Thread:Willbachbakal/@comment-26815373-20161225053323/@comment-1330314-20170130071055

That's the thing: multiplayer games, especially RTSes and MMORPGs, tend to have difficulty with stealth gameplay, because their third-person or top-down perspectives, coupled with the immense potential variation in environments and positioning of enemies, makes it difficult to implement "typical" stealth playstyles a la Thief or Dishonored, which use tightly controlled environments, blind spots and relatively predictable AI to create hand-crafted puzzles for the player to sneak through. The latter games often make stealth a matter of memorizing predictable movement patterns, visualizing how enemies cover each other and elaborating long-term plans on how to navigate levels that, while full of NPCs in motion, are actually fairly static, in that there is a limited number of states they can be in. By contrast, multiplayer tends to be extremely fast-paced and full of targets that are inherently dynamic and unpredictable, which is why so many games have resorted to invisibility as a means of giving the player the feeling of stealth, instead of implementing true stealth gameplay.

So far, the only multiplayer game I have seen come close to implementing stealth successfully is Warframe: the game does have several player characters with invisibility, but any of them can sneak around and play stealthily, in levels whose layouts and enemy distributions are procedurally generated. It's not entirely "true" multiplayer stealth, in that the targets are still NPCs, but I think it gives a pretty good idea of what it could be like: the game gives player characters tremendous movement across spacious rooms, with lots of places to sneak across and get an overview of how to approach the next few areas. It's not perfect, but it still manages to bring stealth gameplay to a level of speed and dynamism that you'd find in League.

Bringing this back to LoL, a big advantage the game has compared to, say, Dota or Warcraft, is its brush, which creates blind spots in the environment for players to exploit. I think when you're going to elaborate on stealth gameplay, you're also really going to have to discuss the environment players operate in, and I think there's likely a lot more opportunities for enabling that: a lot of thick walls, for example, could have crevices implemented that would allow players to hide there for an ambush, or use them as a shortcut to dash over those large gaps. Brush could also be made more dynamic, as shown by Ivern, and you could also implement periodic growths of brush across the map that would open up more stealth routes. Invisibility would likely still be a fixture in the game, but it should just be one potential tool for stealth, rather than shorthand for it (especially since the playstyles it encourages often run counter to actual stealth gameplay).