Thread:Willbachbakal/@comment-26815373-20161225053323/@comment-1330314-20170211202158

LivesByProxy wrote: And the gameplay around it thus far seems to be very... IDK how to put it. Minimal? I see the enemy with a ward in inventory, they wander off out of sight, the ward is no longer in their inventory - I know they've warded, but beyond relaying that info to my jungler, their is no way to avoid that ward beyond just choosing another gank path or using invis?

I agree, I'd say the issue with information-based gameplay in League is that it's not all that deep, on top of often being poorly conveyed. Ideally, if someone dropped a ward, that would offer gameplay to play with it, i.e. take time to destroy it, wait it out, or take another path, but often all of that just boils down to not going through a certain area for an extended period of time. It's both predictable and unpredictable for the wrong reasons (you generally know what's being warded and when, but don't have enough information to make nuanced plays around it).

LivesByProxy wrote: Ward skins, if only a tiny part, do profit Riot.

This is surprisingly a fairly large consideration I hadn't thought of, yeah. It frustrates me especially that Riot would tie priced cosmetics to items that have experienced massive variation over time, as it also hinders potential gameplay improvements in the above case. Perhaps there's room for compromise, though, and both the ward pods and Scuttle Crab shrines could keep the skin, though ultimately I think those cosmetics might just be worth abandoning in the end, even on Live, since wards are way too unstable to use as a monetary resource.

LivesByProxy wrote: The jungle would also feel cluttered (potentially, maybe) with all of these plants. It'd be one thing if Riot had made all the plants associated with vision at the start, but going back and adding new plants specifically for vision while we still have the Honey Fruit and Blast Cone (the non-vision plants) seems. . . wierd to me.

The ideal I had in mind was that the jungle would feel like this alive place, with something interesting to do at most major locations, but wouldn't have, say, two plants right next to each other or the like. Currently, plants only take up a tiny portion of the jungle, and leave massive holes to be filled in, particularly around top and bot lanes. I also feel there might be room for more power-ups besides vision, but since sight is itself tremendously useful, powerful and potentially versatile, I think it deserves to be expressed in more ways than, say, a knockback or a heal.

The other part to this is that I think it would be acceptable for the jungle to be more complicated if it were merely a shift in complexity, as it would involve the removal of wards and trinkets. While it's understandable to want perfect systems from the very start (I definitely get the same feeling), League itself is a massive system constantly in evolution, and none of it has ever remained unchanged. Most systems also tend to play out very different in practice from what they would in theory, which is what opens up opportunities for improvements.

LivesByProxy wrote: This goes back to something you mentioned earlier, about there being a limited number of states (I assume you mean alarm levels?) the level and NPCs could be in.

What I meant was that singleplayer stealth games have a finite amount of action states: basically, at every state you're in, i.e. position, resources, time, there's a limited, predictable number of things you can do based on complete information, since the environment and AI around you is also fully predictable. Every singleplayer level therefore starts out with a limited amount of action states, which you then usually reduce (i.e. by taking out and hiding enemies) down to just one or a handful, which usually tends to be a "safe" set of states in which nothing you do will generate alerts or force you to redo anything.

To a degree, that last "safe" state is somewhat desirable to some -- you've beaten the level, and get to feel your achievement by switching from careful, restricted movement to much faster and more open mobility. Some of my favorite moments from Deus Ex and Dishonored came from being able to fully explore a level I could previously only tiptoe through. Because of this, though, singleplayer stealth games have run into a formula, one that manifesto points out, in that you end up with stealth games whose end objective ends up being to no longer be stealthy, and so through actions that violate "true" stealth, i.e. knocking out or killing enemies, and thereby leaving traces. Enemy AI needs to be predictable and forgetful in those games, and usually the default action upon failure is often to just reload a previous save point. This ends up creating a genre that is much shallower than it could be, one that is stuck in its own tropes.

Because of this, I agree that multiplayer and/or procedurally-generated stealth games are an evolution that needs to happen on a much larger scale, because those generate the kinds of environments where you don't have complete information at any given time, where you can't just reload a save or wait for the enemy to reset if you get detected, and where there may never be a solved status where stealth just doesn't matter thereafter. League fills all of these criteria, as you mentioned, so it's really a matter of implementing stealth, rather than just invisibility, in a manner that adds gameplay for everyone.

LivesByProxy wrote: I guess I'm just rambling at this point - I'm not sure what my point was - but Riot needs to give us enough vision options that we can 1) create a multilayered defensive information system (I called this a 'network of vision' earlier, similar to an obstacle course that demands precise timing and careful cautious movements to avoid being seen / detected, i.e. stealth); 2) ways of gaining vision 'offensively' - scouting, gaining information, misleading enemies; 3) ways to avoid and preempt both 1 & 2, preferably by telegraphing and good clarity. All of your plant options meet these criteria, which is great. (The 'lantern' plant is the possible exception - it seems like you can only use it for no.2, as it can't be 'set up' to provide a defensive line of vision.)

I'd say the lantern plant does both 1 and 2, since it's a static, permanent objective that can be used both defensively (you can use it to guard your own jungle for a limited duration) and offensively (it can see through nearby brush). Ideally, all of those plants should also fulfill criterion number 3, since they'd appear at set locations and respawn at predictable intervals once consumed (plus their growth would indicate how long until they reappear). I agree with the objectives you've set out, though I also think it's worth pointing out that vision, by nature, always has both an offensive and defensive component: revealing an area lets you know a path is safe to take, which both gives you more security when navigating the map, and an edge when trying to ambush your opponent.