MOBAs and the Metagame.

So, I've been playing around with League of Legends a bit, and I wanted to make a post specifically addressing a certain facet of it, how other MOBAs deal with the issue, and how it might be better implemented in future titles or patches.

Essentially, I really don't like the metagame in League of Legends. The gameplay itself is great, but everything outside of a match is rather dull.

Now, if my knowledge is correct, MOBAs evolved out of the Defense of the Ancients map for Warcraft III. And, really, there was no metagame in that age, and there really couldn't be, since holding continuity between map launches wasn't really possible.

To this end, the MOBA genre evolved into a very self-contained experience. Each match is a self contained game to itself, and match-based arenas are the core of the experience.

However, as the genre expanded beyond being essentially a mod of other games into being its own structure, this shifted somewhat. LoL, for example, introduced Summoner Level, Summoner Spells, and Runes, to give some degree of progression and customization outside of a match.

The problem? The systems are dull, aren't very engaging, and offer little in the way of visible benefit during matches (Spells are really the only exception to that last one). I essentially forget that the Rune page even exists most of the time, and the only trend I remember about leveling up is that leveling up was bad because the jerks of the community tended to increase in number as you went up in level. There was never really any incentive to level up or anything engaging about the metagame. It seemed to have been practically thrown in there, but not really planned out or well executed.



Is this a necessary facet of the genre? Does the primarily PvP nature and match-based-format really exclude the ability to have a fun, deep, or engaging metagame tying it all together? I don't think so, and I'd like to toss some thoughts about it around for a bit.

Let's go over problems first. Since each match starts with Champions at a basic level and working up on a per-match basis, your potential carryover from one match to another is limited. If the metagame rewards are too powerful, they will unbalance the core gameplay and could destroy the entire nature of the game. If they're too weak, they'll get overlooked and be unengaging for most players (hello, Rune system).

So, we want something small, but also deep, and with a visible impact on gameplay and hopefully some engaging mechanics of its own.

A territory control system would be fairly easy to implement. You could run it like Mass Effect 3's version, where each map is tied to a particular area, and where you fight helps determine what areas you control, or perhaps you could have a more world based system, with factions or guilds allowing groups of players to compete against each other in a larger system.

Actually, I got to the idea for this system from FFTA and the Clan Wars, and only noticed the similarities to ME3's system when typing it up for implementation. But FFTA also gives some ideas for rewards that we could tie into matches. A controlled or liberated area could give access to quests. Killing so many of a particular jungle beast could lead to an extra gold reward, for example. Or a larger than usual bounty being placed on the boss enemies.

In fact, you could take the quest system even farther. For example, a player takes a mission before a match, and a new superboss appears, with its own unique rewards, for whichever team takes it down (which could also adjust play styles and strategies). Thus mixing things up, but not unbalancing them.

You could also have continual buffs up for a home territory advantage, or a discount on items. You could even scale minor buffs or events to a particular team as control was shifting (for example, if you have one win left to grab control of an area, your enemies get an extra minion every few waves).



So, yeah, I'm kind of rambling and spewing ideas at random, but that's sort of what the point of this thread is. I just think there has got to be a better way to handle it than the minimalistic system that Riot has got. So pick apart my ideas, supply your own, and tell me how other MOBAs handle this issue.


And, while we're on the subject, tell me why there isn't an Ivalice-based MOBA yet. Because I would play the heck out of that game.

Honestly my experience was the higher level you got you bumped into less assholes.

Level 1-10 was usually smurf accounts, trollers or people that had been banned and made new accounts. 10-15 was mostly just rage and then up until 30 was the most pleasant time I've had in LoL. Once you hit 30 which is the cap then you end up with assholes again but I honestly think they could simply alleviate this by not having a level cap. The rune pages and mastery points could stop accumulating from 30 onward.

The Rune system honestly makes a *lot* of difference. If, at 30, you do a Co-Op v AI game against bots (who don't use runes or masteries) and then do a PvP game and you'll immediately notice how much of an impact runes make. You can immediately tell when someone has gone for a sustain runes/mastery build for example which means when laning you can capitalise that they have traded off damage for it and likewise vice versa.

I'd be really iffy about anything that provides extra gold as one of the core issues right now is how quickly things can snowball with a gold advantage. An extra minion per wave for example isn't really going to do anything impactful other than give someone on the opposing team an extra 12-40g x 3 per minute.

Riot have been dabbling with some of the things you mentioned like territory control. Control over the orbs is one of the fundamental mechanics of the Twisted Treeline map that they revamped last year. It also has the optional superboss objective. Then we've also got the entire game mode in Dominion centered around territory control. Aside from that we've also got the single lane ARAM map which is a great way to try out new champions and everyone is pretty much lumped into the same boat. Now in theory it sounds like a great idea to lump all of these things together onto one map but from experience a certain MMO (WoW) tried that with it's two most successful BG formats (Warsong Gulch - capture the flag, Arathi Basin - territory control) to make a capture the flag/territory control hybrid map. This ended up being one of the most convulated BGs the game has and people quickly figured out that controlling more bases was far better than bothering with the flag. In competitive situations it's amazing how quickly a gaming community will figure out how to min/max a system.

The quest system sounds great on paper but the community will just immediately min/max it and there will be only a few quests that ever get taken (much the same with summoner spells now).

As for a lore based map with territory control. This is a cool idea and I wouldn't be surprised if we see something like this in future as Riot have really been working on fleshing out the lore and factional side of things recently. They already did something similar recently during the Freljord patch where there were 3 factional based summoner icons available for a limited duration and you had to play X games with one of those icons in order to swear your allegiance to a faction and get that icon unlocked permanently - but if you switched factions you'd lose it and have to start over. I imagine if they do anything more "outside" of the game stuff it will be for purely aesthetical things like this, not anything that has any direct impact on the actual matches.

Providing buffs and whatever for out of game stuff is a very slippery and tricky slope. For example you may choose to represent Ionia but it turns out only 3 other people are in Ionia whereas 80 represent Demacia meaning your faction has no chance in hell of claiming anything so any actual match you go into you're at an immediate disadvantage. Which then means there will be things like underdog buffs for factions that are under represented and all sort of other balancing acts that have to go on - which in business terms is basically resources constantly being lost to continually balance this system - resources that could be spent elsewhere. This has single-handedly killed PvP in some MMOs like The Secret World for example.

Honestly I think this is why LoL blazed ahead because it stripped so much of the chaff of the original DotA and generally avoided over-complicating things further and simply refined the core experience. LoL has done for MOBAs what WoW did for MMOs when it first came out - focused on polishing the fun things and making them even more fun and ditching the more boring aspects. Honestly, if anything, I really hope that Blizzard "do a WoW" with Blizzard All Stars and provide a complete curveball that will mix everything up.

As for the metagame - there is a metagame, the whole Bruiser Top/Mage Mid/AD Carry + Support bottom/Jungler is the meta right now. It hasn't always been like that. Double jungle builds with 3 solo lanes are becoming more and more prevalent due to the counter-jungling it provides. Likewise there's a lot of lane swapping going on these days to push a tower down really early and facilitate faster roaming. The metagame is really what champions and setups are viable, the whole process of picking, banning and counter-picking in ranked/draft and the entire process of adapting to the situation in-game on the fly. Are you going to split-push? Do you choose to convert that Ace into Baron or continue pushing? The metagame in these types of games is the overarching strategy and team based element of the game which fluctuates and changes over time based on balancing patches and new champions. At it's core LoL is a map with a bunch of champions to choose from - it's the playerbase that has determined what roles and lanes these champions are best in.

Well if you're talking Metagame like levelling up and unlocks and changes to the matches, I really like the direction Dota 2's taken where you can only get cosmetic upgrades. This leads to players building up a cache of tradeable items that brings the community and friends together in interesting ways. It's another cool implementation of the network features Valve has been working on and another reason why I think it could become Steam's flagship game.