What Can Riot Learn From DotA2?
“Riot Pls” is the usual term used when a gamer, frustrated by a mechanic in League of Legends, wishes Riot had done something differently. In a break from my usual topic of covering what is obvious to Professionals but maybe not to the beginner of ranked play, I’m going to talk about what Riot can learn from other MOBAs out there, most notably Valve’s entry to the genre, DotA2. From the client, to matchmaking, to certain in-game mechanics, Riot has a lot to learn in terms of what makes a user base stick to playing their game. This is something that genre competitor Valve and Esports competitor Blizzard have been perfecting for over a decade. This is not going to be a rage filled rant, but hopefully a balanced view of some things Riot could learn from its competitors to greatly improve the game.
Queue Trolls and Forced Dodging
Lets be realistic here, if you’ve played ranked or even normal League of Legends, you’ve encountered a troll in the team select stage. This person will be adamant they’re playing their preferred position regardless of pick order (the official manner in which roles are given out) or team synergy, or even the skill level of your team mates in certain roles. At this point you have two options:
1 – Play the game with the troll and hope for the best. You might have been able to quickly rework your team composition around the troll to get something workable, but even then it is likely your annoying team-mate isn’t going to cooperate in the game, so your chances of victory aren’t great. On the plus side, they might do something you can report them for if they’re stupid, however this is little consolation if you’ve just lost some precious Elo.
2 – Dodge. You now have to sit and play ARAM for 30 minutes while you wait out the timer, or for an hour if it’s your second game of the day. Meanwhile the troll gets right back in to another game and is potentially going to be doing the exact same thing to the next unfortunate group of people. This option is what most people will choose to do; after all, waiting 30 minutes is far better than losing Elo.
Neither option is great for anyone. Either way, the innocent party usually ends up as the one getting the penalty.
So how does DotA 2 deal with the same situation?
The main way that DotA2 deals with this is having champion select in the game proper, not before the game. You are loaded in to the map, on the game servers where everything is being recorded, and then you select your champion. DotA2 has a less strict meta-game compared to LoL, which does make champion select somewhat simpler, but the main point is that if a troll decides to attempt to ruin a game with a useless pick, they are going to be forced to play that game, they can’t try and force someone to dodge.
So what can Riot do?
One of the main issues Riot faces is the fact the game client (or lack thereof; it’s just an Adobe Air application) is separate from the actual game client. The champion select is based on a different server to the game server, so there are no records of pre-game chat and it’s simply not possible for us to have champion select in the actual game. Reddit user ArchangelPT comes up with an interesting idea in this post from earlier this week. He suggests having a system in place whereby after a game is dodged, the other players on the team can choose to forgive the dodging player if they felt the dodge was necessary. While this is a great idea on the surface, some other Redditors did come up with one major issue: vote rigging. It wouldn’t be too hard for you to agree to dodge and forgive the dodger if the enemy team composition isn’t one you think you can beat, and you don’t feel like playing the game. It is however still an interesting idea that could be developed into something workable until Riot produce a proper game client that would allow them to having a more robust system.
Players leaving mid game
There have been many proposals as to what the situation should be if one player leaves the game, most of them rotating around the idea of increasing the passive gold gain for the team without a player, but like many things this would be abused. DotA2 offers a very simple yet effective solution to this problem. If a player leaves the game, after five minutes anyone else can leave the game without penalty; though of course there are criteria that need to be met and there are some penalties. The leaving player will be put on a lower priority for finding games if they leave two games within a set time period. Game records are still made as well, if First Blood has been given then the first team to leave gets the game counted as a loss and the other team gets recorded as a win.
But why haven’t Riot implemented this if it’s such a great system?
Like with many things, Riot is afraid of abuse, and rightly so. It wouldn’t be too difficult to abuse someone on your team to get them to leave so you can get away from the game you’re not going to win without losing Elo. On top of this we must remember that DotA2 doesn’t actually have a formalised ranking system. The closest it gets is a system similar to hidden Elo in LoL normal games, though this is expected to change with the move from Beta to Full Release. This is important because a lot of League of Legends is balanced around what the best people playing the game can do. Yes, you might think Blitzcrank is OP and needs a nerf, but in reality until we see him being abused to a game breaking level at a major tournament, this isn’t going to happen. This makes taking anything from another game without a comparable system hard to properly analyse as we can’t see the full effects. Naturally, this is something that I suspect Riot will have thought about, but presently it isn’t something that they seem to be pursuing.
Region Locking
One of the biggest downfalls of League of Legends is the fact it’s region locked. You create an account on a server group, i.e. NA, EU-West or EU-North East and you are stuck on that region’s servers. This is problematic for many not wanting to play on servers close to them or those with friends in different regions. This problem is made even worse once someone has invested a lot of money in RP and so doesn’t want to create a new account to play with distant friends. DotA2 gets around this by simply having region select built in to the game queue, you can choose to play on whatever server you wish to before you queue for a game, completely removing the problem created in League of Legends.
So where does this leave us?
In the last few days, since I started playing a few DotA2 games, I noticed a few major things I think LoL could improve on- but it is incredibly hard to see just how well they could be implemented into League of Legends effectively. All in all, Riot have managed to balance the game pretty well considering the handicap of not having a proper client. For any major change to come about, full investment in a standalone League of Legends client would be needed, and that is something I hope we see before too long. The issues I’ve stated aren’t enough to make me stop playing the game (and perhaps this why Riot don’t seem too rushed to improve it) or enough to make me play DotA2 permanently. It does raise certain questions as to whether Riot is working on the larger issues, as opposed to focusing simply on more champions and game balance.
What are your thoughts?
The ‘preselected role’ thing has been suggested before, with ways to avoid issues. You could still swap if you choose to, and you wouldn’t be champion locked so you can still take supports not officially recognized as supports for example. People say Riot doesn’t want to enforce the meta, but quite honestly this meta has been in place since late S1. The only way it could have changed is if Riot did something about the 0 CS duo lane situation, but they wussed out as expected. This means they want things to stay the same for another year. There is no reason at all why they shouldn’t just go ahead and force roles pre-match for ranked and normal draft, leaving blind pick normals for screwing around.
No more asshats screaming MID/TOP OR FEED, no more fifth pick having to troll or dodge to avoid getting 0 cs support; because few people actually enjoy playing that slot and wouldn’t have even queued if they knew they were getting stuck support. People who actually WANT to play support get much faster queues under this system, while the mids and tops will either have to wait it out longer or expand their roles. Either way, you get the roles you want to actually play instead of someone getting stuck playing something they didn’t want to.
Honestly, I feel no need for the queue dodging and trolls to attempt to be ‘corrected’. Its an online game and if you want to get around it, set up a team.
As for the region locking, I would actual be interested in a region selection system being implemented on something like the patcher before we ‘start’ the game, or the adobe air client I should say.
@Shyhalu
This isn’t incorrect.
Riot never endorsed pick order as official roles, you need to edit that out imo. They never said if role call or pick order came first, just not to be a douche.
@DannyBoy
And dota stole it from warcraft 3. Done.
I don’t think riot is going to spend money on a new standalone client since if they feel the need for one they would have added it in the beta
@TellsWhatsHeard
… As they then would force the meta
@Enfinex
Riot doesn’t want to create the meta as misheard whisper said. This includes the number of players/champions in a lane. 2 bot, 2 solos and a jungler is the meta and therefore the although smart idea would not work in reality.
@Misheard Whisper I think you sort of misunderstood. I think he was aiming at lane/role selections pre-champion select, not which champion to pick. Lets say I want to play top. Then, when i queue for ranked, I have to press that i can play top lane in the match the system puts me into. If i can play both top and jungle, then i check both those boxes. Then, when the match is found, i get to play one of the choices i selected pre-champion select. If it’s top, I can pick the champion I want to play, it doesnt have to be a “top lane champion”. I can play heimer jungle or crittlesticks adc if i want to, but to be honest, i believe the trollers do so because they dont get the lane they want. Most of the trolls are only trolling to get someone to leave, so that they can change the pick order(they usually want mid or top). So instead of getting a random pick order, the lane order is already settled by the client when a match is set up.
My point is: It’s highly unlikely that people will continue trolling when they get the lane they want. They can ofcourse still troll by picking heimerdinger jungle, but that is a problem you can’t really deal with, since its 110 champions and no restrictions about which one to pick.
And by the way, the meta is kind of forcing its way in, either Riot likes it or not. As the review stated: Riot takes changes into consideration from what the pro players are doing. So the pro players kinda sets the meta.
@Stincuta Paul This won’t happen, because Riot have stated that they do not want to create a meta. That is, they won’t acknowledge champs as ‘top’, ‘mid’, ‘bot’ and so forth. They have their own set of categories (melee, ranged, support, assassin etc) that don’t shoehorn champions into a lane. They don’t want to limit players like that by making them feel like they HAVE to take Twisted Fate mid. Maybe the meta demands it of you, but Riot definitely won’t. So they won’t implement any system acknowledging the meta as such.
@Stincuta Paul way to quote me without quoting, haha xd
I personally think it that for League of legends it will be good if they would do the system that players in WOW USE , and by that i’m talking about the DUNGEON FINDER in WORLD OF WARCRAFT where u chose what u want to BE before the game even starts …It would be OK to see how it works if u get to chose ur LANE and ur ROLE before the champion selection in LOL because then there wouldn’t be so much hate between players i think and maybe it would become more enjoyable.
I agree in this but the problem would be that people could just troll with it. Say if you are queue´ing 5 premade you can just vote kick 1 as a troll, it should be concidered though
tl;dr: title + i don’t know
Why doesn’t RIOT makes a ”vote to kick” option???? In my opinion that would reduce the number of trolls drastically! For example a simple button on champion select that could be pressed for each player from the same team and if 3 of 4 (this excludes the troll/unfriendly player) would get kick and would have to wait a 30mins penality… i dont see many ways of unproper abuse… player would be happier without a troll and trolls would be punished for the harassement. in the current days what i think about RIOT is ”stop making new champions and focus the atentions on the real client problems that everyone is unhappy about”…..
@Kleitarxos
While there would be benefits to this one, the main disadvantage is the potential lack of flexibility here (i.e., I’d like to play top or mid, and don’t mind which so long as I can counter-pick; or jungle/top, etc). If the queue was only a suggestion, not locking you into that role (just making sure your teammates aren’t also all gunning for mid-lane), that’s better, but it also leaves you stuck if you’d like to switch roles after seeing the enemy team’s picks. Lots of champions have multiple roles, especially jungle/top; maybe I want to pick Lee Sin early, and my team can decide if I should go top or jungle depending on what jungler/top the enemy picks. (this is all assuming Draft Mode, I should note.)
If you place any restrictions on “must own X champions of Y role” to queue for that role, that also hurts players using slightly less conventional picks (unless they go ahead and categorize Yi as being jungle/top/AD bot/AP mid), and it could also hurt first-pickers, who might want to pick a champion early and trade it to someone else. We’ve all seen those little “role” checkboxes in the Champion tab… if we’re to follow Riot’s suggestions there, then we shouldn’t be playing Gragas as an AP (he’s a melee fighter), and our support should be playing Teemo or Nidalee.
Being able to “flag” yourself as preferring certain roles might be a good option, however, maybe allowing other players to hover over your name and view your favored roles. A mini-profile if you will.
Maybe two people called mid, but one of them has mid/top listed, the other has mid/support listed. Depending on what the team needs, we can ask one of these players to play that role, knowing that they (presumably) have some skill in that role as well. We already have a support, so let’s let the mid/support player get a role he’s comfortable with, and ask the other one to go top.
Changing their client to fix some major issues with trolling isn’t going to change how the game plays. You have to be trolling with this post, there’s no way you could be this thick headed.
@Kleitarxos
……you’re pretty dumb
Its not really a bad troll when you realize ad kennen is op for example
Stop META-hugging so much. M5 is M5 because all they did was your version of troll and i love GG
@dotaratatat
@xexanos
If you want EXPERIMENTATION gather 4 people and go normal custom or even 5 man ranked and experiment anything you want there!
Just don’t troll with other 4 people you don’t know…
If exist a meta is because work…if you don’t want play that meta go play premades 5 and do your fancy comps.
I have one idea for solving atleast one of the problems regarding trolls.
For those of you who have played World of Warcraft, you know how it works.
For those of you who hasnt; when you queue for random dungeon or raid, you have to pick roles. You can pick several roles, but when you are matched up for a dungeon/raid, you get one specific role, and you have to stick with it in order to down the bosses. And ofcourse, like tanks and healers are more rare in WoW, junglers and supports will have a shorter queue, and those roles will probably be taken more seriously. It would also be easier to report those who choose to trollpick, since(as far as I know), theres no rule against playing a setup that is different from the original meta.
In future, they may add it into the games (gonna took real long) so don’t judge them. THEY ARE HUMAN NOT ROBOT, THEY DO NOT WORK 24/24, 365/365. PEACE OUT.
I love LOL no matter what. If LOL change everything or just a little thing like Dota2 then it would be called “copy” (for some fuckers always spam about this everywhere on Twitch). You guys have to think, LOL and Dota2 is two different games, would be boring if it is the same. Also, you don’t have a right to compare and stuff. Let me say this… once you make a huge, famous game that has some awesome things, rules, etc. and I was like “that is a brilliant idea, let make it our…”, if other decides to play my game and not ur, Im gonna be like “UMADBRO, TROLOLOLOL”
The end, I get sue for that…..
@shrimpshimia
This provides a serious problem in high elo matches where teams like clg/tsm/etc… can vote to dodge people until they get there entire comp into a match and can be play premades instead of solo que or once again if you dont like your comp and you can just vote out the worst player in the team. It would result in far too much manipulation capabilities within the teams. LoL’s system is fine if you cant wait an 30 mins to get matched with other players just play with the troll its a lose and in time it wont matter if you won or lost that game anyways. Even in ranked if you lose elo and you should truely be where ever you were at then you will make it back there in time
What DOTA 2 does about the champion select is nothing better than wat LoL does. So idk what you can learn from that. This guy doesnt even know what he was writing about zz. Just go play DOTA2 and never ocme back.
@ideatime
different people play different positions in different lanes need less to say some one could play adc top which would then give you the possibility of 2 adcs so it doesnt make sense to have a que for individual slots when people play the game so diversely
I was thinking the same.
Its the best option so far in my opinion.
@Kleitarxos
That would force a meta and would leave no room for experimentation…
@Alejandrio
Hahahaha Dota2 > LoL balancing heros
Why not do it like WoW? Queue for Top/Mid/Jungle/Support/AD
It could learn how to balance champions.@Aaron
Why not have the que setup in a way where you que for a specific role on a team that way there isn’t an ensuing arguement in the champion select screen over who is going to play which role? Then the que itself places groups of people together based on their role to make a team and then once your on a team you can discuss what the comp will be. Have a requirement like before you can que for a specific role you need X number of champions that play that position. It’s easier to pin point players that are causing problems in champ select and its less of an arguement in ranked ques that you never get the role you want or you are tired of trolls.
Too bad that leave system sucks. Someone leaves after one kill and is hardly punished. “longer que times” Wuu, you lost us a game and all you get is a longer que time.
@Tigrr
yes RIot have access to pre-game chat, and all in all this article is very “empty”. Nothing is rly said in it, ‘cept that you hope that Riot will do something about something that even you don’t know exactly what it is…
in dota if someone goes afk/dc CPU plays for him (and it does really good!) or team can decide to let him afk in base… LOL is really bad compared to dota
Yea i think that would be a better idea…a system where the team can vote before they go into the game if they wanna play with this player or not. Usually if it’s a troll then the entire rest of the team already doesn’t wanna play with this player and go into the game with the mindset of most likely losing it because one player just thinks it’s funny to screw other people’s games.
Iv’e told RIOT alot of times, that they shuld make a “Vote Kick” in the Champion Selection, one problem solved atleast.. Do not include mid-game though, atleast you get ride of these trolls who either random during ranked or just decides to take the most useless Champion to ruin your currently setup.
- ” What can RIOT learn from Ary Alexis”
What? WHAT? Tell me what DotA2 could learn, shit all.
Pretty sure Riot has access to pregame chat. You might wanna double check on that info.
@GottaSuckHisCauseHesDannyPhantom
Regions to lock in for East or West would be nice cause my ping is always around 90 where if they added to different regions for North America i could most likely play with around 50 or lower.
let’s remember that riot is new on these kind of stuff and what they are doing its very impressive
You are seriously comparing DotA UI v/s LoL UI? wtf… and the smite one? totally different OR you’re blind.
Are you kidding? Riots HUD does not resemble either DOTA 2 or Smite in the least bit, and in fact you saying that shows how little you actually know about the MOBA world.
@Hell yes
True, but I don’t play dota2 so I don’t really -care- what they can learn from LoL. I do care what LoL can learn from dota2 since that makes the game I play better ^_^
There are indeed some good thoughts we could further develop. It wouldn’t hurt anyone to have a better system. Let’s also watch out for how the new league system will be.
“One of the biggest downfalls of League of Legends is the fact it’s region locked.”
Really? I think that’s one of the best things that Riot has done in a long time. I don’t remember the last time I’ve complained about playing with someone who couldn’t speak English- yet my friends complain about getting people who speak Russian, Spanish, etc all the damn time.
In the Fizz image it should read “its competitors” instead of “it’s competitors”
Uhh lol? So if somebody trolls, and not for make ppl dodge, then you can’t dodge him instead. that forces you to play with the troll when otherwise could have dodged him. You have to look at both sides of the coin
Yet there’s also a lot DotA2 can learn from League of Legends, so that makes it equal.
well riot already steals everyones hud why not take mathmaking and mechanics, the game idea of league of legends does not fit the new displays which all too closesly resembles that of SMITE and Dota/Dota2. i understand originality is hard for MOBAs and that you can only advance your game so far without getting too close to other games but come on.