pretty obvious, as I'm the only person who will notice the opportunities. Going into the mid and late game, I am much more decisive than my teammates when it comes to taking objectives and closing out games, so I become the primary strategic shot caller (as opposed to our jungler being the primary tactical shot caller).

Top: Our top laner tends to like split pushing and farming into the late game, so it's his job to call out all teleport opportunities, where he's going to split push, where he needs vision, and anything else necessary to secure his pushes safely. In addition, when he's playing initiator champions like Shyvana, he calls out engages as he sees them, along with our jungler.

Support: All responsibility for wards and timers falls through to our support. He tells people where to place their wards, where to scan, things like that. He also pays the most attention to where each team is spending their gold, calling out big enemy items as he sees them, or letting us know if we have a significant power spike that we can push. He and our jungler are also our last line for checking the minimap. Between the two of them, no enemies should ever show their face without getting called out.

Carry: We're in a very carry focused meta, so our carry needs to spend most of his focus on his mechanics, and as a result, we limit his communication responsibilities. However, he has final say on who gets what farm and where, as well as calling out when he will need peels, wards, or some other kind of support. In addition, he calls out when he's close to a power spike ahead of time, since his power spikes are the largest and easiest to make a play with.

Since setting aside these specific roles for each person on our team, the amount we've talked has gone up a lot, and our coordination has skyrocketed. We've gotten much better at taking objectives and at closing out games, and it's been a blast playing. If your 5s team is having trouble putting 2 and 2 together, try this out; it'll make a huge difference in how your games pan out.

[chordatagaming]

Items in League of Legends

Item selection in League of Legends has historically been very limited in scope. Each item is typically useful in some situation, or for some champion. However, most champions stick to a very specific core build, with little room for variation, or for creating a distinct playstyle through your build. The reason for this is because the power of items in League of Legends is centered around stats, rather than the unique effects of each item.

In League of Legends, balance in items is achieved by ensuring that each item fills a unique role. If you group the items very generally, you will find that they can fit into three different categories: stat sticks, enablers, and utility/counters. None of these item groups are naturally bad for the game. However, currently, LoL items lean heavily towards stat sticks, with too much overlap. This isn't solely because of a lack of unique effects, but rather, power on items is balanced heavily towards their stats over their unique effects.

Utility/counter items are items that add CC, unique effects such as grievous wounds, auras or allied buffs, and unique and significant defensive options such as Zhonya's active. They are somewhat commonly bought, primarily on supports and mid laners. Enablers are items that are bought to allow a certain, specific combo or strategy to succeed, but not counting items that just give raw stats. They often become a core part of certain builds if a character uses them particularly well, for example Statikk Shiv on Tristana to allow her to wave clear extremely well through the midgame. Another example is Runaan's, which turns a single target DPS character into an AoE character. They significantly change the playstyle of a character, beyond just giving them a power spike. Anything else, that is bought primarily for the stats, is a stat stick.

The problem with this style of design is that a lot of overlap occurs between items. For example, do Phantom Dancer, Youmuu's, Zephyr, and Statikk Shiv all need to exist? They are all bought to give movespeed and attack speed, and whichever is best at a given time depends on the balance between the numbers, and what synergizes with a particular champion's kit; you rarely make a choice between them mid-game based upon how the game is going. What about Rabadon's, Deathfire Grasp, and Void Staff? They all add only damage, and the differences come down to math.

So how do we change this? My suggestion is to rework items, and stats, from the ground up. Riot has shown in the past that they don't want decision making between item choices to come down just to math. For this reason, armor and magic penetration should simply be removed from the game. They lead to an awkward scenario, where flat penetration is more effective against squishy targets over tanky targets. And percentage penetration just serves as a general multipler to your damage, making it always the go-to late game choice for any DPS. By removing penetration, and removing "free" resistances that are simply thrown onto items to make them more attractive (e.g. the magic resistance on Chalice of Harmony), we simplify the stats game so that each stat you buy affects your gameplay in a unique way. The physical damage stats become damage, attack speed, and crit chance, which all affect the way you deal your damage differently. Magical stats become ability power and cooldown reduction, which again, affect the game differently. We get rid of non-interactive multipliers.

From this point, redundant tank items can also be removed. Right now, Sunfire Cape, Randuin's, and Warmog's are bought primarily because they add a massive amount of effective HP. They are very rarely viable options at the same time, where a single champion would choose between them in the middle of a game. Similarly, Spirit Visage and Banshee's Veil fill the same space. By consolidating stats onto a few items: having one or two big armor items, one or two big magic resist items, and one or two big health items, we can reduce this redundancy and rework the other items to be centered around their unique effects. When you buy Sunfire Cape, you should buy it primarily because you want the passive to speed up your farming and split pushing, not because you need a certain amount of tank to function and that item is slightly better than the other choices.

The same thing can be said for almost every stat. Mana Regen, CDR, movement speed, lifesteal. All of these should be consolidated to make room for stronger unique effects. This doesn't mean that buying stats is unimportant, just that, you want to build those stats for a specific purpose, not just because they're easy to get. CDR is a good example. Imagine you're playing Twisted Fate. Currently, everyone grabs Athene's or Morellonomicon because they give plenty of damage and mana regen along with 20% CDR. There's no downside to them. Instead, you should have to think: hey, I want to grab a lot of cooldown reduction this game, so that I can gank more often. And in exchange, I'm giving up damage, or mana regen. In this way, your choices within a game become significant, rather than your choices between games.

A bonus to all of this is that it makes the game more fun, as you get to play around with the unique effects of different items, and it makes the game more clear for new players. Currently, a new player might want to buy armor so they don't die as fast, so they go buy a Thornmail. This is practically always the wrong option, despite the fact that it gives the most armor. With the new system, if they decide "hey, I need armor", the options from that point are simplified. Then, if they see a unique effect that looks like it works well for them, they can opt for that, and not worry if it's good enough mathematically.

Thanks for reading! Riot has been going in a similar direction in emphasizing the strengths and weaknesses of different champions, so hopefully, they can take a similar path with items in the new seasons.