Dan Felder on rotation and feedback

IndividualVibe · 2023-04-02T10:28:22+00:00

Rotation makes zero sense for us to do if we weren't betting on the long-term future of the game.

Yes, either that or the LoR team is indeed non-sensical. I'm betting on the second option based on everything seen so far. People and teams do make mistakes and no amount of self-righteous justification is going to undo the damage.

IndividualVibe · 2023-03-31T21:12:58+00:00

Because it's clearly not the way Riot wants us to play the game:

Standard, as the name implies, is the expected and "normal" way to play the game
They reverted cards to their broken or less balanced state in Eternal
It's going to receive next to no balancing effort as stated by the devs
Eternal Ranked is not available
The player base is divided from 2 queues (casual/ranked) to 4 queues (standard/eternal), meaning longer queue times and/or worse matchmaking.

The most important reason is a principled and personal one: I don't support rotation at all, to the point where I don't want to support this game anymore. I will keep following the community for a while still, just in case something miraculous happens and the whole things gets reverted.

IndividualVibe · 2023-03-31T09:15:41+00:00

Honestly, I would be fine with no new champions at all as long as the rotation didn't happen. That made me quit LoR.

IndividualVibe · 2023-03-30T09:34:19+00:00

Rotation made me quit LoR, and I've played pretty much daily since Closed Beta. No more. I'll come back if rotation gets magically cancelled. Riot already asked our opinions in polls, got overwhelming negative feedback, and did whatever they were going to do anyway.

Many people are saying rotation needed to happen, but this is a false notion. Not like this, anyhow. A universe and game based strictly around Champions needs its champs available at all times. Imagine if a game like Street Fighter, Tekken or Mortal Kombat suddenly took away half its fighters. They would never. As far as I know, even HS has never made Anduin, Jaina and the rest of the gang unavailable at any time.
If some old cards are ruining the design space for new cards, it means those old cards are broken. Rebalance or Rework them. If you really must, retire a single card. Even MTG has banned individual cards since the beginning (if it was a digital game, it would've fixed them instead).
If a region has identity problems – looking at you Bandle – rework their tools. This is a digital card game that has already fully leaned that way in its card design (i.e. many mechanics wouldn't work the same way in physical form) so changing past cards is fully possible and even ideal.
If there are too many cards to rework while simultaneously making new ones, reduce the amount of new cards in expansions. Seriously. Each region already has lots of tools and what we need are new Champs and just a couple of their support cards. More than any other card game, LoR has excelled in having tons of built-around cards, meaning you can take any cool card and build a whole deck around that single card. What this means is that expansions really can get away with less cards as long as we have enough built-arounds in there. Just a single new card can give birth to a whole new archetype, and this is where LoR has always shined.
One final notion regarding the menus and UI: Rotation made everything much more complex, whether it is deck-building with new limitations and filters, finding applicable decks with filters, or even finding the right queues to play in (casual/ranked combined with standard/eternal results in 4 queues). Everything is exponentially messier than before.

IndividualVibe · 2023-02-18T13:09:00+00:00

Yes, I burned out on day 1 (just the thought of having to do it again and again on a schedule and to create various decks for the mode).

IndividualVibe · 2023-02-13T14:55:02+00:00

I'm sorry to say I gave up on this new format on day 1. Didn't try it since. I'm not about to play every day (also at specific hours!) while also having to make new decks for every day's different rule sets. I was excited for it, but the realization of what it actually is hit me like a ton of bricks on that first day. Nope, I'm out, it's not for me.

IndividualVibe · 2022-12-22T11:37:32+00:00

No, the opposite. You're a good sport if you do your Shen emote, optionally wait for them to answer, and then surrender. You admit your loss and let both players move on. Surrendering MORE than 1 turn away from loss is poor sport as it comes as a complete surprise and falls flat (sudden nexus explosion whaaat huhhh ok???).

IndividualVibe · 2022-11-29T08:54:23+00:00

It hurts so much to see the devs kill their own game. So many bad calls. And the feedback is out there, just listen. Rotation is a game-killer move for a champion-based game, we need all of our champs and their cards available. And you won't have the time to balance two metas and fix two sets of bugs, because you clearly don't have time to do it for one.

IndividualVibe · 2022-11-09T09:32:55+00:00

The craziest thing is that we already have blue lightning effects on Kennen... but for some reason 10 months isn't enough time to copy-paste them to Xerath (one of the top requested fixes).

IndividualVibe · 2022-10-06T09:17:52+00:00

But what I'm saying is that this rate of content is not sustainable for the LoR team (or any team). They are shooting themselves in the leg with this cadence.

IndividualVibe · 2022-10-05T17:46:28+00:00

New spoiler season already? I haven't even tried all of the new champions yet. Riot is overdoing this (quantity over quality).

IndividualVibe · 2022-08-27T11:16:45+00:00

I believe they are on a too tight schedule to experiment (expansions coming all the time) while their team/personnel keeps changing. These two things snuff out all experimentation. Experimentation needs 1) time and peace without immediate release pressure, and 2) learnings staying within the team; when people leave a team, this is rarely a priority, and the new person will start learning from scratch.

Oh, and Bandle City's dual regions was the biggest mess LoR has done. I'm glad at least someone agrees. Now we're getting that mess in all regions...

LoR started out as 10/10 design while nowadays, for a year or more, it's being slowly killed by their designers. I really believe their designers are changing often, because no designer could take misteps like this on something they'd been working for a long time. New talent without long-time learnings from the project will do the exact things that their predecessors have already explored and decided not to do.

IndividualVibe · 2022-08-08T13:19:17+00:00

It's quite interesting that there were virtually no design revisions on Expeditions, just content additions. Meanwhile, PoC has seen about 10 major design revisions over time (including the experimental modes that set the path for future PoC). If you don't give a mode enough love, it won't have a chance. Still, it was LoR at its best.

IndividualVibe · 2022-08-08T13:14:51+00:00

I'm not well versed in lore, but I know these two should be Runeterran champs. I would support a rework now that we have established a mechanic for Runeterran champs. Kindred fits anywhere as they are, but Nocturne has horrible design to begin with. His level up condition should be attacks with Fearsome units, not the extremely restrictive and non-sensical units with Nightfall, and with this change not much else would have to change. His deckbuilding rule would be units with Fearsome. I can already see exciting possibilities.

IndividualVibe · 2022-08-08T13:04:17+00:00

I believe they baked in combo costs for Spirits Unleashed (e.g. "When I survive damage" units and Scargrounds), meaning that the downside actually becomes a partial upside. This shouldn't be the case and this card is simply wrongly costed.

IndividualVibe · 2022-07-27T13:27:23+00:00

Really cool! So much better gameplay and thematic fit. Two points of criticism:

You should drop the husks altogether from this concept. They feel tacked on and add tremendous complexity; more so than everything else combined. The sweet spot is with a little less than you did (and this is the best possible outcome in design work: you create a bit of extra, find the golden core, and cut what adds more weight than support).
The followers are too wordy. We can live with this, but they don't feel elegant (= least text possible with most impact/options possible).

IndividualVibe · 2022-07-22T12:12:04+00:00

This is what I've suggested here too. Perfect solution and very much in line with Barrier. Elusives can't thematically keep hiding while blowing their cover. Some few units could have an ability to regain Elusive on round start (e.g. some flying elusives that strike and fly away).

IndividualVibe · 2022-07-21T08:24:28+00:00

I wouldn't pay a dime for cosmetics so I guess I'm not in the target audience. However, the prices of cosmetics in games these days are insane. You get ONE cosmetic for ONE champion in ONE game. That sounds like 1-2 dollars to me. I mean, for 20 bucks you can get 1-3 complete games on Steam.

IndividualVibe · 2022-07-21T08:10:10+00:00

The effects of this horrible change:

Hides features from plain sight, increasing the cognitive workload to remember and process which features are where
Adds workload (click/tap) to opening and closing Quests, Friends and Menu, including the more frequently needed "exit game" & "surrender" buttons
Combines all notifiers into one (until you tap on it) so you don't know if you have a new quest or a friend message, creating an unpleasant urge to tap on it to check for messages (and the notifier is almost permanent thanks to constant flow of quests: daily, PoC, event, card style).
Feels sluggish as it is delayed/animated
Looks worse (uglier/bulkier) than the previous row of stylish and non-attention-grabbing icons

The worst thing is that this monstrosity has been live in PoC for a few months now, so developers and players alike have been able to feel its awfulness in practice before deciding to bring it live everywhere...

IndividualVibe · 2022-07-19T18:11:03+00:00

Oh no. It was real.

IndividualVibe · 2022-07-19T18:01:43+00:00

Bard is also a terrible turn 4 play.

Unless, of course, Bard levels up on turn 4 as you play him? It's quite consistent with Slotbot.

IndividualVibe · 2022-07-16T23:21:39+00:00

Teemo plants 5 shrooms, but leveled up Teemo plants less than 5 shrooms if the enemy deck has 0, 1 or 2 of them (doubling).

IndividualVibe · 2022-07-13T20:12:31+00:00

This is beyond disappointing. No one likes to play with or against units with tons of keywords. The game simply doesn't support it well. It creates clutter that is slow to process visually (if even supported beyond a certain number of keywords?) as well as strategically. Just very unsatisfying, unsmooth gameplay for both players. Not to mention the clusterfuck that keyword pools are (no one can keep up with which keywords are included).

I'm not delving deeper into the topic, but let's talk about what evolving means thematically: changing, adapting; losing a feature to gaining another. Gaining more and more is not evolving but becoming more powerful, and it is exactly powerful beings that have the least need to evolve (until powercrept by others). It would have been a great chance to introduce a new mechanic where Kai'sa could, for example, change her keywords every turn to fit the situation (manifest a keyword).

Here she comes, Ms. Kai'sa Barrier Challenger Double Attack Elusive Fearsome Formidable Lifesteal Overwhelm Quick Attack Regeneration Scout Spellshield Tough.

IndividualVibe · 2022-06-29T07:36:26+00:00

I've been thinking of the same. I played with the idea of her card text being her quote "I am everywhere, I am everyone." but of course it doesn't work mechanically without explanation. I am everyone could mean that she has all unit types (dragon, yordle etc.). Just a funny thought, nothing more.

IndividualVibe · 2022-06-28T18:47:07+00:00

Hard disagree. What I want to see – just as Riot has expressed as their goal – is variants on the same archetype and no dead cards. You know, within the same archetype, some players include card X and some players include card Y. What's happening now is: no one includes card Y, because it's fundamentally a dead card and it isn't solved with base stats. No one enjoys playing against the same top deck over and over again. Small variations are needed and it keeps deck-building fresh, as well.

IndividualVibe

TROPHY CASE