if you're gonna call attention to that bedsheet you use as a backdrop, might want to address those ocean waves forming behind curtis. bro's so thick he's generating a gravity field that's warping local spacetime around him
Shout out to that riot employee asking about the smurfs. She probably knew what a lot of the most common answers would be and potentially could make it look like she didn't know things she should but is willing to go out and ask it anyway because it might deepen her understanding of the issue and make the game better. I have a massive amount of respect for that.
on the topic of seat positioning - my wife writes for Rhett & Link, and I've learned they go to great pains to make sure they always appear on camera that way (Rhett left, then Link right). congrats on being held to the same standard by your viewers lmao, you're in good company!
In the section about Faker's speech, Nathan mentions that league pros lose more than any other sort of craft. An interesting point to mention is that many professional athletes don't have any intimacy with the experience of losing. Tons of pro athletes were the best in their hometown, won championships in high school, had winning seasons in college, and then go pro where the best teams can have 70%+ win rates. A notable example being American Football where undefeated seasons are fairly common. Trevor Lawrence, an American Football quarterback, won every single game in high school and college. He literally lost for the first time in a decade once he turned pro. Tons of pros in traditional sports only experience losing once they make it big time.
I have a few thoughts: First of, on the effect of the low action athakahn: He doesn't really help passive scaling comps to reach the late game, because the scaling comps are unlikely to succsessfully contest him. In that sense he might even be a final hurdle for a staling comp, because the defending team will be strangled even more. They can't get anything if they somehow manage to get a pick, and even if they manage to stall untill they can win the teamfights, the revive might mean "wining" 5 for 2 is an uterly game loosing fight. On strategy, bloodroses are a new factor that might increase strategic planing (or at least reduce some value of especially early fighting). Depending on their actual value, a level 1 invade or tower dive, might carry higher risk. Obviously you might fail, but wether you die or kill, you create a spawning location for aditional xp on the part of the map your oponents control. Also, with Athakan replacing the 20 minute baron, I don't think the number of objectives will go uo that much (except Athakan being a likely more achievable objective than a 20 minute baron). Finally on leagues future and games versus sport: a) league might be the best electronics based sport that is around, but it has a significant porblem for true longetivity. That is the hurdle of picking it up. Compared to chess or soccer, league is hard to learn. You don't have an enjoyable mechanism to play with other beginers in a controled environment. While a child might just pick up the chess peaces without understanding en passant, or kick a ball around without any understanding of where you can pass. Even worse, leagues controles asume familarity with the RTS genre, which is less comon and has significantly changed controles for many people just starting to play. b) the psychology of play differentiates different understanding of rules, with the second being "rules as writen" and the third being rules as a malleable social construct. This understanding and changing isn't possible in league, making it in my opinion closer to a competetive sport and less the traditional played game.
@@HAPYDUDE7lol it’s really not hard to make it more professional. These guys are on episode 2XX and a 14 year old in their bedroom could have better production quality.
It's just that important, if you truly watch them for the right reasons their words are enough. Most people are just listening to the audio anyways@@chezwickcheese139
Agreed. They probably have more plans to expand and improve on the BG with time, but it's very plain and a downgrade visually speaking from their old setup for now.
Phreak literally said this as well in one of his vids, people just really really really like to fight in league. To the point where they will move away from their champs core strengths and weakness just because it's exciting to fight. They embrace it in their design philosophy.
I recently started playing league with a friend who hasn't played in 10 years. In S4 we were both plat but nowadays I'm emerald and he got placed into bronze. We couldn't play solo queue together but, as Nathan said, people love getting lp/ranking. I don't like smurfing so we started playing flex. And its terrible. My flex rank is gold and his is still bronze. When we get into a game there are borders ranging from plat to bronze. That's a 1600 LP spread in a single game. At first this didn't bother me since of course there is a 1200 LP difference between me and my friend. Obviously we're going to have some scuffed matchmaking. The problem is that when we win we both get exactly the same LP. Same for a loss. So that 1200 LP gap NEVER closes. In theory, if we win I should be getting practically 0 LP and he should be getting tons. For a loss I should be losing a bunch and he should be staying about the same. That way over time if we keep playing we'll normalize to the same rank - the rank where us as a duo belong. But that doesn't happen. We've played 31 games going 17-16 and we're still sitting at exactly the same 1200 LP gap. Flex should be the queue that people play instead of smurfing with friends but the ranked system there literally doesn't work.
Same issue here with my friends. I play on multiple accounts which makes the issue worse even though all of the accs are Emerald~Diamond flex range because it creates situations where some friends are able to reach Diamond in flex and others are stuck in Emerald, even though objectively speaking the Emerald player plays solo Q (mid Emerald/past Dia) and the Diamond player hasn't touched solo Q in years (never reached Dia) and literally admits they get gapped every game in laning phase (and just looking at their gameplay, imo, they are worse than the Emerald player). [No gossip flame intended if they somehow read this comment :d] And then there's another homie who only started LoL like 2 years ago and honestly has like Silver~Gold mechanics easily at this point, but their rank is perpetually stuck in Iron because they only play flex when with our friend group and they lost a ton initially. Also because if they manage to climb up to Bronze or something, everyone else's rank is getting propped up into Diamond and then we get pushed back down because the majority of us aren't Diamond players loool (and for the ones who are we tend to take flex less seriously and do silly picks/builds which tanks the LP cap naturally as well).
New prediction for the upcoming season is that the gap between laners who can and can't get prio is going to widen. We'll have to see, but the season seems pretty themed around fighting. I can't imagine a world where you want a Kayle on your team over an Ambessa when there are more objectives and you also want to get kills/obj/turrets for the boot upgrade. The upside, tho is that this is a Noxus themed season so who knows, maybe in the Ionia themed season scalers will have their time to shine.
This is true. If anything they pushed this standard onto other games like TF2, CS:GO, OW, etc. But for what it's worth the industry was likely to go in this direction sooner or later to begin with and I feel that LoL simply lucked out at being the first of it's genre to be in a position as F2P. When you consider it's OG devs were a couple of dudes working out of their mom's basement essentially, I refuse to believe it was 100% intentional on their part to reap the all of the benefits they ended up gaining by being an F2P game.
For the pool example. You shoot shots that are hard. You add rules that make it harder such as the cue ball must bounce off a wall before hitting a ball in or it's a scratch. A league equivalent is playing with right hand on keyboard and left hand mouse or controller like box box. I think he used a ddr pad at one point
I think the biggest thing that practice tool has enabled is TEACHING. It is a place to allow you to teach another person without the pressure of a live game. Coaching is going to go crazy when this is released
Eyy things keep looking better! Keep up the good work. Who knows maybe the podcast evolving could also mean extra episodes every now and then. It's soo good it really sucks to wait a whole week for more! 🔥
Pretty important detail for the TP tho : You can't hold waves the way you used to because it doesn't make the minions invulnerable anymore (which is good in my opinion)
On the final topic of competitive games: A lot of games die over time because they become more competitive. The reason is that there is a limited audience for a super competitive game. As a game ages naturally the people good at the game stick at it because they have more fun because they are good at it, and the less skilled stop. However this begins to accelerate as the game gets older and older. The players who play primarily for reasons other than the competitive experience (hang out with friends, try wacky builds or strategies etc.) start out having fun but as the playerbase shifts, fewer of them can enjoy the new experience of the game enough to continue playing so they quit, gradually contributing to shrinking range of gameplay experiences that are rewarding. Chess is at the extreme end of this process. Kids can have fun goofing around with family members who barely know the rules and haven't played in forever or their friends at school who are about at good at them (i.e. pretty terrible) but if they want to play a lot of games of chess they are pretty quickly going to run out of opponents of that skill level and to get more games in will have to play people in clubs or at tournaments who take the game very seriously. They will either enjoy this competitive process enough to become a competitive chess player or stop playing chess. And people who like competitive games tend to end up playing chess and so despite catering to a small percentage of the gaming population, it manages to survive as a game. In a sense hyper competitive games are like a black hole that attracts certain kinds of playersb and the larger black holes gradually steal mass from the large stars and smaller black holes around them. There's a limit to how many black holes there can be in a certain amount of space. There's also a limit to how many competitive games can exist and support a viable matchmaking experience.
8:20 I think there will be more unseen uses for it like maybe a strong member split pushing and they're able to go extra hard because they just get a fast base when they die if they get collapsed so your team can go extra hard elsewhere. Or even vice versa your team gets wiped in a 4v5 but they're still up to contest objectives spawning soon while your split pusher is off doing their thing (and safely still because they have the psuedo GA up still).
toplaners/midlaners with teleport going extra hard on splitpushing will probably be an immensly strong use for since as you said, there is no risk. They can die,respawn and teleport to the fight losing only a few seconds at worst, but resseting and buying items in the meantime.
Just today I lost a game I could've won with Turret respawn. The other teams made a ton of mistakes and we punished them, still couldn't come back with 3 open inhibs.
As a high elo player, you can totally have a casual experience and play with your friends. I have multiple smurfs that I play with friends, but I dont play soloq, I strictly have those smurfs to have a low normals mmr and we just play normals. You dont have to play soloq, and soloq isnt even a casual experience like you have mentioned.
My two cents on the nexus towers respawning, as a low elo player. I dislike games with champions that are game warping. On my team or the enemy team, their win condition is separate from the rest of the teams’, and a disproportionately large part of the game becomes about whether they succeed in their win condition. Tryndamere and yorick are my best examples. I feel for people who main those champs, because they are losing the ability to play the game their way. But arguably, the other 9 people in their games are going to have more of a chance to engage with the game themselves.
Havent watched yet but my biggest fear with the Noxus theme thing is the boots needing 2 out of 3 objectives. Can't wait to see my team dive in attempt to get the first blood
1:03:00 Idk the stakes seem to get to everyone in other competitive games as well. An RTS like AoE2 or WC3 can last for up to 30+ minutes so those games become time commitments as well. Valorant Ranked matches can take like 40 minutes despite individual rounds lasting for only a few minutes. And I see similar-type content starting to float around in other competitive games as well nowadays trying to address having proper/good mental around improvement and not focusing on your rank/LP in these games as well.
46:30 about "smurfing" in normals, I am not a high elo player, but my normal MMR still is hard for Iron players, but when I play on my "Smurf" I don't play champs who deal damage or who can "carry". I play Yuumi a lot, and I also want to try some Ivern jungle. So enchanters, and engage support, to help get the snowball rolling with players who otherwise are bad at consistently gaining gold. Not always a winning strategy by the way, have about a 30% winrate. More so prefer watching them stream their gameplay, and try to help them connect certain game play concepts and be more aggressive as that is a struggle of Iron players. 48:33 I am not a support main, I am in fact a top main, and play Garen mostly. Not played Garen on my "Smurf". Played a couple of Gragas games because the champ had given me some trouble, spammed Q, went oom. Although, even playing a champion I don't know, even a mechanical champ, if you get fed you don't have to execute well to get value. Stopped playing Gragas after I believe two games. Played some Soraka top/mid (when in a four or three stack where sup and jungle were taken).
I think there needs to be a trials game mode where youre strictly going into that game mode, theres significantly lower times, significantly higher competitiveness or fighting but also shorter times or less time getting into lane, because thats a huge time waster of walking back into lane that we dont want to do
Overwatch has seperate mmr / rank for the different roles, so if you want to learn support you don’t grief your main role mmr on the same account, although they only have 3 roles and role lock no autofill /secondary role
Regarding the topic of smurfing in normals; I have had a lot of trouble playing with my friends learning the game. I'm a dia ad main, so playing on role on a smurf is an unethical choice that I'm not proud to admit that I have made too often. I can't play on my main because the games are too hard and my friends are miserable. My friends enjoy the smurfing because we stomp, but I believe it has done permanent damage to their learning journeys as well as the poor noobs we play against. As an adaptation I've begun to play off role tanks and enchanters in an attempt to limit my own carry potential as well as force my own friends to carry the game themselves. This is not a perfect solution, but over the past two years its the best I've come up with so that everyone in the community benefits.
I have never made a smurf and when I was teaching my girlfriend how to play league it was for sure rough at times. (We have always played against the full range of gold - grandmasters in norms). That being said she is way ahead of many other players with a similar amount of time put in. I float between emerald and diamond when I'm actively playing ranked.
I think y'all's billiards analogy is off base. In a game of billiards you can always go for the hardest shots available or play a more defensive game and wait for your opponent to land shots before you land yours. In other words, you can play down to your opponents/teammates level. In league you can intentionally play worse. Lose minions on purpose, choose to apply less pressure, or let your friends make the decision for example. Even trying to win a team fight without one of your abilities is a possible way to apply a handicap to your play. It's how I was taught to teach people basketball when you're much better in 1v1 settings. Let the weaker players focus on playing their best and as the better player try to play in a less aggressive way. Just my two cents as a decade long billiards, basketball, and league player.
the enemy doesnt need a good team vs my bad friends, they need 1 good player that lanes against me... the people who smurf and the people who hate smurfs arent the same people
Wow nathan actually perfectly predicted the point of the video I linked 😂. Interesting, I really appreciate your thoughts. I really still wanna highlight that the person who made that video seemed to have a sort of vitriol towards competetiveness in general, and was much less neutral about this cycle.
Does adding more objectives in the jng change the meta to better team fight champions ? I already got enough shit to do without people pinging to get that too
Low damage Atakhan is aimed at pro play I think. In very few solo q games ever is Atakhan gonna be the low damage version, people fight constantly in solo q.
1:18:17 "They died because they weren't as good as League." True and wrong at the same time. HoN came out at the same time and if you compare the games side by side HoN had more polish, features, quality of life, debateably monetization, and looked better too (in isolation at the time, stylized graphics age better so it's not so cut and dry if you look at both games from 2010 side by side now). Gameplay was really good at the time too. That said, it's objectively true that these other games died or fell off because they weren't 'as good as League' in regards to things like matchmaking, monetization (strangely enough without hindsight), timing, etc. I genuinely believe monetization is the major one alongside with being the "first somewhat polished game of the genre". HoN had a buy to play monetization once it exited it's private beta testing phase. This is consumer friendly in terms of buy once and get all characters and features forever, but it's now much better known how bad this monetization style is in regards to growth and overall longevity of a game; especially in a new genre or one that's already established it's biggest game as free (which in and of itself is a result of being F2P). Look at every game leader of a new video game genre in the last 15 years and the pattern becomes obvious. Fortnite Battleroyale (PUBG existed before but was buy to play), LoL (HoN buy to play; DotA 2 late to the scene), Hearthstone (Artifact CCG literally dead on launch because it wasn't F2P), TFT (the OG autochess' lack of support from a big company and lacking the polish of a full non-modded game meant it went the way of DotA 1), Genshin, and I'm sure there are more but these are off the top of my head.
Hi guy, another awesome episode the most wholesome league content on youtube! One request, though. I'm only listening to you at work and so I can't see what's on screen. When you have play these vids in different language, like Faker here, could you at least paraphrase it a bit? Thank you for all your hard work
A side effect of multiplayer practice tool might be less need to Smurf ranked games with friends, now you can just practice with your friends and actually help them get better through practice drills
On the point of "competitiveness is the end of a games life cycle" - this couldn't be further from reality, in fact it's the opposite. Nobody cares about a random mario level, but add a timer, score and leaderboard and you will have people play it for decades to come. For League specifically, the core gameplay loop IS competition. There is no real goal in league other than being better, and it has one of the most loyal playerbases ever
I know I'm kinda late but deadlock my first moba has some of the best information for what's going on in the game like how much damage an item is doing when people stopped farming I hope you guys can look at the deadlock in game stats it make league look so bad in comparison
My thing I usually do for smurfs is I start a new account to see how high I can climb on a new champ/role with fresh MMR. I one trick whatever champ it is. I've done it with Fioras, Shen, zoe, yuumi, singed etc Champs with COMPLETELY different play styles, so when I went from my challenger Fioras account to a fresh yuumi account I AM a bronze yuumi. I'm starting fresh relearning the game essentially aside from fundamentals that carry over I'm essentially on the same playing field as anyone else 🤷 And also I don't want to learn in norms because it's not a good litmus test for improvement because the games run much shorter due to ffs and people are mostly for funning and don't have the DRIVE TO WIN
I was listening on Spotify at the part about "Why Smurf?" and I had to come to youtube to make a comment because I disagreed so strongly with what Curtis was saying. (Bear in mind I usually agree with Curtis on most things!) Context: I am Master when I have time to play ranked seriously. My friends range from Iron to Emerald and I have no problem playing norms on my main account with them - that's fine, even though my normal MMR regularly brings in Diamond or Master players. The problem is when I have a friend, or real example recently my cousin, who wants to try league for the first time or has only played 10 or 20 games. We're talking complete beginners but of course they want to try the game with their friends/family that play. Obviously they are going to get crushed and have a terrible time if I play with them on my main account. But what Curtis is suggesting is that when I smurf, I want to crush the whole game myself. That's not true at all I just want my cousin to have a good experience! So I play something like Nami or Soraka support and heal him up, give advice, stuff like that. Obviously we have a higher chance of winning than the enemy team, but I go out of my way to NOT dominate the game myself and play purely to enable the new players. That in my opinion is justifyable and ethical smurfing
They address this point though. That the onus is on the smurfing player to do the "right thing", but you can't guarantee this will be the case for other smurf players with the current system.
I think they're incorrect about Heroes of the Storm dying because blizzard didnt care. Blizzard have invested massively into heroes of the storm. They put a ton of resources into is what I recall hearing from some recent leaks from Jason Schreier.
I was stuck Silver 1 over and over again for awhile but was never playing consiatenly I was playing 2 weeks every day one period and made a new account and hit plat 3. Diamond was possible with the lp gains
About the smurf point: one thing that a lot of other games do like fortnite, is sneak in bad AI bots into the games without telling people, who they can beat without there being a 'victim' per se. I'm not sure if this would even work in League, as there are bot games anyway, and bots are usually super terrible. How it works in fortnite I think is that it's like a 100 man free for all (or maybe with squads), and the human players invariably all do pretty well vs these secret bots, and think that they're getting close to winning etc./being one of the best players in that game (they get top 10 or top 5 or something). Wouldn't work the same in League as obviously one team has to lose.
Unrelated to the episode: You guys should check out the Martha Stewart documentary, in a weird way it reminded me of Jiro Dreams of Sushi where it’s a story of relentless pursuit and commitment to greatness. Check it out! Martha’s process is a winning one Also, the fact that league is way more about fighting than strategy sucks, and I find myself playing the game a lot less because of it. There are a million games and genre’s out there that cater to mechanics-max people, catering to a generation of fiends with fried attention spans is making the game less and less enjoyable by the year.
hey guys i dunno how i just found out about yall im pissed i didn’t know before now. but y’all’s episodes on apple podcasts won’t play for some reason i’ve tried 2 days in a row now :(
magnus carlsen has been critisizing classical chess for being, GMs have so much of the best openings memorized, you have to make "bad" moves to force your opponent out of his preparation, and many classical chess games end in a draw
The games never felt so unbalanced. I also noticed a huge dropoff of my teammates decisionmaking and understanding of concepts. Im a boomer and play mainly for entertainment and dropped from Gold to Bronze, not saying im the greatest player ever but something just isn't right with the matchmaking. I blame the constant resets aswell as they made the game way too fast. Objectives everywhere, people losing their mind and you either participate nonstop in this headless chicken madness which is what Riot wants or you play how the game used to be and hope for the best. The game just played better back in the days. There are enough things to think about without the fast pace and all these additions.
everyone wondering why he so jack, alot of the mindset stuff they talk about in league is great for workout mental too. Try it out even with just small stuff. Good health makes everything atleast a little better. You got it! We all believe in you!
I know this split is harder because of the MMR thing, but honestly how do you guys still are able to play a shit ton of games. I'm now playing everyday 5 to 6 games and the grinding just feels exhausting. How do you guys keep motivated to keep grinding, despite the amount of time and games required to reach a X rank?
if its exhausting just take a break. If you don't find it fun anymore, its probably not worth it to play anymore. personally i play one or two games a day max.
you can solve chess: perfect games end in a draw for AI and pros have confirmed themselves like hikaru nakamura top 3 players in the world that chess will eventually be solved and every game ends in a draw, league doesnt have that = league is superior because no draw is possible
Why people always sweep smurfing under the rug? and say " it's not a big deal" or find some other excuse. yeah im not an angel either but atleast i own up to it.
Damn that screen ironing macro is cleaaaaan. EDIT: On the part about why people smurf, you guys comment on how Ranked Flex is a failed experiment, you know why that is? Because if you get a "good" Flex queue rank, people KNOW you've been boosted, otherwise you would have played Solo queue. Or alternatively, you use it to queue up with your friends (not caring about which rank you get) and they will have a worse experience because matchmaking has to try and make the game even to account for the skill disparity. People that smurf to play with friends will not engage with a fair system because that would mean either ruining their own fun (due to some system enforced handicap) or their friends fun, who don't want to play against players the same rank as the smurf. The ONLY remaining option is the situation today, smurfs will have their cake and eat it too, create a new account and have their fun at the expense of others. It's also interesting using the real life example, if Messi rocked up to a game of football wanting to play semi-seriously, even the people playing on his team wouldn't have fun (short of smashing the other team). League has a phase of play where it's easy to chill out for 10-15 mins before it becomes fully apparent that there's an issue matchmaking wise and 1 team with the smurf rolls over the team without one. It provides enough of a fake feeling to the non-smurf players that they're actually having an impact in these games (likely why you see so many case studies of people that have played with their friends forever, only to get a cold awakening when they try to play seriously in Solo Q). On a seperate note, normals could be a much better experience for practising champs, or playing with friends, however the matchmaking is completely useless in that mode. The games are not balanced at all, and I don't know why Riot sees this as acceptable (it doesn't matter that it isn't ranked). I think normals should have the same (or at least similar) matchmaking as Flex queue, I suspect there's some internal reason for why it's so lax currently (probably queue times). But that's the trade off, and I think that's another reason for Flex queue not being taken seriously, it's effectively normals for people of different ranks that want to have a game that feels competitive. Personally I like Flex for this very reason, the main caveat being I would never want to reach a rank in Flex that I wasn't able to acheive individually in Solo Q. In summary, I don't know how much luck RIot will have with combatting smurfs. However, it is worth noting that smurfs will never go long on one account, as they do get found out eventually, they will carry too many games and matchmaking will start to punish the lower ranked players (the friends) or if playing alone, the smurf will stabilise back to their own true rank. Like it was expressed in the podcast, these players only have selfish intent, they need to avoid a fair experience to have fun, and that is incompatible with any game based on competitive play. If Riot close the loopholes that allow smurfs to exist, the question is whether this would harm the overall health of the game (less people playing because they can't play the way they want) or improve it.
I think you are wrong when saying a new account cant get you grandmaster while your stuck on the main in d4. I got emerald on one second account while being stuck around gold 4 in one season in another. If league sees you still play alot of gams even if loosing you get bad teams. If you do 1 or 2 games every 2 days or so you win automatically more than grinding many games on the main. I mean i feel like many people say this.
Normal games are good for learning a champ from a beginning standpoint. I'm a masters Camille top onetrick or ADC main. I love Aatrox, syndra, and some support in norms. I have only one agressive limit testing perma fight controlled aggression playstyle from 9 years of Camille. I know that my level of ADC play Is around D4. An anything else is plat. There's no way im going into a masters lobby with Aatrox. I love to play him but I'm loosing to bad players in norms. Ranked is for when you know a kit and it's vision to a degree you can be competitive. It's fine trolling and fooling with your mates on my off champs while I lock in vs masters on Camille.
48:00 its crazy how you guys say normals dont work for competitive practice because players dont have the right competitive mindset then proceed to say playing for fun doesnt change your affect when playing with a new friend. will prob make a skool post about this
whats funny about the conversation of the game turning into a 5v5 only and losing solo impact, valves new game deadlock has been getting complaints about being a 6v6 moba where your impact feels even less than league and its truly a team diff at higher elos. but deadlock is basically dota turned into an fps so theres way more macro involved off the jump just with the way items and counters interact with each other instead of champs just being hard counters and not being able to do much like league
17:00 Compared to DotA, LoL is deff the more "ugga ugga" game where it's a lot of raw micro tests and the strategic aspect is toned down. In DotA there are a lot more things u can't micro ur way out of that are really just strategic choices made with team comps, intentional ability usage, itemization, etc.
In dota2 the items arent as "pure damage" based, they are more utility based, so often you can itemise your way out of a bad draft. Wish League had more utility items, like force staff or lotus orb
@@dumpsterplayer2700 They seemed to be moving in that direction during the mythic era with stuff like galeforce, duskblade, and support item actives increasing over time, but I think they recognized that itemization is a line they don't want to cross (too heavily) beyond simple stats and effects due to the added complexity.
if you're gonna call attention to that bedsheet you use as a backdrop, might want to address those ocean waves forming behind curtis. bro's so thick he's generating a gravity field that's warping local spacetime around him
His bicep is taking up half the frame for most of the episode.
next setup going to be outside to not deal with the background
Curtis is looking rather beefy
Seat positioning is back LET'S GOOO
Shout out to that riot employee asking about the smurfs. She probably knew what a lot of the most common answers would be and potentially could make it look like she didn't know things she should but is willing to go out and ask it anyway because it might deepen her understanding of the issue and make the game better. I have a massive amount of respect for that.
on the topic of seat positioning - my wife writes for Rhett & Link, and I've learned they go to great pains to make sure they always appear on camera that way (Rhett left, then Link right). congrats on being held to the same standard by your viewers lmao, you're in good company!
In the section about Faker's speech, Nathan mentions that league pros lose more than any other sort of craft. An interesting point to mention is that many professional athletes don't have any intimacy with the experience of losing. Tons of pro athletes were the best in their hometown, won championships in high school, had winning seasons in college, and then go pro where the best teams can have 70%+ win rates. A notable example being American Football where undefeated seasons are fairly common. Trevor Lawrence, an American Football quarterback, won every single game in high school and college. He literally lost for the first time in a decade once he turned pro. Tons of pros in traditional sports only experience losing once they make it big time.
Facts. I mean only the best of the best go pro. Then the best of the best win championships
I'm not going to lie the creases in the curtain were bothersome for me too, I just didn't comment xD
The pH levels in that glass of water look suboptimal. Makes the podcast completely unwatchable.
I have a few thoughts:
First of, on the effect of the low action athakahn: He doesn't really help passive scaling comps to reach the late game, because the scaling comps are unlikely to succsessfully contest him. In that sense he might even be a final hurdle for a staling comp, because the defending team will be strangled even more.
They can't get anything if they somehow manage to get a pick, and even if they manage to stall untill they can win the teamfights, the revive might mean "wining" 5 for 2 is an uterly game loosing fight.
On strategy, bloodroses are a new factor that might increase strategic planing (or at least reduce some value of especially early fighting).
Depending on their actual value, a level 1 invade or tower dive, might carry higher risk. Obviously you might fail, but wether you die or kill, you create a spawning location for aditional xp on the part of the map your oponents control.
Also, with Athakan replacing the 20 minute baron, I don't think the number of objectives will go uo that much (except Athakan being a likely more achievable objective than a 20 minute baron).
Finally on leagues future and games versus sport:
a) league might be the best electronics based sport that is around, but it has a significant porblem for true longetivity. That is the hurdle of picking it up. Compared to chess or soccer, league is hard to learn. You don't have an enjoyable mechanism to play with other beginers in a controled environment. While a child might just pick up the chess peaces without understanding en passant, or kick a ball around without any understanding of where you can pass.
Even worse, leagues controles asume familarity with the RTS genre, which is less comon and has significantly changed controles for many people just starting to play.
b) the psychology of play differentiates different understanding of rules, with the second being "rules as writen" and the third being rules as a malleable social construct. This understanding and changing isn't possible in league, making it in my opinion closer to a competetive sport and less the traditional played game.
Imagine yelling at a Rioter to do her job when she is literally doing her job
Charlie is a great addition
I'd really like to see some kind of BBC League banner in the center of the backdrop instead of a completely plain black screen.
Wow and if they had their own like rented studio with a production team and also ten thousand million dollars
@@HAPYDUDE7lol it’s really not hard to make it more professional. These guys are on episode 2XX and a 14 year old in their bedroom could have better production quality.
It's just that important, if you truly watch them for the right reasons their words are enough. Most people are just listening to the audio anyways@@chezwickcheese139
Agreed. They probably have more plans to expand and improve on the BG with time, but it's very plain and a downgrade visually speaking from their old setup for now.
Phreak literally said this as well in one of his vids, people just really really really like to fight in league. To the point where they will move away from their champs core strengths and weakness just because it's exciting to fight. They embrace it in their design philosophy.
I recently started playing league with a friend who hasn't played in 10 years. In S4 we were both plat but nowadays I'm emerald and he got placed into bronze.
We couldn't play solo queue together but, as Nathan said, people love getting lp/ranking. I don't like smurfing so we started playing flex.
And its terrible.
My flex rank is gold and his is still bronze. When we get into a game there are borders ranging from plat to bronze. That's a 1600 LP spread in a single game.
At first this didn't bother me since of course there is a 1200 LP difference between me and my friend. Obviously we're going to have some scuffed matchmaking. The problem is that when we win we both get exactly the same LP. Same for a loss. So that 1200 LP gap NEVER closes. In theory, if we win I should be getting practically 0 LP and he should be getting tons. For a loss I should be losing a bunch and he should be staying about the same. That way over time if we keep playing we'll normalize to the same rank - the rank where us as a duo belong. But that doesn't happen.
We've played 31 games going 17-16 and we're still sitting at exactly the same 1200 LP gap. Flex should be the queue that people play instead of smurfing with friends but the ranked system there literally doesn't work.
update: had some games with iron-emerald in the same game. 2400 LP difference.
Same issue here with my friends.
I play on multiple accounts which makes the issue worse even though all of the accs are Emerald~Diamond flex range because it creates situations where some friends are able to reach Diamond in flex and others are stuck in Emerald, even though objectively speaking the Emerald player plays solo Q (mid Emerald/past Dia) and the Diamond player hasn't touched solo Q in years (never reached Dia) and literally admits they get gapped every game in laning phase (and just looking at their gameplay, imo, they are worse than the Emerald player). [No gossip flame intended if they somehow read this comment :d]
And then there's another homie who only started LoL like 2 years ago and honestly has like Silver~Gold mechanics easily at this point, but their rank is perpetually stuck in Iron because they only play flex when with our friend group and they lost a ton initially. Also because if they manage to climb up to Bronze or something, everyone else's rank is getting propped up into Diamond and then we get pushed back down because the majority of us aren't Diamond players loool (and for the ones who are we tend to take flex less seriously and do silly picks/builds which tanks the LP cap naturally as well).
New prediction for the upcoming season is that the gap between laners who can and can't get prio is going to widen. We'll have to see, but the season seems pretty themed around fighting. I can't imagine a world where you want a Kayle on your team over an Ambessa when there are more objectives and you also want to get kills/obj/turrets for the boot upgrade. The upside, tho is that this is a Noxus themed season so who knows, maybe in the Ionia themed season scalers will have their time to shine.
Now I need to know what ridiculous comparison Nathan made causing the jump cut at 1:04:13
The lost transcripts of the BBC...
lmao
Meth addicts all over again
I remember how broken chemtech dragon was upon release, not sure how to feel about all these changes
This new setup looks great, would be nice with a whiteboard for visual explanations on either of the sides:D
1:18:20 league was also one of the first free competitive online multiplayer games
This is true. If anything they pushed this standard onto other games like TF2, CS:GO, OW, etc. But for what it's worth the industry was likely to go in this direction sooner or later to begin with and I feel that LoL simply lucked out at being the first of it's genre to be in a position as F2P. When you consider it's OG devs were a couple of dudes working out of their mom's basement essentially, I refuse to believe it was 100% intentional on their part to reap the all of the benefits they ended up gaining by being an F2P game.
For the pool example. You shoot shots that are hard. You add rules that make it harder such as the cue ball must bounce off a wall before hitting a ball in or it's a scratch. A league equivalent is playing with right hand on keyboard and left hand mouse or controller like box box. I think he used a ddr pad at one point
I think the biggest thing that practice tool has enabled is TEACHING. It is a place to allow you to teach another person without the pressure of a live game. Coaching is going to go crazy when this is released
Eyy things keep looking better! Keep up the good work. Who knows maybe the podcast evolving could also mean extra episodes every now and then. It's soo good it really sucks to wait a whole week for more! 🔥
The set up feels familiar and looks great!
Pretty important detail for the TP tho : You can't hold waves the way you used to because it doesn't make the minions invulnerable anymore (which is good in my opinion)
If the minion dies does it cancel the TP?
@@ArkHavoc22 no but you can't hold the whole wave
On the final topic of competitive games: A lot of games die over time because they become more competitive. The reason is that there is a limited audience for a super competitive game. As a game ages naturally the people good at the game stick at it because they have more fun because they are good at it, and the less skilled stop. However this begins to accelerate as the game gets older and older. The players who play primarily for reasons other than the competitive experience (hang out with friends, try wacky builds or strategies etc.) start out having fun but as the playerbase shifts, fewer of them can enjoy the new experience of the game enough to continue playing so they quit, gradually contributing to shrinking range of gameplay experiences that are rewarding.
Chess is at the extreme end of this process. Kids can have fun goofing around with family members who barely know the rules and haven't played in forever or their friends at school who are about at good at them (i.e. pretty terrible) but if they want to play a lot of games of chess they are pretty quickly going to run out of opponents of that skill level and to get more games in will have to play people in clubs or at tournaments who take the game very seriously. They will either enjoy this competitive process enough to become a competitive chess player or stop playing chess. And people who like competitive games tend to end up playing chess and so despite catering to a small percentage of the gaming population, it manages to survive as a game. In a sense hyper competitive games are like a black hole that attracts certain kinds of playersb and the larger black holes gradually steal mass from the large stars and smaller black holes around them. There's a limit to how many black holes there can be in a certain amount of space. There's also a limit to how many competitive games can exist and support a viable matchmaking experience.
8:20 I think there will be more unseen uses for it like maybe a strong member split pushing and they're able to go extra hard because they just get a fast base when they die if they get collapsed so your team can go extra hard elsewhere. Or even vice versa your team gets wiped in a 4v5 but they're still up to contest objectives spawning soon while your split pusher is off doing their thing (and safely still because they have the psuedo GA up still).
toplaners/midlaners with teleport going extra hard on splitpushing will probably be an immensly strong use for since as you said, there is no risk. They can die,respawn and teleport to the fight losing only a few seconds at worst, but resseting and buying items in the meantime.
Just today I lost a game I could've won with Turret respawn. The other teams made a ton of mistakes and we punished them, still couldn't come back with 3 open inhibs.
As a high elo player, you can totally have a casual experience and play with your friends. I have multiple smurfs that I play with friends, but I dont play soloq, I strictly have those smurfs to have a low normals mmr and we just play normals. You dont have to play soloq, and soloq isnt even a casual experience like you have mentioned.
love the new setup. gives a better experience for staring at curtis's arms
My two cents on the nexus towers respawning, as a low elo player. I dislike games with champions that are game warping. On my team or the enemy team, their win condition is separate from the rest of the teams’, and a disproportionately large part of the game becomes about whether they succeed in their win condition. Tryndamere and yorick are my best examples. I feel for people who main those champs, because they are losing the ability to play the game their way. But arguably, the other 9 people in their games are going to have more of a chance to engage with the game themselves.
Havent watched yet but my biggest fear with the Noxus theme thing is the boots needing 2 out of 3 objectives. Can't wait to see my team dive in attempt to get the first blood
1:03:00 Idk the stakes seem to get to everyone in other competitive games as well. An RTS like AoE2 or WC3 can last for up to 30+ minutes so those games become time commitments as well. Valorant Ranked matches can take like 40 minutes despite individual rounds lasting for only a few minutes. And I see similar-type content starting to float around in other competitive games as well nowadays trying to address having proper/good mental around improvement and not focusing on your rank/LP in these games as well.
Great episode. Also excited about respawning nexus turrets and multiplayer practice tool!
46:30 about "smurfing" in normals, I am not a high elo player, but my normal MMR still is hard for Iron players, but when I play on my "Smurf" I don't play champs who deal damage or who can "carry". I play Yuumi a lot, and I also want to try some Ivern jungle. So enchanters, and engage support, to help get the snowball rolling with players who otherwise are bad at consistently gaining gold. Not always a winning strategy by the way, have about a 30% winrate. More so prefer watching them stream their gameplay, and try to help them connect certain game play concepts and be more aggressive as that is a struggle of Iron players.
48:33 I am not a support main, I am in fact a top main, and play Garen mostly. Not played Garen on my "Smurf". Played a couple of Gragas games because the champ had given me some trouble, spammed Q, went oom. Although, even playing a champion I don't know, even a mechanical champ, if you get fed you don't have to execute well to get value. Stopped playing Gragas after I believe two games. Played some Soraka top/mid (when in a four or three stack where sup and jungle were taken).
Well now that’s it’s been pointed out I can’t stop looking. There’s a huge ripple in the background over the dude on the left.
I think there needs to be a trials game mode where youre strictly going into that game mode, theres significantly lower times, significantly higher competitiveness or fighting but also shorter times or less time getting into lane, because thats a huge time waster of walking back into lane that we dont want to do
Overwatch has seperate mmr / rank for the different roles, so if you want to learn support you don’t grief your main role mmr on the same account, although they only have 3 roles and role lock no autofill /secondary role
Regarding the topic of smurfing in normals; I have had a lot of trouble playing with my friends learning the game. I'm a dia ad main, so playing on role on a smurf is an unethical choice that I'm not proud to admit that I have made too often. I can't play on my main because the games are too hard and my friends are miserable. My friends enjoy the smurfing because we stomp, but I believe it has done permanent damage to their learning journeys as well as the poor noobs we play against. As an adaptation I've begun to play off role tanks and enchanters in an attempt to limit my own carry potential as well as force my own friends to carry the game themselves. This is not a perfect solution, but over the past two years its the best I've come up with so that everyone in the community benefits.
I have never made a smurf and when I was teaching my girlfriend how to play league it was for sure rough at times. (We have always played against the full range of gold - grandmasters in norms). That being said she is way ahead of many other players with a similar amount of time put in. I float between emerald and diamond when I'm actively playing ranked.
You have a method of measuring progress. Look at the percentiles, done.
problem is that Rito is making the game harder and harder for new players, I don't think they care about new players at this point.
I was not notified that you guys released this video, youtube is trolling
I think y'all's billiards analogy is off base. In a game of billiards you can always go for the hardest shots available or play a more defensive game and wait for your opponent to land shots before you land yours. In other words, you can play down to your opponents/teammates level.
In league you can intentionally play worse. Lose minions on purpose, choose to apply less pressure, or let your friends make the decision for example. Even trying to win a team fight without one of your abilities is a possible way to apply a handicap to your play.
It's how I was taught to teach people basketball when you're much better in 1v1 settings. Let the weaker players focus on playing their best and as the better player try to play in a less aggressive way.
Just my two cents as a decade long billiards, basketball, and league player.
Thanks for the answer, love you guys
I'm definitely going to put an emphasis on skirmishing this next season
Faker just 6 months ago was committing self harm against a wall with his forehead
Cosmic balance has been restored
smurfing takes away the only winning 50% of games aspect that a lot of people can barely handle
late game champions are going to be lightyears beneath, despite already below the Mariana Trench atm
the enemy doesnt need a good team vs my bad friends, they need 1 good player that lanes against me...
the people who smurf and the people who hate smurfs arent the same people
Wow nathan actually perfectly predicted the point of the video I linked 😂. Interesting, I really appreciate your thoughts. I really still wanna highlight that the person who made that video seemed to have a sort of vitriol towards competetiveness in general, and was much less neutral about this cycle.
Are we going to get an ADC episode? :( I was really looking forward to hearing about Nathan’s bot lane journey
It's coming mid January. source: skool
Does adding more objectives in the jng change the meta to better team fight champions ? I already got enough shit to do without people pinging to get that too
Low damage Atakhan is aimed at pro play I think. In very few solo q games ever is Atakhan gonna be the low damage version, people fight constantly in solo q.
The key to Faker's success is his mindset for sure. Also his godlike mechanics though.
1:18:17 "They died because they weren't as good as League." True and wrong at the same time. HoN came out at the same time and if you compare the games side by side HoN had more polish, features, quality of life, debateably monetization, and looked better too (in isolation at the time, stylized graphics age better so it's not so cut and dry if you look at both games from 2010 side by side now). Gameplay was really good at the time too.
That said, it's objectively true that these other games died or fell off because they weren't 'as good as League' in regards to things like matchmaking, monetization (strangely enough without hindsight), timing, etc. I genuinely believe monetization is the major one alongside with being the "first somewhat polished game of the genre".
HoN had a buy to play monetization once it exited it's private beta testing phase. This is consumer friendly in terms of buy once and get all characters and features forever, but it's now much better known how bad this monetization style is in regards to growth and overall longevity of a game; especially in a new genre or one that's already established it's biggest game as free (which in and of itself is a result of being F2P). Look at every game leader of a new video game genre in the last 15 years and the pattern becomes obvious.
Fortnite Battleroyale (PUBG existed before but was buy to play), LoL (HoN buy to play; DotA 2 late to the scene), Hearthstone (Artifact CCG literally dead on launch because it wasn't F2P), TFT (the OG autochess' lack of support from a big company and lacking the polish of a full non-modded game meant it went the way of DotA 1), Genshin, and I'm sure there are more but these are off the top of my head.
Hi guy, another awesome episode the most wholesome league content on youtube! One request, though. I'm only listening to you at work and so I can't see what's on screen. When you have play these vids in different language, like Faker here, could you at least paraphrase it a bit? Thank you for all your hard work
my main is stuck in bronze 4. made a fresh account now emerald 1. something wrong.
A side effect of multiplayer practice tool might be less need to Smurf ranked games with friends, now you can just practice with your friends and actually help them get better through practice drills
I'd be shocked if that is how it'll go. Most just want to play with friends, running drills if for a minority of players
The tool is niche built for sweatlords.
@@DuckGoat-mr9tu the entire game is for "sweatlords" 😂
On the point of "competitiveness is the end of a games life cycle" - this couldn't be further from reality, in fact it's the opposite. Nobody cares about a random mario level, but add a timer, score and leaderboard and you will have people play it for decades to come. For League specifically, the core gameplay loop IS competition. There is no real goal in league other than being better, and it has one of the most loyal playerbases ever
i tried introducing friends to league and they quit bc they got stomped every time they play with me
I know I'm kinda late but deadlock my first moba has some of the best information for what's going on in the game like how much damage an item is doing when people stopped farming I hope you guys can look at the deadlock in game stats it make league look so bad in comparison
My thing I usually do for smurfs is I start a new account to see how high I can climb on a new champ/role with fresh MMR. I one trick whatever champ it is. I've done it with Fioras, Shen, zoe, yuumi, singed etc Champs with COMPLETELY different play styles, so when I went from my challenger Fioras account to a fresh yuumi account I AM a bronze yuumi. I'm starting fresh relearning the game essentially aside from fundamentals that carry over I'm essentially on the same playing field as anyone else 🤷
And also I don't want to learn in norms because it's not a good litmus test for improvement because the games run much shorter due to ffs and people are mostly for funning and don't have the DRIVE TO WIN
I was listening on Spotify at the part about "Why Smurf?" and I had to come to youtube to make a comment because I disagreed so strongly with what Curtis was saying. (Bear in mind I usually agree with Curtis on most things!)
Context: I am Master when I have time to play ranked seriously. My friends range from Iron to Emerald and I have no problem playing norms on my main account with them - that's fine, even though my normal MMR regularly brings in Diamond or Master players.
The problem is when I have a friend, or real example recently my cousin, who wants to try league for the first time or has only played 10 or 20 games. We're talking complete beginners but of course they want to try the game with their friends/family that play. Obviously they are going to get crushed and have a terrible time if I play with them on my main account. But what Curtis is suggesting is that when I smurf, I want to crush the whole game myself. That's not true at all I just want my cousin to have a good experience! So I play something like Nami or Soraka support and heal him up, give advice, stuff like that. Obviously we have a higher chance of winning than the enemy team, but I go out of my way to NOT dominate the game myself and play purely to enable the new players.
That in my opinion is justifyable and ethical smurfing
They address this point though. That the onus is on the smurfing player to do the "right thing", but you can't guarantee this will be the case for other smurf players with the current system.
I think they're incorrect about Heroes of the Storm dying because blizzard didnt care. Blizzard have invested massively into heroes of the storm. They put a ton of resources into is what I recall hearing from some recent leaks from Jason Schreier.
I was stuck Silver 1 over and over again for awhile but was never playing consiatenly I was playing 2 weeks every day one period and made a new account and hit plat 3. Diamond was possible with the lp gains
About the smurf point: one thing that a lot of other games do like fortnite, is sneak in bad AI bots into the games without telling people, who they can beat without there being a 'victim' per se. I'm not sure if this would even work in League, as there are bot games anyway, and bots are usually super terrible. How it works in fortnite I think is that it's like a 100 man free for all (or maybe with squads), and the human players invariably all do pretty well vs these secret bots, and think that they're getting close to winning etc./being one of the best players in that game (they get top 10 or top 5 or something). Wouldn't work the same in League as obviously one team has to lose.
This already happens on the recent patches btw. New and returning players can run into bots even in match made queues/ARAMs that aren't Ranked.
@@Freakattaker oh wow i didn't know
Unrelated to the episode:
You guys should check out the Martha Stewart documentary, in a weird way it reminded me of Jiro Dreams of Sushi where it’s a story of relentless pursuit and commitment to greatness. Check it out! Martha’s process is a winning one
Also, the fact that league is way more about fighting than strategy sucks, and I find myself playing the game a lot less because of it. There are a million games and genre’s out there that cater to mechanics-max people, catering to a generation of fiends with fried attention spans is making the game less and less enjoyable by the year.
hey guys i dunno how i just found out about yall im pissed i didn’t know before now. but y’all’s episodes on apple podcasts won’t play for some reason i’ve tried 2 days in a row now :(
You’re back, im back, we’re all climbing
magnus carlsen has been critisizing classical chess for being, GMs have so much of the best openings memorized, you have to make "bad" moves to force your opponent out of his preparation, and many classical chess games end in a draw
Random question: why is Curtis soo jacked :DD
gym lil bro
he is a self defense coach too
When you finally gitgud and start carrying your team, you naturally get jacked.
Damn Curtis is jacked af. Whats your workout routine?
The games never felt so unbalanced. I also noticed a huge dropoff of my teammates decisionmaking and understanding of concepts. Im a boomer and play mainly for entertainment and dropped from Gold to Bronze, not saying im the greatest player ever but something just isn't right with the matchmaking. I blame the constant resets aswell as they made the game way too fast. Objectives everywhere, people losing their mind and you either participate nonstop in this headless chicken madness which is what Riot wants or you play how the game used to be and hope for the best. The game just played better back in the days. There are enough things to think about without the fast pace and all these additions.
everyone wondering why he so jack, alot of the mindset stuff they talk about in league is great for workout mental too. Try it out even with just small stuff. Good health makes everything atleast a little better. You got it! We all believe in you!
I know this split is harder because of the MMR thing, but honestly how do you guys still are able to play a shit ton of games. I'm now playing everyday 5 to 6 games and the grinding just feels exhausting. How do you guys keep motivated to keep grinding, despite the amount of time and games required to reach a X rank?
if its exhausting just take a break. If you don't find it fun anymore, its probably not worth it to play anymore. personally i play one or two games a day max.
@@ambush8240 Thanks for the reply man. Good idea.
Try playing max 3 games a day and take 1 day a week off
2025 is looking good
Can't believe we're entering another season where rito didn't delete yasuo from the game. Maybe 2026...
I think riot should let people play any champion they want in practice tool
what happened to the comfy chairs?
Ranks aren't a part of the reward splits anymore. You just need to win 15 games within that split. Don't have to be Gold anymore.
Nice time to just troll ranked without worrying about reaching gold.
I just want Curtis to be my coach on bicep day .
you can solve chess: perfect games end in a draw for AI and pros have confirmed themselves like hikaru nakamura top 3 players in the world that chess will eventually be solved and every game ends in a draw, league doesnt have that = league is superior because no draw is possible
controversial take but mmr doesn't matter for basline champion mastery if you know what you are doing.
Why people always sweep smurfing under the rug? and say " it's not a big deal" or find some other excuse. yeah im not an angel either but atleast i own up to it.
Damn that screen ironing macro is cleaaaaan. EDIT: On the part about why people smurf, you guys comment on how Ranked Flex is a failed experiment, you know why that is? Because if you get a "good" Flex queue rank, people KNOW you've been boosted, otherwise you would have played Solo queue. Or alternatively, you use it to queue up with your friends (not caring about which rank you get) and they will have a worse experience because matchmaking has to try and make the game even to account for the skill disparity. People that smurf to play with friends will not engage with a fair system because that would mean either ruining their own fun (due to some system enforced handicap) or their friends fun, who don't want to play against players the same rank as the smurf. The ONLY remaining option is the situation today, smurfs will have their cake and eat it too, create a new account and have their fun at the expense of others.
It's also interesting using the real life example, if Messi rocked up to a game of football wanting to play semi-seriously, even the people playing on his team wouldn't have fun (short of smashing the other team). League has a phase of play where it's easy to chill out for 10-15 mins before it becomes fully apparent that there's an issue matchmaking wise and 1 team with the smurf rolls over the team without one. It provides enough of a fake feeling to the non-smurf players that they're actually having an impact in these games (likely why you see so many case studies of people that have played with their friends forever, only to get a cold awakening when they try to play seriously in Solo Q).
On a seperate note, normals could be a much better experience for practising champs, or playing with friends, however the matchmaking is completely useless in that mode. The games are not balanced at all, and I don't know why Riot sees this as acceptable (it doesn't matter that it isn't ranked). I think normals should have the same (or at least similar) matchmaking as Flex queue, I suspect there's some internal reason for why it's so lax currently (probably queue times). But that's the trade off, and I think that's another reason for Flex queue not being taken seriously, it's effectively normals for people of different ranks that want to have a game that feels competitive. Personally I like Flex for this very reason, the main caveat being I would never want to reach a rank in Flex that I wasn't able to acheive individually in Solo Q.
In summary, I don't know how much luck RIot will have with combatting smurfs. However, it is worth noting that smurfs will never go long on one account, as they do get found out eventually, they will carry too many games and matchmaking will start to punish the lower ranked players (the friends) or if playing alone, the smurf will stabilise back to their own true rank. Like it was expressed in the podcast, these players only have selfish intent, they need to avoid a fair experience to have fun, and that is incompatible with any game based on competitive play. If Riot close the loopholes that allow smurfs to exist, the question is whether this would harm the overall health of the game (less people playing because they can't play the way they want) or improve it.
I wonder how many times people are gonna tell me to kms as a jungler next season
I love the black curtains
I couldn’t find boke
I think you are wrong when saying a new account cant get you grandmaster while your stuck on the main in d4. I got emerald on one second account while being stuck around gold 4 in one season in another. If league sees you still play alot of gams even if loosing you get bad teams. If you do 1 or 2 games every 2 days or so you win automatically more than grinding many games on the main. I mean i feel like many people say this.
I think the solo queue needs to be solo queue and remove any possibility of duo in that environment.
No
Normal games are good for learning a champ from a beginning standpoint.
I'm a masters Camille top onetrick or ADC main.
I love Aatrox, syndra, and some support in norms.
I have only one agressive limit testing perma fight controlled aggression playstyle from 9 years of Camille. I know that my level of ADC play Is around D4. An anything else is plat. There's no way im going into a masters lobby with Aatrox. I love to play him but I'm loosing to bad players in norms. Ranked is for when you know a kit and it's vision to a degree you can be competitive. It's fine trolling and fooling with your mates on my off champs while I lock in vs masters on Camille.
Cant wait for a trundle splitpushing t3 to die , and get teleported back to base at 0 cost. Then TP into a fight for a 5v4
48:00 its crazy how you guys say normals dont work for competitive practice because players dont have the right competitive mindset then proceed to say playing for fun doesnt change your affect when playing with a new friend. will prob make a skool post about this
The point being just because you are playing for fun doesn't mean you forgot the fundamentals of the game.
Yea the bois
whats funny about the conversation of the game turning into a 5v5 only and losing solo impact, valves new game deadlock has been getting complaints about being a 6v6 moba where your impact feels even less than league and its truly a team diff at higher elos. but deadlock is basically dota turned into an fps so theres way more macro involved off the jump just with the way items and counters interact with each other instead of champs just being hard counters and not being able to do much like league
17:00 Compared to DotA, LoL is deff the more "ugga ugga" game where it's a lot of raw micro tests and the strategic aspect is toned down. In DotA there are a lot more things u can't micro ur way out of that are really just strategic choices made with team comps, intentional ability usage, itemization, etc.
In dota2 the items arent as "pure damage" based, they are more utility based, so often you can itemise your way out of a bad draft.
Wish League had more utility items, like force staff or lotus orb
@@dumpsterplayer2700 They seemed to be moving in that direction during the mythic era with stuff like galeforce, duskblade, and support item actives increasing over time, but I think they recognized that itemization is a line they don't want to cross (too heavily) beyond simple stats and effects due to the added complexity.
PLEASE SET UP A 2v2 DOJO WITH JGL ACADEMY
disagree on the normals mindset at 41:00
Garen players, nothing changed.
Rocket League , 5 minute games , I think I have 16k losses