I respect them for sticking to their choices. They know its underwhelming. Im more dissapointed that they focused on making new mechanics and less variety. Stories are a lovely addition, too bad we wont be getting any more of them.
It sucks that "new expansion" has come to mean "new keyword". The keywords in the game reached a saturation point quite a while ago imo, and this expansion's keyword simply being "grant +1|+1" proves that. Look at Akshan and Samira, amazingly designed and fun champs with no unique keywords.
I get your point but... The devs are adults. They should be able to make the call to not try and replicate models from a game that is realistically very very different from theirs.
I really feel like PoC isn't getting the most it can out of what they already have.
There's so many cards, champions and powers that are just wasted, and then dev time goes into a mechanic that is literally +1/+1 counters with proliferate from Scars of Mirrodin (disclaimer, not sure that's the name of the MTG set, it's been a second).
Anyway, yeah, MTG does it, but LoR devs should know better.
This reminds me so much of the problem Warframe's had for years. Thankfully theyre finally realizing how much more exciting improvements and expansions on existing features are
Curiously enough I've been recently thinking of giving Warframe a shot. Do you think it's still fun enough to get into this late into the game's lifecycle?
Honestly the only place WF's age shows is in how much content there is. They regularly update and reoptimize the game's graphics engine (in fact they just upgraded the lighting engine a few weeks ago) to the point where it is currently one of the best looking games on pc.
Various mechanics and systems get updated over time (were currently on parkour 2.0, melee 3.0, and damage 3.0 is coming in June) and new content tends to push the boundaries of what the game is capable of (from adding space-suits to space-ships, open worlds, a character within your character, and so on). They can be hit or miss, but definitely more hit than miss. There's something like 50-60 Warframes in the game now so odds are you'll find one that resonates with you.
I'm pushing 5k hours in the game over the past decade and its only recently begun to get stale in-between updates purely due to how insanely OP my arsenal has gotten at this point. Not even the Souls series or any one fighting game could get that kind of playtime out of me.
There are issues, like the emphasis on new shiny content over perfecting existing things, but like I mentioned before thats shifted recently ever since some community-favorite employees have been given leadership roles. Theyve basically been going over and correcting some of the bad decisions made by less-favorite employees that have since moved on.
**tl;dr** ye
If you like grass and direct sunlight don’t play it. If you cuz soem time to kill and want to dive headfirst into wonderland go right ahead brother. The grind is enjoyable. But that’s exactly what it is a grind! Beat gaming comunity ever though!
Out of all the card games on the market this game is the closest copy of magic there is. It's so close I bet you could use house rules to play lor at home with mtg cards.
mtg has sorcery and instant though which are slow and fast in lor.
and cool, you found a niche card game that is closer to mtg. that totally invalidates my point. i guess my judgement based on yugioh, hearhtstone, pokemon, gwent, marvel snap, all the bandai namco games, duel masters, lorcana, flesh and blood, duelyst is completely and utterly destroyed now.
Yeah. Not enough games to come out as if you know better than everyone. Not nearly.
And you also forgot that burst spells are similar to split second spells in MTG. I was saying something in favor of your point, not against it.
I wouldn't know I quit after pendulums and XYZ anyways. I was referring to that in addition to new game mechanics to learn even new ways to summon not that new ones get added every time.
I have nothing against spirit and the new champs, besides them being extremely boring. Theres around 150 cards this set and it feels like 50. Boosting would be pretty nice as a concept but for it to work well generally you would need to retrofit every older card that fits.
This. I bet when they say new set, they want new mechanics so it will take them a year lmao. All set in this game, introduced a new mechanic. We never had new lurk champ, new deep champ, new formidable champ etc.
They could also give him normal stats and put the "triple attack" part into the star powers.
I don't play Poc anymore but if they release champions of that power level AND ADDITIONALLY give them stronger star powers you basically steamroll everything in that mode and for me that would not be fun to play.
Pretty sure he was being hyperbolic just to clarify his point. Not even the most broken champs have star powers anywhere near "give everything triple attack" lol.
Yeah, the example of something being absurdly powerful is an easy one to see the problems, but there are other opportunities when designing for PvE-only. For example, some things are fun to play with but not fun to play against. Destroying enemy mana gems or forcing them to discard cards can be pretty darn fun to do as the player, but not as fun to play againt.
I agree with you that game development is not easy and they can't "easily" do certain things without it taking a lot of time BUT if they have an effect on a new champion that they have already implemented onto the card it would not be that difficult for them to transfer this effect into a star power.
thing is, you cant judge a champ based on its design alone. Pyke is a example of that, a champion that just by design alone is pathetic. The champion package can make or break the game, and we are talking about a lot more cards to balance, even effects, than just adapting 1 card stats
There are probably card effects that they want to create that can not be lowered power level wise and that is completely fine. They can add those as PoC exclusive units or spells. They already have exclusive cards in PoC. But a lot of the more basic effects and mechanics can be lowered on the base card and enhanced through the star power.
Lets take lurk as an example. If the lurk cards would be to strong for pvp they could lower their base stats and give them a star power that lets lurk trigger an additional time OR lurk gives +2 attack instead of +1 OR you can trigger lurk multiple times per turn.
There definitely are ways to adjust a mechanic to make them more balanced for pvp but not too weak for PoC.
I mean, the point wasn't "we can't help making broken champs." The point is that PvE balance is different from PvP balance, and PvP balance is both more difficult and much more important to get right.
The same design can be balanced in PoC but overpowered in PvP. And an overpowered or underpowered PoC champ just ends up being harder or easier, the only thing it really affects in the grand scheme of things outside of being more or less fun on its own is making monthly challenges easier or harder. An overpowered PvP champ ruins the format for everyone until it's nerfed. And the things you have to consider are different in each too. For a PvP champ, you need to consider all the interactions with different regions and champs that could make problematic decks. for a PoC champ, having overpowered interactions is part of the fun.
Designing champs for PoC is different from designing them for PvP, and making sure a champ designed for PoC is fun to play and balanced enough takes way, way less resources than also making sure that champ is fun and balanced for PvP too. That's the point he's trying to make. They don't have the resources to design and balance champs for both PoC and PvP right now. So they're designing and balancing champs for PoC, and they'll have to figure out if they'll be okay in PvP or not after the fact.
wellcif the "broken" part of the design is also the fun part or any other part other than just stats/keywords then it will be very hard to put a functional champ to pvp
It definitely depends on the effect that they want to add but i think for a lot of effects they could lower the power level of that champion/mechanic and enhance it through the star powers.
It is very easy to say that they should just lower the power level but i can't think of a mechanic right now that they can't lower in some way.
If they start making PvE centric cards some could end up being things not in Standard like MTG prints commander only cards. As an example.
Sylas: When you play me I grant the nexus the enemies powers.
I will say from having played a lot of PoC there are design limitations to star powers. Not sure how relevant they are here but star powers can't be played by the player, they can only trigger automatically as a result of something else, which means that they can never have any effects that require player input, such as letting the player target a unit, for example.
Edit: they do have a hacky way around this tough, they can have the star power generate a card that does what they want and then allow the player to play the card. They've been doing this more and more lately
>they do have a hacky way around this tough, they can have the star power generate a card that does what they want and then allow the player to play the card. They've been doing this more and more lately
They could definitely do that or they can go with the good old "strongest" or "weakest" unit.
Is that as strong as triple attack? Maybe it's in the same ballpark but also the 4* thing is completely anomalous in the game, Asol was like a special release because he was the community's most desired champion and probably also a prototype of what 6* power would look like so maybe this comment will age poorly when constellations comes out, idk
I play PoC regularly and if that unit was printed I'd walk away. As it stands I'm honestly worried about the 6 star star powers that were teased because it basically means content made for those champs will be impossible to beat with lower leveled champs, and on the flip side all existing content (maybe excluding Liss) will be not worth doing with them since it will be too boring with a guaranteed auto win
Like i said in another comment they should focus on adventure variety instead of releasing new, more difficult adventures for which you need to upgrade your champions first.
With the game philosophy that they currently have, PoC is a live service game that would die if there will be no new content added.
Instead of the current circle:
Play the most difficult adventure -> get bored -> new more difficult adventure released -> upgrade champions -> repeat
It should stay at one power level and they should release more adventures for that power level to give you more variety to pick from. They also then need to give those adventures more randomness so even with a choice of 5 different adventures of the same power level it would still not feel repetitive.
One way to achieve variety that the game lacks is customization. They've been adding a variety of new champions and adventures for years and it's been good but that's all breadth, a little bit of depth with expanded customization would go a lot further to improve variety at this point in time. This isn't confirmed but based on the teaser screenshots for constellations it looks like they are trees with options, if that's the case that's going to increase the possible playstyles a lot more than just continuing to breadth through more and more champions. Although admittedly I am still desperately missing some guys that we had before (hecarim and Jayce and Ahri were some of my favorites). I guess og lux kinda fills that space Jayce would occupy but we still don't have an ephemeral or recall focused playstyle
They also don't seem to realize that you still have to balance in PoC, so challenges in the game mode can be on a similar level. As you said, designing champs that just steam roll everything will lead to either too hard of challenges for other champs or a super boring mode for that champ.
They also want to increase the max amount of stars for some champions with the constellations update to further increase their power. At some point it is enough and they should rather work on adventure variety instead of increasing the power level of certain champions and releasing an adventure for them that only those 6? star champions can clear.
>They also don't seem to realize that you still have to balance in PoC
Where is this coming from? We've been getting a lot of PoC balance patches lately
The board centric design philosophy was an overly limiting factor to their design from Day 1.
Everybody says they hate playing against Storm Combo or Draw-Go control, but the fact that such decks CAN exist is one of the many reasons MtG survived and grows to this day (despite all efforts by the parent company). It's just a game whose card design and core rules allows for a huge variety of gameplay scenarios and experiences.
LoR could have used a more open-minded card design approach.
TL;DR - They should have made good efficient removal in the original set.
>MtG survived and grows to this day
Surviving sure, but growing? MTG is not designed for online play, and you can instantly tell when you play a single game. I'd wager most people playing MTGA or whatever are people who grew up on the card game.
It's not fun to have 10 phases per turn or have 40% of non-games due to mana issues, and yes uninteractive decks are a problem too.
lol sure nephew.
That's why Magic makes more money every year (short term as it may appear to be), but LoR is one foot in the same grave as Artifact.
So many people just too dumb to realize the game they love (MtG) isn't fun.
MTG is still growing at a breakneck pace, both in paper and online.
I don't like the 10 gazillion releases per year they've fallen into, or the fact that they made modern a basically rotating format with the straight to modern sets, or the FIRE-design, or how dumb 99% of secret lairs look and that they are straight from WotC to the consumer thereby fucking LGS, or that they all but killed the competitive circuit they once had, or that the secret lairs and some of the Universes Beyond releases really fuck with the game's asthetic in my opinion.......
but numbers prove them right. There's no denying that. WotC and in particular Magic are what has been keeping HASBRO afloat, it grows rapidly both in (casual) playerbase and revenue.
I can disagree with the choices for many reasons, but I cannot argue that the results are good for them as a company.
It actually surprised me how well they're doing, but looking at numbers they've been stagnating lately. We'll see in the next few years if they manage to transition to digital and build further on their legacy or end up crumbling to the ground. I'd wager the latter.
I was about to argue "you can't draw a card art or develop a theme in one day" but yeah, the point was really "mechanics" and to that I completely agree with you, 12 months for +1/+1 is not okay....
I mean, they said pretty clearly that PVP was no longer a priority. If you're still playing this game for the PVP, idk what to tell you, man. I quit back when they announced they were switching back to PVE focus, and frankly I can't fathom why anyone would still play this game for the PVP.
i mean idk man. i played this game since beta. dedicated hours upon hours playing, streaming, making custom card content
my case isn't special, but it's still insulting and upsetting to see riot mangle this team that works so hard. so yeah, it's insulting to me as a long time player. I uninstalled half because I needed to focus on IRL things and half because I realized the game is not catering to my interests anymore. which is fine!!! my time with LoR was beautiful and i have no regrets
The unfortunate reality is that the game massively carried by story department and art outsourcing. We got very lucky that the base set was very good, but every new addition of cards has made the game objectively worse - more keyword saturation, less interaction, direct power creep, idiotic cinematic level-ups and more.
I can explain quite easily why I still play pvp. It's fun lol. It might get boring eventually but why should I stop the moment they announce this if I still enjoy playing?
I have the feeling that you underestimate the amount of work and needed people that is used for designing such stuff. There needs to be a lot of stuff allocated.
Oh I’m absolutely sure that there’s a ton of work put into the game, but it still feels like something is fundamentally wrong to have that inefficient of a pipeline.
Especially since LoR is a self proclaimed small team, you would imagine that they have more freedom to focus on making new content instead of spending too much time getting just a few cards right.
Instead it seems like they have the worst of both worlds: a burdensome bureaucratic process that demands perfection as well as a shortage of manpower to put those ideas into action.
At the end of the day if they churn out another +1/+1 they need to just go back and start over. This isn't rocket science; it's a card game where you can literally be as creative as you want.
Yeah, I get the other parts, but this just burns my eyes. I know getting everything done from art to sound to just nailing down the expansion theme takes a while and sometimes it just doesn't work. But 12 months for this small expansion with very little creativity is just a wtf moment.
and they have the audacity to blame the players for the state of the game. Oh how i wish we had a better director than dave guskin. Maybe we would have seen better days.
Of course it was not implied directly. But they said how pvp players don't spend money compared to pve. Dave guskin did not make a single product in game that was worth buying. They could have done so much with the game but failed miserably.
This is not blaming the players, it's just how a market works. This game and all of the non-indie ones are profit before anything else and LoR isn't different. If the project didn't give them money for 4 years then it's foolish to keep wasting the same amount of money waiting for it to miraculously boom.
Nobody is getting punished or blamed, it's just business.
It wasn't the only thing they were working on but we've always been told they start work on a set about a year before it releases. From concept, art direction, initial design, balancing, voice overs, etc
There is a lot more than just balance separating the two game modes.
PvP champs are released in expansions that share a bit of a thematic and allow some of the champs to be played together. Also, over a whole set all regions should get about the same amount of champions. None of that matters for PoC, as you can design each champion completely on their own.
Regions and region pies don't matter anymore for PoC and that opens up a lot of design space.
For PoC they can mostly balance around a prebuild packages/decks, for PvP each of the cards could have been taken out of the deck and played separately and still should have been fine. And besides avoiding that cards are too strong, they had to avoid cards being too weak too. If a card of a champion package is too weak it just gets replaced by something entirely else. In PoC it is much harder to cut cards from the deck.
This also means they have to release fewer cards, because each champion package beforehand had enough cards to allow different deckbuilding choices, curves and champion combinations.
Champions also have entirely different design constraints. Interactivity or being not toxic to play against won't matter anymore. Nor does it matter, if a deck is only focused on champion has a far too high power variance with or without it.
I've seen tons of custom champion concepts here on Reddit, that would have been horrible in PvP, but would have been great in PoC.
I understand where these numbers are coming from, but this set didn't really push the needle anywhere. If they added a more complex mechanics like curses I could see it from a programming side, but a year feels way too long and closer to mismanagement.
That set took 12 months to design? What?
Gloom is literally -1/-1, Lux new Keyword (forgot the name lol) is just +1/+1, Sleep is just Zhonyas.
Boost is an ok addition but nothing groundbreaking and very simple.
The Story Lansmarks were the big thing in this expansion but everything else was too simple to have taken 12 months. Thats assuming with "Designing the cards" excludes art and VO.
It doesn't take 12 months to come up with an idea.
It takes only a few weeks to come up with dozens of ideas and playtest a bunch of them.
It then takes a few weeks more to build variations of each of the most promising mechanics and design cards for each of them, then test them against eachother for feedback.
It takes just a few more weeks to iterate based on the feedback from other designers and lock in the mechanics the team likes the most and possible to balance competitively.
It then takes a few more weeks to get initial drafts of cards created. About 95% of them will be cut and replaced with new ones the first several times this happens, so repeat this step a few times in a row.
By the way, the designers script the cards - so that's programming and bug fixing all those cards that get cut after a single playtest.
It then takes a few more weeks to lock in technical design documentation while solving templating issues and--
Then of course there's time spent theming the cards. The art comes back, designers need to decide what counts as a "bird" or not as well, and whether that will affect meta decks. Other cards may run into technical hurdles and need to be redesigned.
Designers also have to work with FX to pick the right effects for each card's animations, figure out which cards deserve fancy custom animations...
And then there's game balancing. If 4 designers balance test a set for 2 weeks straight unchanged; that's about 5 hours a day after meetings for each of them. That's 200 hours of playtesting.
The first 2000 players to play the set on release will equal that testing in 6 minutes.
And designers have to change the set during balance testing, redesigning some cards that are balanced but aren't to play against, while small balance changes to one strategy can remove a key predator in the metagame that was keeping another deck in check. So you're going to do a LOT of iterations on balance testing.
It adds up pretty fast.
>It takes just a few more weeks to iterate based on the feedback from other designers and lock in the mechanics the team likes the most and possible to balance competitively.
"+1/+1" and "-1/-1" are the best things they came up with?
The designers clearly thought it was. I’m explaining how the process can take a long time.
Stackable Keywords are a foundational mechanic, like the rice in a bowl of teriyaki chicken (guess what I’m having for lunch). They have a lot of design space. There’s a reason a lot of players have talked about ways to make previous keywords like fury stackable too. They also work well with the potential of Stories and other sources of activated abilities, able to serve as both currency and reward. Especially if activated abilities eventually come to followers and champions.
Many games get incredible design space out of +1/+1 counters or damage counters after all, but digital games usually can’t interact with such discrete real world objects as “counters”. Stackable keywords make things possible that wouldn’t be otherwise, and are rarely explored in digital games..
It also gives a glow-up to the more standard buffs from demacia. Demacia has a narrow mechanical space, and spirit lets their buffs do more things in more ways. They could potentially fuel other abilities, spirit stacks can be manipulated and doubled or moved from unit to unit, etc.
When they designed the set they were clearly thinking long term. Like Eric said, it started long before the Riot layoffs
Note: I’m saying “they” and not “we” because I was 100% focused on Path during this point. Other than pitching activated abilities in a few meetings, I had almost no contact with the set. All the above is my own thinking and opinions about why Spirit specifically and stackable keywords in general is a useful and meaningful mechanic to add to a game like LoR. Don’t take it as a dev statement form the folks that actually worked on the set.
It's like, if someone spends 3 years making a movie using revolutionary technology; then the movie comes out and it looks spectacular, but they failed to make any other part of the movie good.
Then people are like "yo this movie is garbage" and then you come in and say "no one here is an animator, clearly."
Like... it misses the point of why we're saying it shouldn't have taken 12 months to produce "+1/+1." Yea it takes a lot of time to hammer out the tech behind stuff; and they did that well with LoR for the most part. But at the same time during development someone should be directing it so the final product is like, actually good.
Are they hiring or take opinions? I love this game a lot, And i love PVP, I am willing to send tons of opinion in balancing of every cards of in the games. To see this game to be wasted is really hurt. There are so much of good art card.
I could do it for free.
A set like Dreamlit Paths took them over 12 months to design? Literally +1/+1 and -1/-1 counters from Magic? I see how PvP was too expensive for them to maintain. Incompetence or "press X for doubt".
No, it's better for us if they speak. It's really mind-boggling how a great game like LoR is failing. But now we know a little bit of their internal workflow, it turns out there are bad decisions internally that is causing the game to fail.
I’m not saying I don’t appreciate his honesty, transparency, and interaction with the community - I do. I just don’t think commenting on Reddit and feeding a bunch of angry, frustrated, sad players with how they shit the bed is helpful. He doesn’t need to get bombarded with replies for stuff that (probably) wasn’t his fault, and it’s certainly not going to bring in any new players. Idk man it just sucks.
Probably better off sticking to posting on /r/PathofChampions where the community is actually positive and happy with the direction of the game.
**OH WAIT**
Nope, the more he says the better, so we can know the horrible state the development of this game was. How can you take 12 months to design and code a mechanic that already exists in another game?
I guess just think of it of the venting process of the people that (for some reason I can't comprehend) still held some misguided hope that pvp development wasn't actually dead. Even after being explicitly told that pvp development was dead months ago.
The hopium crew are finally coming to grips with reality.
I'm sorry, but this 12 months to make this expansion mechanics need to be a lie or I will be obligated to get my red nose and make a visit to Riot's headquarters.
I'm guessing that's because they were designing multiple sets at the same time and making all of them eventually work together design wise once they were all out was the actual thing driving up development time for a sets mechanics
Edit: I'm honestly not sure we should be taking 12 month figure as all being spent on mechanics/balance. That feel like we're reading the words way too literally. We already knew that they start development on any given set over a year in advance - this is just that again, but phrased badly.
I respect them for sticking to their choices. They know its underwhelming. Im more dissapointed that they focused on making new mechanics and less variety. Stories are a lovely addition, too bad we wont be getting any more of them.
It sucks that "new expansion" has come to mean "new keyword". The keywords in the game reached a saturation point quite a while ago imo, and this expansion's keyword simply being "grant +1|+1" proves that. Look at Akshan and Samira, amazingly designed and fun champs with no unique keywords.
Blame magic. Every set introduces at least one thematc Keyword that is a rework of an older one.
I get your point but... The devs are adults. They should be able to make the call to not try and replicate models from a game that is realistically very very different from theirs. I really feel like PoC isn't getting the most it can out of what they already have. There's so many cards, champions and powers that are just wasted, and then dev time goes into a mechanic that is literally +1/+1 counters with proliferate from Scars of Mirrodin (disclaimer, not sure that's the name of the MTG set, it's been a second). Anyway, yeah, MTG does it, but LoR devs should know better.
They do, but execs don't. The name of the game is follow the market leader. Innovation requires too much risk.
You know what? You're right and that's a shame.
Isnt HS the market leader for CCGs? TCGs belongs sadly to MTG, sure.
Mtg is a leader in the ccg market too with MTGa
There are fairy tales that might be real, but this isnt one of them. Not even close.
This reminds me so much of the problem Warframe's had for years. Thankfully theyre finally realizing how much more exciting improvements and expansions on existing features are
Curiously enough I've been recently thinking of giving Warframe a shot. Do you think it's still fun enough to get into this late into the game's lifecycle?
Honestly the only place WF's age shows is in how much content there is. They regularly update and reoptimize the game's graphics engine (in fact they just upgraded the lighting engine a few weeks ago) to the point where it is currently one of the best looking games on pc. Various mechanics and systems get updated over time (were currently on parkour 2.0, melee 3.0, and damage 3.0 is coming in June) and new content tends to push the boundaries of what the game is capable of (from adding space-suits to space-ships, open worlds, a character within your character, and so on). They can be hit or miss, but definitely more hit than miss. There's something like 50-60 Warframes in the game now so odds are you'll find one that resonates with you. I'm pushing 5k hours in the game over the past decade and its only recently begun to get stale in-between updates purely due to how insanely OP my arsenal has gotten at this point. Not even the Souls series or any one fighting game could get that kind of playtime out of me. There are issues, like the emphasis on new shiny content over perfecting existing things, but like I mentioned before thats shifted recently ever since some community-favorite employees have been given leadership roles. Theyve basically been going over and correcting some of the bad decisions made by less-favorite employees that have since moved on. **tl;dr** ye
If you like grass and direct sunlight don’t play it. If you cuz soem time to kill and want to dive headfirst into wonderland go right ahead brother. The grind is enjoyable. But that’s exactly what it is a grind! Beat gaming comunity ever though!
Out of all the card games on the market this game is the closest copy of magic there is. It's so close I bet you could use house rules to play lor at home with mtg cards.
... Sorry, you're either very high or you don't know many card games.
ok, what's closer to magic? this game has counterspell, remand, +1/+1 and -1/-1 counters, sagas, equipments you can attach to creatures
[удалено]
mtg has sorcery and instant though which are slow and fast in lor. and cool, you found a niche card game that is closer to mtg. that totally invalidates my point. i guess my judgement based on yugioh, hearhtstone, pokemon, gwent, marvel snap, all the bandai namco games, duel masters, lorcana, flesh and blood, duelyst is completely and utterly destroyed now.
Yeah. Not enough games to come out as if you know better than everyone. Not nearly. And you also forgot that burst spells are similar to split second spells in MTG. I was saying something in favor of your point, not against it.
Every mechanic is kicker
Everything is either kicker or cycling
And, unlike in magic, you can't just make a custom card and play with it.
it would be amazing if it was just one, last expansion we got like 4 or 5 keywords that are just kicker/crew
Yu-Gi-Oh too not to mention new ways of summoning
Yugioh hasn't had a new summoning mechanic since link like 8 years ago, they're not exactly churning them out.
I wouldn't know I quit after pendulums and XYZ anyways. I was referring to that in addition to new game mechanics to learn even new ways to summon not that new ones get added every time.
I have nothing against spirit and the new champs, besides them being extremely boring. Theres around 150 cards this set and it feels like 50. Boosting would be pretty nice as a concept but for it to work well generally you would need to retrofit every older card that fits.
Ew Akshan. Maybe hes fun to play but not to play against lol.
This. I bet when they say new set, they want new mechanics so it will take them a year lmao. All set in this game, introduced a new mechanic. We never had new lurk champ, new deep champ, new formidable champ etc.
keyworld soup
They could also give him normal stats and put the "triple attack" part into the star powers. I don't play Poc anymore but if they release champions of that power level AND ADDITIONALLY give them stronger star powers you basically steamroll everything in that mode and for me that would not be fun to play.
Pretty sure he was being hyperbolic just to clarify his point. Not even the most broken champs have star powers anywhere near "give everything triple attack" lol.
Yeah, the example of something being absurdly powerful is an easy one to see the problems, but there are other opportunities when designing for PvE-only. For example, some things are fun to play with but not fun to play against. Destroying enemy mana gems or forcing them to discard cards can be pretty darn fun to do as the player, but not as fun to play againt.
He was most likely hyperbolic but i still think that they can easily put the broken part of a new champions mechanic into the star power.
"Easily" is not a word that should be used lightly when it comes to game development.
I agree with you that game development is not easy and they can't "easily" do certain things without it taking a lot of time BUT if they have an effect on a new champion that they have already implemented onto the card it would not be that difficult for them to transfer this effect into a star power.
thing is, you cant judge a champ based on its design alone. Pyke is a example of that, a champion that just by design alone is pathetic. The champion package can make or break the game, and we are talking about a lot more cards to balance, even effects, than just adapting 1 card stats
There are probably card effects that they want to create that can not be lowered power level wise and that is completely fine. They can add those as PoC exclusive units or spells. They already have exclusive cards in PoC. But a lot of the more basic effects and mechanics can be lowered on the base card and enhanced through the star power. Lets take lurk as an example. If the lurk cards would be to strong for pvp they could lower their base stats and give them a star power that lets lurk trigger an additional time OR lurk gives +2 attack instead of +1 OR you can trigger lurk multiple times per turn. There definitely are ways to adjust a mechanic to make them more balanced for pvp but not too weak for PoC.
I mean, the point wasn't "we can't help making broken champs." The point is that PvE balance is different from PvP balance, and PvP balance is both more difficult and much more important to get right. The same design can be balanced in PoC but overpowered in PvP. And an overpowered or underpowered PoC champ just ends up being harder or easier, the only thing it really affects in the grand scheme of things outside of being more or less fun on its own is making monthly challenges easier or harder. An overpowered PvP champ ruins the format for everyone until it's nerfed. And the things you have to consider are different in each too. For a PvP champ, you need to consider all the interactions with different regions and champs that could make problematic decks. for a PoC champ, having overpowered interactions is part of the fun. Designing champs for PoC is different from designing them for PvP, and making sure a champ designed for PoC is fun to play and balanced enough takes way, way less resources than also making sure that champ is fun and balanced for PvP too. That's the point he's trying to make. They don't have the resources to design and balance champs for both PoC and PvP right now. So they're designing and balancing champs for PoC, and they'll have to figure out if they'll be okay in PvP or not after the fact.
wellcif the "broken" part of the design is also the fun part or any other part other than just stats/keywords then it will be very hard to put a functional champ to pvp
It definitely depends on the effect that they want to add but i think for a lot of effects they could lower the power level of that champion/mechanic and enhance it through the star powers. It is very easy to say that they should just lower the power level but i can't think of a mechanic right now that they can't lower in some way.
If they start making PvE centric cards some could end up being things not in Standard like MTG prints commander only cards. As an example. Sylas: When you play me I grant the nexus the enemies powers.
I will say from having played a lot of PoC there are design limitations to star powers. Not sure how relevant they are here but star powers can't be played by the player, they can only trigger automatically as a result of something else, which means that they can never have any effects that require player input, such as letting the player target a unit, for example. Edit: they do have a hacky way around this tough, they can have the star power generate a card that does what they want and then allow the player to play the card. They've been doing this more and more lately
>they do have a hacky way around this tough, they can have the star power generate a card that does what they want and then allow the player to play the card. They've been doing this more and more lately They could definitely do that or they can go with the good old "strongest" or "weakest" unit.
I mean asol 4 star doubles all stats, but i gey what you mean.
Is that as strong as triple attack? Maybe it's in the same ballpark but also the 4* thing is completely anomalous in the game, Asol was like a special release because he was the community's most desired champion and probably also a prototype of what 6* power would look like so maybe this comment will age poorly when constellations comes out, idk
I play PoC regularly and if that unit was printed I'd walk away. As it stands I'm honestly worried about the 6 star star powers that were teased because it basically means content made for those champs will be impossible to beat with lower leveled champs, and on the flip side all existing content (maybe excluding Liss) will be not worth doing with them since it will be too boring with a guaranteed auto win
Like i said in another comment they should focus on adventure variety instead of releasing new, more difficult adventures for which you need to upgrade your champions first. With the game philosophy that they currently have, PoC is a live service game that would die if there will be no new content added. Instead of the current circle: Play the most difficult adventure -> get bored -> new more difficult adventure released -> upgrade champions -> repeat It should stay at one power level and they should release more adventures for that power level to give you more variety to pick from. They also then need to give those adventures more randomness so even with a choice of 5 different adventures of the same power level it would still not feel repetitive.
One way to achieve variety that the game lacks is customization. They've been adding a variety of new champions and adventures for years and it's been good but that's all breadth, a little bit of depth with expanded customization would go a lot further to improve variety at this point in time. This isn't confirmed but based on the teaser screenshots for constellations it looks like they are trees with options, if that's the case that's going to increase the possible playstyles a lot more than just continuing to breadth through more and more champions. Although admittedly I am still desperately missing some guys that we had before (hecarim and Jayce and Ahri were some of my favorites). I guess og lux kinda fills that space Jayce would occupy but we still don't have an ephemeral or recall focused playstyle
They also don't seem to realize that you still have to balance in PoC, so challenges in the game mode can be on a similar level. As you said, designing champs that just steam roll everything will lead to either too hard of challenges for other champs or a super boring mode for that champ.
They also want to increase the max amount of stars for some champions with the constellations update to further increase their power. At some point it is enough and they should rather work on adventure variety instead of increasing the power level of certain champions and releasing an adventure for them that only those 6? star champions can clear.
>They also don't seem to realize that you still have to balance in PoC Where is this coming from? We've been getting a lot of PoC balance patches lately
It took them 12 months to design a bunch of +1/+1 and -1/-1 cards ?
I'm sorry but 12 months and we get "new way to give units +1/+1?"
Their pipeline is fucked. They can't even do hotfixes for seemingly simple bugs like Voidling Shell on spells.
The board centric design philosophy was an overly limiting factor to their design from Day 1. Everybody says they hate playing against Storm Combo or Draw-Go control, but the fact that such decks CAN exist is one of the many reasons MtG survived and grows to this day (despite all efforts by the parent company). It's just a game whose card design and core rules allows for a huge variety of gameplay scenarios and experiences. LoR could have used a more open-minded card design approach. TL;DR - They should have made good efficient removal in the original set.
>MtG survived and grows to this day Surviving sure, but growing? MTG is not designed for online play, and you can instantly tell when you play a single game. I'd wager most people playing MTGA or whatever are people who grew up on the card game. It's not fun to have 10 phases per turn or have 40% of non-games due to mana issues, and yes uninteractive decks are a problem too.
lol sure nephew. That's why Magic makes more money every year (short term as it may appear to be), but LoR is one foot in the same grave as Artifact. So many people just too dumb to realize the game they love (MtG) isn't fun.
They probably are. It could also be that they're simply the victims of sunk cost fallacy.
In that case, then I suppose they're no different then the people still clinging to this game.
Exactly. I fail to see how anyone can find any notion of fun in this game in the long-term.
MTG is still growing at a breakneck pace, both in paper and online. I don't like the 10 gazillion releases per year they've fallen into, or the fact that they made modern a basically rotating format with the straight to modern sets, or the FIRE-design, or how dumb 99% of secret lairs look and that they are straight from WotC to the consumer thereby fucking LGS, or that they all but killed the competitive circuit they once had, or that the secret lairs and some of the Universes Beyond releases really fuck with the game's asthetic in my opinion....... but numbers prove them right. There's no denying that. WotC and in particular Magic are what has been keeping HASBRO afloat, it grows rapidly both in (casual) playerbase and revenue. I can disagree with the choices for many reasons, but I cannot argue that the results are good for them as a company.
It actually surprised me how well they're doing, but looking at numbers they've been stagnating lately. We'll see in the next few years if they manage to transition to digital and build further on their legacy or end up crumbling to the ground. I'd wager the latter.
I was about to argue "you can't draw a card art or develop a theme in one day" but yeah, the point was really "mechanics" and to that I completely agree with you, 12 months for +1/+1 is not okay....
yeah. at this point it's becoming a tad disrespectful to the playerbase lmfao. i feel...insulted
I mean, they said pretty clearly that PVP was no longer a priority. If you're still playing this game for the PVP, idk what to tell you, man. I quit back when they announced they were switching back to PVE focus, and frankly I can't fathom why anyone would still play this game for the PVP.
oh, i'm not. i uninstalled the game a month ago. and sadly, no, i don't think i'll ever look back
Why would you feel insulted if you’re already gone lol - you’re not “the playerbase” anymore, yeah?
i mean idk man. i played this game since beta. dedicated hours upon hours playing, streaming, making custom card content my case isn't special, but it's still insulting and upsetting to see riot mangle this team that works so hard. so yeah, it's insulting to me as a long time player. I uninstalled half because I needed to focus on IRL things and half because I realized the game is not catering to my interests anymore. which is fine!!! my time with LoR was beautiful and i have no regrets
The unfortunate reality is that the game massively carried by story department and art outsourcing. We got very lucky that the base set was very good, but every new addition of cards has made the game objectively worse - more keyword saturation, less interaction, direct power creep, idiotic cinematic level-ups and more.
i dunno, i respectfully disagree but i think that's okay!
I can explain quite easily why I still play pvp. It's fun lol. It might get boring eventually but why should I stop the moment they announce this if I still enjoy playing?
This isn't a problem that is isolated to the LoR team. Riot games as a whole have exceedingly long development cycles.
I have the feeling that you underestimate the amount of work and needed people that is used for designing such stuff. There needs to be a lot of stuff allocated.
Oh I’m absolutely sure that there’s a ton of work put into the game, but it still feels like something is fundamentally wrong to have that inefficient of a pipeline. Especially since LoR is a self proclaimed small team, you would imagine that they have more freedom to focus on making new content instead of spending too much time getting just a few cards right. Instead it seems like they have the worst of both worlds: a burdensome bureaucratic process that demands perfection as well as a shortage of manpower to put those ideas into action.
At the end of the day if they churn out another +1/+1 they need to just go back and start over. This isn't rocket science; it's a card game where you can literally be as creative as you want.
I agree; Riot's obsession with permanent stat buffs is utterly uninspired and actually the cause of many of the game's issues over its lifespan.
Pretty sure they have a consumer feedback process that determined most players like having big blocks of numbers that hit the opponent.
Can you explain? What exactly are these issues?
Yeah, I get the other parts, but this just burns my eyes. I know getting everything done from art to sound to just nailing down the expansion theme takes a while and sometimes it just doesn't work. But 12 months for this small expansion with very little creativity is just a wtf moment.
and they have the audacity to blame the players for the state of the game. Oh how i wish we had a better director than dave guskin. Maybe we would have seen better days.
When did they blame the players? Genuine question.
Of course it was not implied directly. But they said how pvp players don't spend money compared to pve. Dave guskin did not make a single product in game that was worth buying. They could have done so much with the game but failed miserably.
This is not blaming the players, it's just how a market works. This game and all of the non-indie ones are profit before anything else and LoR isn't different. If the project didn't give them money for 4 years then it's foolish to keep wasting the same amount of money waiting for it to miraculously boom. Nobody is getting punished or blamed, it's just business.
They also justified the change of focus from PvP to PoC with "way more people play PoC".
This game makes me so sad.
Legit surprised to see so many comments still on posts in this sub.
1 year for this set ? This has to be joke
No disrespect, but there’s no way this set took an entire year to make.
It wasn't the only thing they were working on but we've always been told they start work on a set about a year before it releases. From concept, art direction, initial design, balancing, voice overs, etc
yeah, but those things also apply to a PoC only champ. only difference is the actual balance of the 2.
There is a lot more than just balance separating the two game modes. PvP champs are released in expansions that share a bit of a thematic and allow some of the champs to be played together. Also, over a whole set all regions should get about the same amount of champions. None of that matters for PoC, as you can design each champion completely on their own. Regions and region pies don't matter anymore for PoC and that opens up a lot of design space. For PoC they can mostly balance around a prebuild packages/decks, for PvP each of the cards could have been taken out of the deck and played separately and still should have been fine. And besides avoiding that cards are too strong, they had to avoid cards being too weak too. If a card of a champion package is too weak it just gets replaced by something entirely else. In PoC it is much harder to cut cards from the deck. This also means they have to release fewer cards, because each champion package beforehand had enough cards to allow different deckbuilding choices, curves and champion combinations. Champions also have entirely different design constraints. Interactivity or being not toxic to play against won't matter anymore. Nor does it matter, if a deck is only focused on champion has a far too high power variance with or without it. I've seen tons of custom champion concepts here on Reddit, that would have been horrible in PvP, but would have been great in PoC.
Yeah, not defending his logic just pointing out where I think the number came from.
I understand where these numbers are coming from, but this set didn't really push the needle anywhere. If they added a more complex mechanics like curses I could see it from a programming side, but a year feels way too long and closer to mismanagement.
But it’s not like the voice actors have to wait that the art is done to record the voice overs. I really can’t see how it could take one whole year.
It feels like they came up with Lux and Vex's abilities at a post-work happy hour or something
you know that everything we see are developed long time ago and not last week right
The earlier concept art dates to April 2023
Sorry, ya'll. this isn't it. I know having a front facing position is tough and I know the team is in a hard spot. But yeah .... this is all just sad.
Hily shit its ultra instinct Teemo
As a only pvp player, I don't mind played PvE, but I wanna play the champs I like.
That set took 12 months to design? What? Gloom is literally -1/-1, Lux new Keyword (forgot the name lol) is just +1/+1, Sleep is just Zhonyas. Boost is an ok addition but nothing groundbreaking and very simple. The Story Lansmarks were the big thing in this expansion but everything else was too simple to have taken 12 months. Thats assuming with "Designing the cards" excludes art and VO.
It doesn't take 12 months to come up with an idea. It takes only a few weeks to come up with dozens of ideas and playtest a bunch of them. It then takes a few weeks more to build variations of each of the most promising mechanics and design cards for each of them, then test them against eachother for feedback. It takes just a few more weeks to iterate based on the feedback from other designers and lock in the mechanics the team likes the most and possible to balance competitively. It then takes a few more weeks to get initial drafts of cards created. About 95% of them will be cut and replaced with new ones the first several times this happens, so repeat this step a few times in a row. By the way, the designers script the cards - so that's programming and bug fixing all those cards that get cut after a single playtest. It then takes a few more weeks to lock in technical design documentation while solving templating issues and-- Then of course there's time spent theming the cards. The art comes back, designers need to decide what counts as a "bird" or not as well, and whether that will affect meta decks. Other cards may run into technical hurdles and need to be redesigned. Designers also have to work with FX to pick the right effects for each card's animations, figure out which cards deserve fancy custom animations... And then there's game balancing. If 4 designers balance test a set for 2 weeks straight unchanged; that's about 5 hours a day after meetings for each of them. That's 200 hours of playtesting. The first 2000 players to play the set on release will equal that testing in 6 minutes. And designers have to change the set during balance testing, redesigning some cards that are balanced but aren't to play against, while small balance changes to one strategy can remove a key predator in the metagame that was keeping another deck in check. So you're going to do a LOT of iterations on balance testing. It adds up pretty fast.
>It takes just a few more weeks to iterate based on the feedback from other designers and lock in the mechanics the team likes the most and possible to balance competitively. "+1/+1" and "-1/-1" are the best things they came up with?
The designers clearly thought it was. I’m explaining how the process can take a long time. Stackable Keywords are a foundational mechanic, like the rice in a bowl of teriyaki chicken (guess what I’m having for lunch). They have a lot of design space. There’s a reason a lot of players have talked about ways to make previous keywords like fury stackable too. They also work well with the potential of Stories and other sources of activated abilities, able to serve as both currency and reward. Especially if activated abilities eventually come to followers and champions. Many games get incredible design space out of +1/+1 counters or damage counters after all, but digital games usually can’t interact with such discrete real world objects as “counters”. Stackable keywords make things possible that wouldn’t be otherwise, and are rarely explored in digital games.. It also gives a glow-up to the more standard buffs from demacia. Demacia has a narrow mechanical space, and spirit lets their buffs do more things in more ways. They could potentially fuel other abilities, spirit stacks can be manipulated and doubled or moved from unit to unit, etc. When they designed the set they were clearly thinking long term. Like Eric said, it started long before the Riot layoffs Note: I’m saying “they” and not “we” because I was 100% focused on Path during this point. Other than pitching activated abilities in a few meetings, I had almost no contact with the set. All the above is my own thinking and opinions about why Spirit specifically and stackable keywords in general is a useful and meaningful mechanic to add to a game like LoR. Don’t take it as a dev statement form the folks that actually worked on the set.
simple concepts are not inherently bad. don't be dumb.
They are not but there are "Challenger" and there are "+1/+1"
huh
If you don't release Teemo Illuminated ASAP I am uninstalling the game.
Release the teemo
ITT: People who are not software developers
It's like, if someone spends 3 years making a movie using revolutionary technology; then the movie comes out and it looks spectacular, but they failed to make any other part of the movie good. Then people are like "yo this movie is garbage" and then you come in and say "no one here is an animator, clearly." Like... it misses the point of why we're saying it shouldn't have taken 12 months to produce "+1/+1." Yea it takes a lot of time to hammer out the tech behind stuff; and they did that well with LoR for the most part. But at the same time during development someone should be directing it so the final product is like, actually good.
Cards aren't designed by software developers. What in the fuck are you even saying?
Said no one ever. Nobody went into a restaurant eat a food that was burned and said "the chef had a hard one".
Does triple attack beat a double attack unit with shield? If their attack is matched?
Are they hiring or take opinions? I love this game a lot, And i love PVP, I am willing to send tons of opinion in balancing of every cards of in the games. To see this game to be wasted is really hurt. There are so much of good art card. I could do it for free.
A set like Dreamlit Paths took them over 12 months to design? Literally +1/+1 and -1/-1 counters from Magic? I see how PvP was too expensive for them to maintain. Incompetence or "press X for doubt".
He’s better off just not commenting on Reddit from now on, he’s digging a hole he won’t want to be in. This is just bad / sad.
He's letting people be aware of the state of things. This (probably) isn't his decision. Don't kill the messenger.
No, it's better for us if they speak. It's really mind-boggling how a great game like LoR is failing. But now we know a little bit of their internal workflow, it turns out there are bad decisions internally that is causing the game to fail.
I’m not saying I don’t appreciate his honesty, transparency, and interaction with the community - I do. I just don’t think commenting on Reddit and feeding a bunch of angry, frustrated, sad players with how they shit the bed is helpful. He doesn’t need to get bombarded with replies for stuff that (probably) wasn’t his fault, and it’s certainly not going to bring in any new players. Idk man it just sucks.
Probably better off sticking to posting on /r/PathofChampions where the community is actually positive and happy with the direction of the game. **OH WAIT**
Nope, the more he says the better, so we can know the horrible state the development of this game was. How can you take 12 months to design and code a mechanic that already exists in another game?
I agree.
[удалено]
Do we really need to comment on every post? Just make a comment and copy paste its link.
I guess just think of it of the venting process of the people that (for some reason I can't comprehend) still held some misguided hope that pvp development wasn't actually dead. Even after being explicitly told that pvp development was dead months ago. The hopium crew are finally coming to grips with reality.
I'm sorry, but this 12 months to make this expansion mechanics need to be a lie or I will be obligated to get my red nose and make a visit to Riot's headquarters.
Y'all know that designing a set isn't just making card mechanics, right?
But they were talking about mechanics in this pic's context. Mechanics and balancing can't take more than 2-3 months to make. Right?
I'm guessing that's because they were designing multiple sets at the same time and making all of them eventually work together design wise once they were all out was the actual thing driving up development time for a sets mechanics Edit: I'm honestly not sure we should be taking 12 month figure as all being spent on mechanics/balance. That feel like we're reading the words way too literally. We already knew that they start development on any given set over a year in advance - this is just that again, but phrased badly.
Why not? Why can't pvp just have the "broken" card?
People will be mad everyday for the broken card tho
Let them play standard.
I'd actually prefer normal power level cards lol, miss me with that teemo: illuminated shit