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Feedback required and about recent updates!

Hi,

considering the fact that game simulator development is planned from 18.09 - 18.10 and I want to focus solely on this without doing anything except hotfixes for the game, I would like some feedback on what exactly is needed to do before I start working on the new sim.

There are mainly two types of things that I currently have in mind. The goal is to add more variety and things to figure out to the game while I will be working on sim.

1) Champion buffing and nerfing.
The idea is that each week, for example on Saturday daily update, champions will get nerfed/buffed. Top 3 most used champions in team rankeds and league games between 1500+ ELO teams will get nerfed and 3 least used will get buffed by x%. There will be statistics, report and patch notes generated based on that showing the usages and winratios of different champions and showing which champions did get buffed and which nerfed. There were some mixed opinions about it in the chat so I would like to see some more feedback on this. This would force players into switching up the champions and plan ahead on what they want their players exactly to be learning in solo queue for example. It will also reward someone who has secretly been training a little bit weaker champion as this champion will get strong at some point. I think it will add an interesting mechanic to the game.

2) Game simulator tweaking
Quick things I would look to tweak to make the game sim a bit more realistic and mix up the strategies used currently.
a) Buff adc survivability
b) Increase jungler gold and ability to carry

Is there anything else I could do? Meanwhile the rest of the time I plan to go over all the things mentioned in https://www.lolmanager.gg/features-v2 according to the plan. After the new game simulator is implemented I plan to add more transparency to everything - exact values of what facilities do, player champion experience and so on.

As for what has been happening lately:
1) There are now multiple strategies finally so make the most out of them! I was concerned that sandbox would become too difficult a place to practice when everyone can just set a weaker strategy for sandbox and use good strategies for the other type of games. It can be good because it forced people to communicate when they want to practice, but it can be bad for teams who are more of a solo creatures and they will have harder time finding proper opponents to practice against. One solution for that would be to use the same strategy in sandboxes as a team uses in team ranked. This would also mean that teamranked strategy would be locked throughout the whole day after daily update, because otherwise it would still be possible to use a proper teamranked strategy before the upcoming game and then switching back to a 'funny one'.

2) We switched to a dedicated server on Saturday, however the new server right now is actually with weaker specs that it was before - we are just testing out the service and if it works out well we will do another switch at some point.

3) We are also sending out inactivity emails and team reports now after the daily update.

4) Ability to upload custom team icons for credits.

Good luck and have fun!
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I'm not a big fan of balance patches that much. I feel like in real League it's impossible to have perfect balance so the reason for constant patches is just for the variety. In LoL Manager I feel like you could get in a good place where most champions are useful and will have their place. At least if we keep the champion total under like 60 or so.

If you do feel the need for small balance changes then I would suggest having them in the off season after league games are over. That way it gives us time to change are strats to fit the new champions and be ready.

Anyways with the game sim their is an incredibly important bug I hope you can fix soon. It's a bug that stops snowballing basically and will fuck you over early game. When ever you back without dying you won't fully spend all your gold compared to someone who just died. For example if blue side top kills the other top laner he will back and buy less HP then the top who died. Which makes no sense since the one that got the kill should have more HP since he has more gold.

This bug happens in every lane every single time. And it can change the game dramatically.

The other game changing bug is teams not prioritizing mid inhib. I think you should quick fix it so both teams always go down mid until the inhib is down. Right now they ignore inhibs and will go push another lane letting the enemy team get their inhib first.
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Like Jordian I think that weekly champion updates are too much, if suddenly a champ gets buffed/nerf and you got a league game on the same day you can´t do anything against it. The balance patches should roll out shortly after the league ends and impact more/all champs.

Regarding the multiple strategies: I think it´s totally fine if ppl set to troll strat after haveing a ranked game. If they like to put afford into it they should have the chance to hide their strat. But there will always be ppl (mostly like me xD) that are too lazy to do it and that way ppl got possibilties to scrim. + When rankeds happen at night ppl will most likely use the real strat aswell. Furthermore I don´t care showing my strat. The important thing is to hide P/B for league/tournament where you know your enemy, I don´t think we need it for rankeds.

Regarding the Sim: I don´t really know what to change, the big point for me is, that there are multiple strats that counter each other. For example top-strat counters mid-strat, mid strat counters adc-strat and adc-strat counters top-strat. I love searching for new strats and tweaking numbers, but with only one viable strat it´s kinda boring for me. For me it looks like pushing and dmg distribution are the main problems here.
Oh and I would like to give my jungler a focus on which lane he should sit.

Keep going!
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I agree with what jordian said. Weekly patches are a bit overkill I believe. Do them after the league games are done. This is like every 18 days which feels more realistic and healthy to me.

While we're talking about transparency I believe my next point kinda suits that theme, even though not completely. It'd be nice if we could pause the game replays so we can actually freeze a certain point in time and see what exactly happened (by reading chat). Also try to make the chat more clear, it gets spammed a lot and the colours aren't very helpful.
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For the weekly update, i'm not against this feature. It can brings more variety and more implication from the players, giving a little bonus to managers that really pay attention to this. As it was stated though, it could be really problematic if it happens just before a league game, too long to re-adapt. And, moreover, is it necessary when we don't have, in my opinion, a really good system about champion mastery ? What i would expect is something more graphical ,like when you click on more stat on a player, you see little icons, followed by numbers, next to every champions in the game, that would show me a REAL mastery input on the champion for my player. Right now, the only thing we have is a vague number which depend on the note our player had on the previous game (Like for exemple having 8 as rate when my player played the champions only two games... not giving much info, i don't know if he is really good with that champ, just that he did fine in his two games.). So for me, yeah, we need a better system on champion mastery.

And it's pretty much the same for the differents strats. It's a very good thing, but i can't bring myself to think of another strategy. It's already reaaaaally messy at this point to find the best strategy since we don't have much input (we don't see what actually happen in teamfight, if our adc was well placed or not, if he takes the right trades in the lane). For me, strategy right now is just "try to tweek some number here, scrim and watch if i won". At this point, i would like to save strategy like "laning composition for early win" or "safe lane but strong teamfight" or "avoid teamfight and try to split", etc... but honestly, i don't have any idea if this is relevant or not, since i don't really know what my players are doing with my strategies...
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1) Nerfs/Buffs are to be implemented between seasons or it will screw up strategies without giving enough time to adapt, possibly the notes should be released one day before the actual changes.

2) For what concern the sim I ahve few ideas:

- Having teamfights happen slower or slowing the pace of the replays could help understand better what is going on. Adding a pasue button helps too. Now you can only see basically who dies first and who surives in the end.

- An other intresting feature could be checking out how much damage each player did in a given teamfight and an end screen with total damage dealt

- Letting players know what champion is being played during the game (on the scoreboard maybe) since most of the time I am unable to remeber what champions are fighing within the replay

- Adding more clarity on the "Utility" points, sicne we don't really know to what extent they affect the game and on what champions are effective either

Most of the other concerns I had have been expressed in the comments above. Keep up the good work
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I actually like the weekly Patches, i dont think that there will be priblems if you have a League game close, because so does everyone else. I definitely like the idea that the Patches will slowly change the meta over time. To really work that system has to be transparent though, so people can see wich champs are likely zo stay untouched for some time.

For game Sim, i think atm its a little unrealistic, that in a normal game my top laner stacks up 20000 HP because there is no Full build and games are too long. I think implementing a Full Build might already make some more early game focused strats work. Othrr thing i could imagine are like early mid late game makro settings like: push back minions and stall untill late game, rotate and try to catch ppl with a pick comp, splitpush in late game, those things, but i guess thats rather complicated to implement...

And i want a Pause Button for Replays pls
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havent played that much this season because of some real life issues , so i havent really followed every patch closesly , but as someone that proposed champion buffs/nerfs , i do think that buffing some champs and nerfing others is not a bad ideea.

Making it weekly seems a bit much tho , i agree as well.
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Okay, based on current feedback what I would do is give a 48 hour notice on the incoming patch changes. Incoming changes would occur after the last round of league games are played so roughly saying each 3 weeks.
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Better idea yeah. The patch would need to be more important then, if they are not weekly. What will it be ? Random modifications of the champions attributes ? We would need for them to be more relevant in game then (or at least, more information on how they are revelant, cause right now, even if we know what the means, they are a bit of mystery)
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Well I am highly in favor of balance changes, especially at regular intervals, the reason being is that it will keep the game fresh and promote us trying out new strategy's. League of Legends has balance changes regularly (+5 ad anyone?), and it promotes a level of imbalance and uncertainty that keeps the game feeling fresh and new. Changes in strategy also promote people to explore and try out different things, with the most successful of those the ones who fully understand what is going on.

My idea was to do any work to the simulator side between seasons, then champion buffs and nerfs halfway through each season. The overall changes would be less than 1ce per week, but the schedule is the same. Either that or do all changes between seasons. It will take several days to figure out just the basics of any major changes.

To this point, maybe if there were more frequent changes, we could have more accurate tools to analyse our games. Damage done, damage taken, player ratings ect could be a good way to get feedback quickly to compare strategy's. The quicker the rate of change, the more information would be helpful to decipher everything that is going on.
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I like balance patches, but also agree that one a week is overkill. I like the idea of small balance tweaks at the end of each season would be cool, and because it's only ~20 games per season it's still pretty frequent.
Also, instead of most played champs you should do highest and lowest win rates, I think that would balance it more as popular champs may not be the strong ones.
Love the game, I hope you can keep it going!
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I am in favor of balance patches. Maybe not weekly but bi-weekly with 48 hours to change up strategies. Rito is known for both their mid-season and pre-worlds balance patches that some have said have decided championships. I think it is a good thing to add to the simulator as it would add dynamic play vs static strategies and really reward managers that keep up with the game.
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I think balance patches should come way later in the game. As i suggested in the features walls of text (lol) there were other ways to induce champs diversity with no need to nerf/buff, while having advantages in several other regards. this will just lead to identify who is strong again, and repeat, it wont really change much about the identity of the game, it will just be about see patch - apply soloq to buffed champs and test them or smth similar, also if u want to do this we would need individual builds for champs, since for example for top probably some ap champs would rise and we couldn't do general builds anymore or smth, so u get extra work. It is ok change, but i dont think it is the more important thing at this point.

please read my feedback on features if u didnt yet, i'd prefer that direction, changes to strategy that would induce champ diversity on its own , and after that is achieved, then that is the point when we start having balance patches, so this will affect both the strategies used (some would rise or fall according to which champs were stronger/weaker at that point, and the champs would rise and fall simultaneously). However i don't know if this is feasible to do. So its just about that, if u can do that i would highly prefer that option, if not im a bit indifferent if we do balance changes or not, wont have noticeable impact on the game imo.
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I'm perfectly fine with the idea of balance changes/patches etc. however I do believe that these shouldn't be weekly. Every month or so sounds good but having to totally readjust strategy every week does sound painful. As Riot do, possibly minor nerfs weakly wouldn't be a problem however massive ones from week to week to totally shift the meta wouldn't be overly effective imo.
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no "Champion buffing and nerfing", it wont happen in games like lol, so why should exist here?
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I love champion balance patches. I completely hate and disagree with automated %-based balance patches. It's such an awful idea.

Look at how Riot, probably the most successful game designers, balance. Sure, sometimes out of line champions need to be brought into check or up to par, but honestly 70% of their patches are not about raw power. They are about giving you a reason to pick the champ and THAT is the right way to go about it and you can't do that with an automated %-based system. Decisions should be made like "hey Nasus should be picked for his scaling, but his laning is too strong so that's where I'll trim." That way now you have a reason to pick Nasus(Scaling) and a reason to pick other champions(Laning).

Under your percentage-based automatic system, we simply would just bring Nasus's power in line with everyone else's and then you just have to refigure out which champ is 5% better than the other ones this week until the point where they all basically have the same stats anyway.

You're building this game on the back of bad game design principles. The fun in a good game comes from real strategic decisions, not just trying to figure out how the game works. Because either the person will figure out how the game works and then start to get bored due to lack of strategic depth until you introduce a new mechanic to keep them busy for like a week OR they get frustrated and give up before they figure out how the game works.

As a person that has figured out how most of the game works, give me a reason to keep playing besides the fact that this is an idle game and I've sunk a time commitment into it. Give me actual decisions to make in game daily, not ONE right decision that I can solve then forget about(until you change a mechanic/balance patch and then I have a different ONE right decision to spend a couple days finding).
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I like your list of quick tweaks for game simulator health. However you should maybe do it differently.

ADCs aren't scaling well enough, don't make them scale better with health. Make them scale better with damage. Don't just bring ADCs in line with the other roles. Give a different reason for them to have an impact. Maybe they still need a little buff to hp if it's wayy too far out of line, but try to focus on dmg buffs if you can.

Same for jg. Buffing gold just makes it more like the other roles, but buffing impact on lanes gives you an actual strategic decision when deciding between which role you wanna focus your team on. Maybe the gold income is stil way too small, but I would try to buff lane impact too.


Also, Hug Turret really needs to be fixed. It has a lot of potential as a "lose lane safely" option, but right now it is a "lose lane harder" non-option. You die more often when you pick it, not less. Make it so you're less likely to take AND deal dmg instead of just less likely to deal dmg..... That fix will go a long way to help teams add focus to their teams instead of just having to have better players in every role
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I like the idea of buffs/nerfs, i think it doesnt really matter if they happen once a week or after each season. I also noticed u said u wanna nerf/buff the top 3/bottom 3 champions, depending on their use rate. I would rather buff/nerf depending on the winrate and maybe look just at games for 1600-1700+ Elo.

About the simulation, i agree about give the jungler slightly more gold. But the ability to carry more, shouldnt be just a dmg or hp buff. I think the jungle pathing and the decision when to farm and when to gank is more important. Usually like 3-4 times per game, when the 2 junglers meet beside a lane, they get kinda stucked. They start to ran at each other and run away again, over and over. This costs em a lot of gold and time to gank.

Btw i like how u look for the contact with the community, keep up the great work with this great game :)
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I think patches are a good idea, but having them weekly seems a bit too much. Similar to League patches, these patches would buff/nerf champions and shift the meta a little every time.
This would require us to adapt properly and select new champions/strategies over time. I personally believe releasing patches like this bi-weekly or even monthly will be a better idea.

Also adding that the more champions the game has, the more intriguing a patch could be.
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I'm just gonna copy/pasta an idea for the update schedule that I had posted before:

[League games Mon-Fri]
Season is 18 games, breaking this down into 4 weeks means having weeks alternate between 4 and 5 games a week.

[Patch notes Saturday and Patch day Sunday/Monday]
Having patches role out at the end of the week would give some time for teams to prep for the pick and ban strats of the following week but also allow teams a break from what I'm hoping will be a more involved ladder system coming with the division placement changes arriving tomorrow.

[Event day Weekends]
Owning a league team would be nothing without having a little drama involved and I feel like introducing end of the week events would be one way to implement it.
Maybe something simple like having team members become burnt out and losing more energy, demanding more pay for being a star player or even gaining a temporary stat boost from having a win streak in solo queue. Essentially the events would be used to spice up the monotony of the regular week and create more interactions between you and your players.

I have no idea on how difficult this would be to implement into the game but it was a thought I'd had to attach to the schedule.

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Personally I feel like there's currently nothing shaking things up and the game would become pretty stale if we don't have things that allow for people to consistantly shake things up on a weekly basis.

Seems like I'm one of the few people with this opinion vocally on the site, but in trying to get my friends involved with lolmanager, they had complained mainly about how after a bit it doesn't take much involvement on the strategy side.

It's possible that this could be fixed with the Game Sim changes too and I'm sure a bi-weekly patch update/event days would work well too.
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I'm a fan of Jake's position honestly. I like the idea of balance patches, I think they are flat out necessary for this game to continue and not grow extra stale. I do not like the idea of them being automated "nerf 3, buff 3". I feel more unpredictability, larger amount of changes in the off-season and even unhealthy changes would help the game.
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What I see are all the managers who used smurfs to find the perfect champs being scared that they will lose that advantage. Weekly updates in buffs and nerfs are still only 3 times in a season and it promotes logging in more often studying others games to see what the most picked champs are so that you can anticipate the nerfs. With everything staying the same you are losing users faster than you are gaining them.

My thought is Weekly is by far the best playing a full season on the same patch is ridiculous.
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@Salvarity: What about some random effects on patches such as the number of top champions to be nerfed is random, for example top 1-7 (a random number) will get nerfed and how hard is also random and perhaps add some other minor random buffs and nerfs to make it less predictable and make the champions never go completely balanced.
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I like the randomness factor so players with the deepest champion pools have a larger advantage
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@Henri.
I'd like that honestly, it should never become predictable. Randomizing allows for over buffing, under nerfing and will keep the game interesting.
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I like the idea of weakly nerf/buffs. Would definitely add something. I think some measure of randomness involved is also good. I honestly didn't read everything on this thread but wanted to add my support for the changes.

Maybe in the future mixing up the builds also like a buff/nerf to certain build types on a regular basis (example: nerf the effectiveness of physical dmg slightly so magic toplaners and jungles are favored for a while). I think the suggested idea is probably much simpler to implement though.
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Patchnotes are cool, but I felt like one week would be a little bit too much for the long run,.
Since there is not much happening atm and the new game sims kicks in in about 1-2 month, this is a good oppertunity to test the "patchnotes" style. Considering it as a test phase, a one week cycle would be fine.
You can adjust the scale/size of the patch based on your data then.

Just "reset" the champs with the new sim, cause the automated system might make all champs kinda the same.
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Hi, i would suggest that you remove the money cap on the starting bid on the market.
Because when i want to train 2 players in the youth academy, 1 for me and 1 for the market he costs me 2.8 million for one season training.
So when i sell him i have to guarantue that i get atleast 3 million for him, so i want to put that in as starting bid.