“A lot of people say that if Riot tried to do a champion with a unique mechanic like HOTS cho'gall or lost vikings it would break the game, so do you think its feasible to rewrite league code from the ground up with a better one??”

When we say “break the game” in this context, we’re really talking about breaking the design. If we wanted to a really crazy champion, I’m confident our engineers could get it working from a technical implementation side of things. But we don’t really want a truly crazy champion.

I am, by far, not an expert on Hots. It’s actually challenging to play multiple mobas (even your competition) at anything approaching a competitive level, just because playing even one is such a big investment. So I can’t offer a great explanation for how and why they are confident that really unusual heroes are appropriate for their game. I’m not criticizing their design at all - I just don’t know.

We don’t think they are appropriate for League though. An unusual champion for us is someone like Ivern who jungles in a really different way or Bard who plays support generally outside of the bottom lane. Duo (Xayah and Rakkan) are unusual for us, just because we’ve never released a pair of unified champions together.

There are a few reasons for why we don’t want to “break the rules” more egregiously than this. We hold the laning phase as a sacred part of the game where you get to demonstrate your individual skill with only limited influence from the players in other lanes. We value counterplay as an important design value, and we think it’s harder to provide meaningful counterplay if the enemy champion is doing really, really unusual things (like not leaving base). While getting the game to do what you want is a skill we want players to express, we approach it through things like skill shots, not whether or not two players can figure out how to control the same character, or whether one player can figure out how to control multiple characters. And so it goes. You can probably come up with additional reasons based on that logic.

I want to reiterate one more time that I’m not advocating what is right or wrong in game design here. It’s a good thing that there are differences among League, Hots, Smite, Dota and other Mobas and Moba-likes out there. It gives you a reason to decide which game fits your play style the best.

4/10/2017

