Best Of

It was Crashed who introduced me to @Volatility on Sunday. I’m pretty sure Crashed was high on a lot of people’s list of devs to corner discuss the game with over the weekend. Volatility, by the way, very nice person to chat with. I’m not sure how eloquent I was by then, in retrospect I would love to sit down and chat with her for an hour without all the background noise and my brain functioning properly.

In person, people seemed to be a lot more civil in their discourse. Whether that’s because people are naturally more civil in person or because the trolls couldn’t afford bus fare to get to Vancouver, who can say.

In all of my conversations with devs, it was clear they are keenly aware of the same problems the playerbase cares about. The thing that is difficult to fully convey at times, and this is something I myself discussed with a few people, is that the full context of these problems is often large, complex, and not always fully disclosable. Bugs are bugs, and server crashes are server crashes, but many of the things the devs do that seem to have serious issues or side effects are happening to solve other problems. You can’t say “we do this because the alternative would be a lot worse” because that’s an unsatisfying and sometimes inciteful answer, but it is often the truth. It is much easier to assume the devs just don’t get it, but I think that’s much more difficult when you actually have a chance to speak to them face to face and you see they understand and empathize with the same issues you do, understand the fine points and pain points of those issues, and talk about how they are trying to address those things internally.

Every solution contains its own problems. There needs to be a balance between pointing out those problems - because they will always be there and it is important to let the devs know which ones are the priority pain points - and understanding that many problems come from things that can’t just be reversed, they have to evolve into things that avoid those problems. Which will, of course, create new problems. That is the cycle of games like this.

That balance is to be frank rarely seen here. But it was on full display at the Fest, as far as I could see. Having that balance be something that thousands can be a part of, rather than just hundreds, has always been a fanciful dream of mine.

I often feel the same way, viscerally. However, logically, the problem there is that on the one hand, most players don’t experience AI issues most of the time. But if you black list all node combinations that the AI could interfere with for anyone at any time, you’ve watered down the difficulty of the game dramatically. How many players are you going to lose because the game looks like Monopoly, and because all AI-affecting difficulty is gone (and thus the problem will become much more invisible) most players won’t even fully appreciate why.

Difficulty is not a thing where too high is bad but there’s no such thing as too low. Every notch upward costs players. Every notch downward also costs players. And it is extremely difficult to know how many of each until you actually do it. And then, of course, its generally too late to get them back.

Speaking about BG and GC specifically. First of all, GC is less than 10% of the playerbase. And really, most of GC’s competition level the AI doesn’t factor it. Yes, people lose matches due to uncooperative AI, but few players placement dramatically depends on it. It’s a problem for both sides, and thus in a sense it is a relatively “fair” problem. It only really matters in certain specific corner cases where one side can be said to be much more strongly affected by it than the other side, and in fairness terms that’s a small percentage of that 10% of players. Even in battlegrounds specifically, the AI issue is difficult to work around without creating other issues. Can you come up with meta after meta after meta that doesn’t fall into the many pitfalls people complain about, like being too random, or too focused on nukes, or too overwhelmingly advantageous for certain roster picks, or too homogeneous, and also avoids AI dependencies?

In other words, to go back to my original point. We both agree metas that rely upon AI behaviors the players cannot skillfully anticipate or control is intrinsically bad. But can you solve that problem without creating or uncovering several other problems equally bad? I suspect we could sit down and come up with such things that would satisfy our own judgment. But unfortunately, there’s all those other players who aren’t going to agree with us, and making only two players happy is not going to be a winning formula for the devs.

same here

Just here to put a 5 Star Review in Kabam Crashed's comment box 📦.

This is what good communication looks like. Looking forward to future information!

Seems like a fair compromise to let people watch streamers. I'm not a big streaming guy but I watched a lot of summoners fest live and actually enjoyed it quite a bit. All in all, job well done and thanks for the rewards.

For those complaining just don't watch it then. There's always breakdowns after. It's not that hard. I can't imagine spending all my time complaining on the forums of a game I hate.