What’s up guys it’s me Jeremy.
A couple weeks ago I released a video about an item that existed during the alpha stage
of league of legends, that item was oracles hood, and it gave mages the ability to get
what was essentially a critical strike on their spells.
And in that video I talked about how that kind of thing could create a new playstyle
for the mage, but a lot you guys in the comments raised concerns about the concept of critical
strikes, not only on oracle’s hood, but just in general in all items.
And with your concerns, I felt that it was definitely a topic worth discussing.
It’s quite the topic, and it’s tough to appreciate both sides of the argument, as
there are just as many reasons for keeping critical strikes in the game as there are
removing them, and the more I think about it and break it down, I’m not really so
sure.
But my main question today is, should critical strikes be removed from league of legends?
And as always if you guys enjoy the video hit that like button and if you don’t hit
that dislike, and lets get started.
Now the reason why crit chance is kind of atouchy subject, is that it adds elements
of pure statistical randomness into league of legends.
It’s one thing to get lucky because you happened to randomly throw out a skillshot
and land it by accident, you know it’s one thing to get lucky to facecheck a bush when
you don’t know someone is there, and you randomly one shot the guy at half health inside
of it.
I mean in any game whether or not we like to admit it, there are moments that happen
because you got lucky or because someone got lucky, and that’s totally normal, since
it is kind of just human nature, and that type of luck can be completely conquered through
skill.
Those moments of luck can be completely removed from the game as long as you have enough skill,
you know you could have just anticipated that would be a good spot to throw out your skillshot,
or maybe your map awareness was good enough and you just knew that one guy was in the
bush.
But with critical strikes, it’s a completely different concept.
Now something worth mentioning is that critical strikes in league are only pseudo random,
they aren’t actually completely random effect.
What I mean by this is that the amount of attacks where you do not critically strike
will influence the critical strike chance of your next attack.
Say for example your crit chance is 50%.
On the first attack, you will have a pure 50% chance to crit.
Now if that first hit is a crit, your next hit will have a lower than 50% chance to crit,
and if that first hit was not a crit, then you will have a higher than 50% chance to
crit.
There’s some math and formulas about it somewhere, but the reason why it works like
that is so that you don’t have insane cases where you are critically striking 6 or 7 times
in a row with 50% crit chance, and it makes the super extreme results
basically impossible, so it’s definitely better than just having every hit have exactly
a 50% chance to crit.
But the key thing, is that Critical strikes are lucky or unlucky in the truest form of
the word.
It’s 100% based on something that you as the player have absolutely no influence over.
There is no element of skill or decision making that will influence when you critically strike
and when you will not critically strike.
And in a game that is well almost entirely based on skill, and is highly competitive,
this element of randomness can be a very weird thing that often feels like it makes no sense.
Killing someone or dying in a fight just because you got a lucky streak of two or three crits
in a row is kind of ridiculous, and although it is certainly extremely uncommon, we have
seen games, even at the competitive level, that were arguably decided by pure statistical
luck, because of critical strikes.
And a long time ago, there was a similar stat that existed in the game called dodge, that
would allow you to avoid getting hit based on a random chance, and that stat was removed
completely because the randomness factor was something Riot decided they didn’t want
to have in league of legends, and I kind of see the dodge stat as somewhat comparable
to critical strikes.
But that’s enough about why crits are lame, let’s go over some reasons about why critical
strikes are actually pretty cool, and can be a good thing.
The reason why crit chance exists in the first place, is because it adds variance to a type
of gameplay, auto attacking, that previously does not have variance without it.
Most abilities have some element that makes them different when you cast them.
Maybe they're a skillshot, maybe they have counterplay/outplay potential, or maybe they
just interact differently with the items you build (i.e. rylais and ludens, etc).
And that variance is really important to create interesting gameplay, and make every game
a new and fresh experience, especially for ad carries who typically have a little bit
lackluster abilities that are boring and serve as a way to make their auto-attack heavy playstyle
strong.
However, auto attacks typically do not have the same variance that spells and abilities
do.
You right click on a target, and you will always deal the exact same amount of damage
to them, and nothing will change from one auto attack to the next.
There is no way to auto attack differently or for the mechanics to end up with a different
result from your opponent's reaction.
And critical strikes are the way that variance is introduced into auto attacks, and as such
it makes them a decent mechanic that brings something positive to League of Legends.
And critical strikes as well are a lot different to dodge I would say, because crits are a
lot less frustrating to play against.
It doesn’t feel nearly as bad to get hit for extra damage from someone, then it does
to hit someone and do literally no damage because of a random chance.
Dodge was removed honestly because it was so incredibly frustrating to play against
as a result of the randomness, and critical strikes, sure aren’t always amazing, but
they are definitely nowhere close to how dodge was, think about how many times you’ve flashed
in on someone, and finished them off with that last auto attack, and imagine if that
auto attack was dodged at a random chance, and you didn’t get the kill because of it.
That’s a lot more frustrating then getting crit, and it was also more relevant as well,
since if you attack someone and happen to get unlucky and not critically strike, you
still deal some damage, but if you get unlucky and they dodge, you do literally 0 damage,
and as a result dodge was removed for reasons that don’t entirely apply to critical strikes,
although I can’t deny that there are some comparisons between the two stats.
Now let’s take a more serious example, a game like hearthstone, where randomness is
a massive part of the game design.
Hearthstone has a lot of randomness in it, but also for kind of the same reason why league
of legends has critical strikes.
Hearthstone is a game, where every individual match is at risk at feeling completely the
same.
If you take the same two 30 card decks and play against each other a bunch of times,
it can get really stale, and that is why randomness exists and is such a huge factor in Hearthstone,
because it adds variance to gameplay.
And that variance is extremely important to Hearthstone, otherwise the game would get
stale quite quick.
Now, that kind of scenario doesn’t exist in league of legends, because every game is
naturally going to play out differently since the gameplay is entirely in the hands of the
players to create, and with every little click making an impact, there’s no way a game
will play out the same way, where as in hearthstone, if you take away randomness, or even just
some of the randomness, the individual games would end up being quite similar to each other,
and get stale quick.
And Hearthstone I believe is a great example of randomness adding a lot to the game, in
fact it’s quite brilliant design I would say when you look at what it brings to Hearthstone.
And that type of variance is actually quite nice to have in a mechanic that would otherwise
be much more stale.
And critical strikes aren’t this massive influence, it’s not like in hearthstone
where it feels like one out of every 3 or 4 games gets decided by randomness sometimes,
the randomness of crits in league, sure they have an influence, but the amount of time
they actually single handedly decide a game is so unbelievably insignificant, that it’s
worth it to keep the mechanic in the game, to create the gameplay pattern of auto attacking
as an ad carry, much more interesting.
I wanted to present both sides of the argument the best I could, so that you guy can just
look at the information and make your own decision, so you hopefully you have some idea
about what you think about crits.
Personally, I would say my opinion is that I believe that no, critical strikes should
not be removed from league of legends.
The champions that actually do build crit chance, are the ones that entirely revolve
around auto attacking for the most part.
Auto attack for an ad carry is a huge massive part of their gameplay, it’s not just a
minor thing, so having variance in that gameplay is important enough for crit chance to be
worth keeping in the game, at least in my opinion.
But I want to know what you guys think, should critical strikes be removed from league of
legends?
Leave a comment, subscribe if you want, thanks for watching, and I’ll see you guys next
time!