League players set a lot by their solo queue ranks. It's set something of a social hierarchy—the Challenger royalty, the titled nobility of the Masters, the knighted Diamonds, Platinum yeoman... and, of course, the massed peasantry of Bronze. The nominal meritocracy, as defined by your ability to win solo queue matches, has its flaws—never mind that the season's-end rewards are definitely one of the driving forces behind botting and elo-boosting shenanigans that regularly plagues the game, but it also sets some rather fundamentally erroneous assumptions about the skills required to reach the thin airs and heady heights of pro play.

Pro players, when they can be bothered to answer, posit that a truly skilled player can carry themselves up the ranks with any champion. And this is true! At least to an extent. While being forced to play with nine other players does put an extremely large randomizing factor on a player's chances, my personal experience is that even a support player can "carry" a game with sufficient understanding of the inter-relation between runes, masteries, basic mechanics and player behavior.

Even a Sona player can carry low-Elo games with good positioning and instinct for spell ranges. Especially if they grab a Sheen. And it should, by all rights, be even easier as a mid laner or AD carry, given that they have the additional flexibility of farm gold to enable them. If you're stuck in the lower ranks, chances are that your farm isn't very good, you're not careful enough to maintain vision (please, for the love of whatever deity you subscribe to, buy at least one ward on every recall), you're not packing the right runes to win trades, or you get caught because you haven't developed an instinct for spell ranges yet.

Past a point, though, yes: it is definitely your champion holding you back.

Betting against Bard

League's newest champion is a great case study for the differences between a pub-stomper, or a champion good for solo queue ladder-climbing, and a tournament-caliber champion. I wouldn't play Bard in solo queue—his laning is weak, his stunning skillshot has an incredibly slow missile speed, and his heals reward patience and setup rather than combat usage, making it fairly dismal for 2v2 trades. Worst of all, his Tempered Fate ultimate in solo queue's uncoordinated environment will get you yelled at by your own team for freezing them in place at inopportune moments. Some of this can be offset by customization—full AD marks lets him at least apply a bit of auto-attack pressure in lane, though it won't fully address the deficiencies in his kit and design.

And yet: I think Bard has a good chance at seeing tournament play. A lot of his weaknesses can be summarized as "too dependent on teammates." Follow-ups on Tempered Fate and chases through Magical Journey, even where to put and when to use Caretaker's Shrines, are all dependent on a high level of coordination with your team—more so, at least, than what's required from stacking a bunch of AOE abilities on top of an obvious cluster of enemy players.

With that follow-up, though, Bard's an amazing champion! Suddenly Udyr has a gapcloser that extends far past the immediate screen—so long as there's a wall nearby. Suddenly, Janna's Monsoon doesn't kill a fight—Tempered Fate's locked down her team, preventing escape! The increasingly common 2-man jungle strategies you see at high-tier play are further enabled, as Bard overtly benefits with xp and free mana from roaming around, picking up the chimes scattered across the map.

Of course, you never see 2-man jungling in solo queue. In fact, it's vanishingly rare to see anything but the 4-year-old 1-1-1-2 top-to-bot lane compositional standard even in Team Builder queue, even as it's been proven over and over that a good roaming or laneswap strategy can utterly kill an enemy champion's scaling. Of course, the trick is to pull off a good laneswap, and that is exactly where solo queue falls short. Bard's (potentially) strong in a team environment, but solo queue is all about the individual skill...kind of.

The LeBlanc paradox

You would think that a burst assassin like LeBlanc would be a normal (and possibly frustrating) part of the solo queue experience right now. We know, from LCS games and elsewhere, exactly what she's capable of in equally capable hands: almost single-handedly devastating teams and taking turrets. Yet, for all of her demonstrated prowess, her solo queue win rate is a relatively abysmal 47%, or statistically more of a hindrance than help.

Have pro players deceived us? Is she actually a bad champion? Patently ridiculous, as anybody that's had the displeasure of going up against a decent LeBlanc knows. But between her slow chains and squishy defenses, she's a very temperamental champion. Unless you know exactly what you're doing and how you plan to get out from moment to moment, you'll likely find yourself at the wrong end of a stun or bind—and subsequently wrecked.

A good player can get incredible mileage out of a champion with a high skill ceiling. The Faker vs Ryu Zed-on-Zed showdown in the summer of 2013 stands as proof that the game has ridiculous mechanical depth to it, under the right circumstances. Even milliseconds may be taking too long to respond to a world class player's course of action. But a player trying to get good might not benefit so much from that ceiling—actually, they should be more worried about meeting the requisites of a champion's skill floor.

The skill floor is, simply, that bare minimum of competence you need to make a champion worth playing. A champion like Sona, for instance, has an almost depressingly low skill floor—stick close to an allied champion, press buttons, and you're playing her well! Or well enough, at any rate. Sure, you miss out on well-timed Power Chord usage or a good flash-Crescendo, but they aren't absolutely vital to making her a useful teammate. Champions heavy on the AOE usage or otherwise commanding self-targeting spells instead of skillshots tend to be very newbie-friendly as a result—and, consequentially, much easier to grind ladder points with.

Do they also tend to suffer against a high-ceiling champion? Sure. The way the game's designed, high-ceiling champions tend to be packed with a lot more power, at least in the form of tactical flexibility. What makes LeBlanc terrifying isn't entirely the damage output at her disposal, but a significant part of it built inherently into her extreme mobility. Anybody foolish enough to attempt a Sona mid lane into LeBlanc, for instance, would probably do less damage to their team's odds by sitting at fountain and walking away from their keyboard—with only Flash as an escape from LeBlanc's kill pressure, any ill-conceived attempt to play Sona as a mage inevitably ends up with her doing a pinata impression.

But does the same hold true for the increasingly popular Diana mid? Definitely not—and though Diana isn't quite as easy as Sona, her targeted Lunar Rush and Pale Cascade shield offers her both more survivability and guaranteed damage than LeBlanc. Or Ziggs, who benefits greatly from the recently upgraded mana regeneration for Athene's Unholy Grail—there's very little for LeBlanc to do against a kit built around easy waveclearing and lane pressure. She can't even roam properly, thanks to Mega Inferno Bomb's ludicrous range.

Even outside the mid lane, the difference between skill ceiling and skill floor holds true. Caitlyn's free Elo for most people, especially compared to Ezreal—her longer range, reliable escapes, and easy waveclearing makes her much easier to lane with than Ezreal's single-target-centric kit. And in the jungle, nobody's picking Sejuani over Lee Sin because of her greater mechanical potential—more like it takes a heck of a lot less effort to turn her into an unkillable perma-slowing tank. Who needs to InSec their way into a fight if you can just run them over headlong with a giant pig?

Skill society

There is definitely such thing as "Elo hell." There is definitely such thing as the unwinnable game. There are definitely some champions that counter others, thanks to the interplay between their kits. But what a lot of players fail to ask is whether or not they've contributed to their own torment. Did you pick Draven, a short-ranged high-complexity AD carry, into Caitlyn—who's exactly the opposite? You didn't just inconvenience yourself—you not only indirectly fed Caitlyn a lot of gold, but made it so that the enemy jungler can focus their attention on other lanes, making it harder for your teammates too. Picked Zed mid, and your entire team does only physical damage? The other team thanks you for all of the Randuin's Omens and Thornmails they're gonna stock up on, neutralizing damage from your side across the board.

There is an elusive happy medium to find in solo queue: a compromise between selfish play and team synergy, between ease of use and high potential. It isn't entirely about how godlike you can play Riven top lane—if you play with that kind of self-centered mechanics-only mindset, you'll only get partial credit in solo queue's skills test.

True mastery—and a fancy precious metals border—comes from understanding the game as a whole.

There's a lot to dislike about ESL's best-of-one group stages, as used in IEM Katowice—competition is often volatile, especially with lane pushers where there are balance disparities based on what side you start on or whether teams run into each other in the first two or three minutes of game-time. It could've been worse, sure, as the double elimination format means a team has to screw up twice before they're truly knocked out, and if you're that shaky on the international stage, you weren't set to win it anyhow.

But while the group format itself was unimpressive, the results coming out of it was amazing. Upsets all around: white was black, up was down, Korean teams actually lost, and everybody was chowing down on apple pie in the end. It was easily the most exciting League of Legends tournament in a while—and though the sub-optimal group stage format puts a lot of its results into doubt, there were lessons aplenty to be learned from its outcomes.

Even gods bleed

CJ Entus getting knocked out: fair. Among the OGN regulars, it was widely recognized that their standings in their home circuit was a bit deceptive: while they weren't Samsung-level bad (and imagine saying "Samsung-level bad" just a few months ago), their early-spring performance was now overshadowed by an extremely rough latter-season patch. Calling them "tepid" would be doing them a favor, with the only decent performers being Coco and—to the consternation of everybody that's ragged on him last year (including me)—Space.

Yes, we're talking about the team with Madlife and Shy, the superstars of Season 2. No, neither of them are anywhere near at an acceptable level of play at the moment. CJ Entus getting knocked out of groups wasn't entirely expected (KT Rolster Bullets and SKT T1 K were both in dire straits when they swept their IEM tournaments), but if there was going to be any team to disappoint South Korea it was going to be them.

GE Tigers, though. What? Really? They haven't dropped a set against anybody in South Korea! They were supposed to yawn and steamroll over China's Team WE, who had replaced their mid laner and support literally days before the tournament! Instead, for the first time since 2012, an international tournament with Korean teams failed to have a Korean finals.

Suddenly, blood is in the water, and everybody's a shark. The great exodus of 2014's paid off, alright—it might not necessarily make China more competitive (Team WE was wrecked by North America's Team Solomid 3-0, and haven't made as much of a splash back home in the LPL), but it sure as hell has made Korea weaker. Where once even their lower-tier teams made everybody else look laughable,

Has South Korea's esports golden age run its course?

TSM! TSM! TSM!

Given the nature of international competition, the death knells of one region's supremacy usually means another coming up in its place—and North America has been waiting with bated breath for years for their turn. They lost their grasp of it wwaaaaaayyy back in Season One, when the European metagame that made permanent the distinct roles of League of Legends ended up with Fnatic and Against All Authority in an all-European finals, found themselves in shockingly short measure in Season Two, when the Taipei Assassins demonstrated the value of a truly professionalized training environment, and the next two years were basically KeSPA flexing their muscles.

Each and every time, in each and every season, Team Solomid was North America's best hopes and most popular team. Sure, their innate American-ness might be a tad questionable—the team now consists of two Danes, a Korean, a Canadian and a Dyrus—but with their victory at IEM Katowice, the organization's finally cemented a long-pursued global leadership.

Coach Locodoco's done a continent proud. The biggest criticism against TSM, prior to Katowice, was a notable binary in their play patterns: either Bjergsen went off, or the team suffered. But while they're still centralized on his success, their dependency was notably lessened: Santorin and Lustboy, in particular, had astounding performances, promising a tactical breadth that will prove all the more vital in future tournaments.

Western whiplash

Of course, it's one thing to say that TSM's a major Worlds contender now. It's another thing to say that their success is reflective of the western circuits.

Case in point: the poor European teams. SK might be struggling, but they're still among the top three teams of the EU LCS right now. And Gambit, while comparatively low in the standings, is the opposite case: their ranking belies what has been solid and increasingly respected performance over the last month. Yet in neither case was success found on the international stage, as both China and Taiwan caught them by surprise, knocking them straight out of the groups stage.

At least SK had an excuse: after soundly thrashing the Yoe Flash Wolves, with Forgiven demonstrating his usual muscular prowess down in bot lane, they weren't expecting the rematch to be quite so vigorous. Unfortunately, while the GE Tigers might not have gotten past the 11th-place Chinese team, they did run over the European hope just fine—and that was all the inspiration that the Wolves needed to tear out their hamstrings.

It's even worse for Cloud 9, though—at least SK Gaming got a win at all. But the once-brightest of the recent generation of North American teams have definitely lost a lot of their luster. Balls and Hai have been struggling valiantly to stay abreast of their peers back home, but seemed like outright liabilities on the most recent world stage—facing the Tigers was a harsh lesson in their shortcomings, and losing to the Wolves was salt in the wound. And if Cloud 9 was doing so badly, the rest of the North American scene sitting under them from 4th and onward have reason for concern: they might be the biggest fish at home, but the rest of the world makes them look like mere minnows.

Ray of hope

I'm going to fanboy a bit, and you're just going to have to deal with it: the Taiwanese scene has waited two very, very long years for this moment. We've had to deal with the idiosyncrasies of Southeast Asian esports for years, sit through mind-numbingly inevitable and soullessly rote wins against the Bangkok Titans and Singapore's part-timer teams for months upon endless months, bear with the retirement of our best and brightest players, and a steadily growing sense that our one victory back in 2012 was just a fleeting dream.

We were beginning to believe the derision coming from our western peers: that we were irrelevant, a has-been wildcard region, and that our seeds and tournament presence would've been better-given to a Chinese team across the Strait, or up north to Korea. LMS? Yoe Flash who? Didn't the Taipei Assassins fail to win a single game back in Season 4 Worlds, where even Brazil managed an upset?

Wolves. Yoe Flash Wolves. Know that name. Without the yoke of Southeast Asia's "ten hours a week is a good scrim schedule, right?," with four good teams and three improving rookie teams to practice off (we try to pretend Dream or Reality doesn't exist), it turns out that Taiwanese teams are actually dangerous! Dangerous enough to catch Europe's best off-guard. Dangerous enough to flip a game against North America's top three.

Dangerous enough to be TSM's only real challenge throughout Katowice.

Steak. Karsa. Maple. NL. Swordart. My boys'll be there for the Mid-Season Invitational, you can bloody well count on it. Sleep on them at your peril.

We will have our day again.

I know two particular stories of League of Legends coaches, and the reaction to either seems to tell a lot about a player's mindset. In either story, neither coaches are ex-pros, at least not that of LoL itself. One speaks of disharmony between the coach and players, who hold themselves to be (at least historically) their region's foremost experts of the game. The coach was hired for form's sake more than anything else—a de facto manager and coordinator of scrims, but whose opinions of the game were distrusted at best. After all, he wasn't even Diamond, much less Master or Challenger, so what was his opinion really worth?

The other coach wasn't highly-ranked either. Yet the treatment from his players, all high-level tournament names, was near-cultlike devotion. They looked to him for instruction in everything—how and when to answer press, when dealing with sponsors, when boarding planes...he wasn't their boss or their father. He was their coach. You don't question the coach.

One team's western. The other team's Asian. You can probably guess which one, and which has done better internationally.

Is there some magic secret to coaching? Something that makes them somehow better than the players that've spent years playing the game at the highest level? Probably not. It's not as if Faker's coaching OGN winners—or even Toyz with GPL or LMS leaders. Actually, the Season 2 world champions have been the only ones that've dipped their toes into coaching, and generally to lackluster results. Stanley's Hong Kong Attitude: failed. Lilballz's Midnight Sun: still rookies (though decent for what they are). Game expertise isn't the same as leadership capabilities—and even shotcallers make poor coaches, because leadership isn't the same as telling people what to do.

What is coaching, then, if not game expertise? Why aren't good players naturally good coaches?

Point of view

Technically, everybody in a lane-pusher has full and unlimited view of the map. Vision is shared among teammates, and unless you deliberately chose to lock it, the camera is generally on free movement. Yet viewpoint is incredibly subjective from player to player—mainly as a matter of priority and training. Playing midlane means minimal exposure to the head-to-head dynamics against Maokai, or how to survive one-on-two or one-on-three when cornered. And the AD carry probably isn't going to care over-much about general vision theory and strategy, except to not step into random bushes on their lonesome.

There's also the limitations of exposure. Tournament players are going to be a lot more focused on local rivals than what's happening elsewhere—there's just only so many hours in a day to focus on anything else. Similarly with matchup considerations. Ex-pros like EU LCS caster Deficio outright state that tunnel-visioning is a concern for pro players, where their direct experiences with what works occludes what's possible.

The coach covers for that. It isn't his or her job to refine mechanics to Faker-level perfection. Nobody can play the game for you (and it'd get you booted off the circuit for account-sharing anyhow). But the direct tradeoff for focused skill development is tactical and strategic overview. If anybody thinks they can dedicate 10 hours a day to practice and still have time (and mental energy) left over to concoct world-tier strategy, they're flat-out kidding themselves. Execution is never the same thing as strategy.

Yes, the coach needs to understand the general framework, limitations and capabilities of and within the game. Strategy cannot be conducted without knowing what your pieces are capable of, or that of the opposition. But it isn't the general's job to know how his soldiers swing their swords, only that they do so at the right time and place.

And it's the soldier's job to trust that the general knows where and when that is. That their coach's put in the hours (and, if necessary, hired the analysts) to crunch the numbers and learn the habits and trends of their opposing numbers. That while the players might be called upon to advise them on specific opponents and the results of field tests, the coach has final say on the overarching strategy they utilize—because while they're scrimming and solo queueing, he's the one conducting the HUMINT necessary to turn their skills into success.

Of one mind

I know a story even more appalling than the cultural clash of the first two. Of a team on the verge of making it big, beating back every Challenger to come within a shot of the topmost pro circuit of their region. A team that's trained for months—and in a fit of hubris, threw it all away. For what? For the right to stay up at 4 AM the morning of the final qualifying match? For the right to booze it up and relax just when they were on the cusp of victory?

Worse is that their so-called "life coach" let them.

The coach isn't your friend. They aren't the team's secret-keeper. They're not there to hold your hair back when you yack into the porcelain after a victory celebration. Their job is to turn a team of solo queue stars into a finely tuned engine of conquest. There's a reason why the most successful coaches have generally been older (in conventional sports, a lot older) than the people they mentor: we're conditioned, even grudgingly, to respect our elders, and to be more serious in their presence. And we're conditioned, inversely, to take less shit from those younger than ourselves.

The coach's guidance isn't just on what champions to practice, and where to drop wards according to the team's jealously guarded and maintained timing playbooks. It's also on them to define the spirit of the team—whether it be a China-like aggression, or the deliberative patience of the European teams, but always focused and driven regardless of their situation.

In many (most) cases, that requires the exact opposite of chumminess. Discipline is a pain point, especially when coordinated across an entire team. But there is simply no choice: victory has always gone to the more disciplined team, and the coach must be both enforcer and exemplar of that ideal. And their lust for victory must be shared by all under their command.

The other side

Granted, somebody's gotta watch the coach too. There's no financial endeavor without its corruption from on-high. The history of commodotized music's been of managers handing their artists, flagging from cross-continental road trips, nondescript baggies of white powder that'll "perk them up." Sports medicine goes through regular cycles of self-flagellation for its complicity in feeding athletes various performance enhancers in search of that elusive edge against the competition—and don't think that the athletes themselves don't at least suspect that the injection might not just be "vitamins," accepting with a wink and a thin veil of plausible deniability that this is just the normative approach to professional competition.

Naturally, this approach mainly favors the rich and well-off teams that can afford the doctors involved. And for esports, it begs the question how many teams and coaches are writing off a nondescriptly titled budget line that correlates to their team's purchase and consumption of Adderall or Provigil.

There's a mutualized relationship in any form of governance. The players must submit to discipline, if victory is their aim. But the meaning of their victory is altogether too easily lost. Especially in esports, whose double-digit work days leave even professional athletes appalled at how much of the players' early 20s are thrown away into the competitive grinder, burnout is a massive risk. There must be a reflected trust—not just that the coach can rely on the players to follow their stratagem, but that the coach won't waste their players' efforts in the process.

It's when that bond of mutual trust and respect is perfected that we'll see more western victories. Everything else's just details in its creation.

Games companies hiring (and occasionally firing) games industry veterans isn't usually anything noteworthy or dramatic. Given the industry's tendencies to inflate and deflate in regular cycles, shedding and absorbing workers like some sort of anthropophagus sponge (and—importantly—making it very difficult to transition from desperate work-seeking contractor or freelancer to careered staff ahem), the interest is mostly academic when a known name among the circle of developers moves to a new shop. Not quite so with Greg "Ghostcrawler" Street, back in early last year.

World of Warcraft's former Lead Systems Designer and Riot's current Game Designer lead is, to put it mildly, something of a controversial figure. He was the public figurehead of some of Blizzard's odder design and balance decisions over the years—or, to put it more plainly, the lightning rod for all the hate when everybody but Frost Mages and Hunters get hit with nailed nerfbats. Naturally, his presence at Riot was met largely with trepidation, as there's plenty of overlap between old raiders and arena players with current summoners. For most of last year, this wasn't much of an issue—even the massive across-board changes in 2015 were met with cautious optimism, as it happened with the last competitive season's changes as well and it ultimately worked out.

Then 5.4 hit, and everybody's baying for his blood again. And, honestly, as bad as the patch is for the jungle, the lack of champion diversity and the inherent problems with the jungle probably isn't his fault—and would exist even if he wasn't hired.

The problem with LoL's jungle predates Ghostcrawler—and, in fact, is baked into the fundamental structure of the game. There are two rules that govern how a champion scales over time. First, a champion must absorb experience from slain units, and second, they gain gold from slain units. Self-evident, sure, but for how the metrics and expectations of both rules are established: not from the rate in which they clear jungle camps, but from the steady stream of minions in each lane. The basic design for champions and interactions assumes a trade-off between farming and fighting measured in millisecond windows: punches thrown while waiting for another minion to be low enough for a last-hit.

At first glance, you'd think this would favor the jungler. Laners occasionally die in fights or have to recall to heal off damage, losing experience and gold to unattended creeps in the process. But because there's no distinct separation between laning and fighting, it takes multiple deaths for them to really start to fall behind their counterparts. A jungler, however, can fall behind just by doing what they're supposed to: picking fights to balance out uneven lanes and establishing map control against the enemy team. Neither of which are conducive to actually farming.

Furthermore, an unharassed laner can farm uninterrupted and indefinitely. Unless they're absolute novices, they generally know to stay behind their own minion line so as to not pick up NPC aggro. Junglers, meanwhile, have no choice—especially on the 5.x patches, where the damage has almost fully reverted back to their Season 2 values. After just a couple camps, it's time to recall and heal, greatly cutting into their gold and experience gains compared to laners.

At face value, the answer seems obvious: increase gold and experience per jungle camp, and the jungler can maintain parity. Except that this, too, is a na ve impression—a game focused around damage means any particularly good sources should be diverted to the carries instead, and we saw exactly this happen in prior seasons. The mid laner would take Wraiths (now Razorbeaks) and Ancient Golems for the buff, the side laners would take the respective camps closer to their lanes, and the jungler would be left with red buff (until the AD carry starts to take it) and Wolves.

In short, the fundamental priorities and design of the game actively work against jungle balance. When the jungle is abundant, junglers are paradoxically starved and forced onto gold-sparse utility junglers while their own teammates steal from them. When the jungle is sparse, only a handful of carry junglers are viable, as only they can both clear camps and gank hard enough to stay on top of gold and experience (as we currently see in 5.4). All of these problems existed before Ghostcrawler. The problems with the jungle has been with League since Beta.

The solutions, however, didn't start appearing until Ghostcrawler was on board.

Greg Street was hired in January 2014. Enough time, I think, to have had input in two major changes to the jungle. The 2015 changes involved two major overhauls to the jungle: first, to replace Spirit Stones with Machete-based item builds that alter the mechanics of Smite (in at least two cases, allowing it to be used as combat utility spells against enemy champions). Second, that all forms of Smite now have triggered effects when used on jungle creatures, reminiscent of the changes made to Nunu's Consume all the way back in Patch 3.7.

The latter change, in particular, solves or allows for the solvency of the aforementioned income/priority tensions between the jungler and his teammate. It is now always unquestionably beneficial for the jungler to have the non-buffed camps. While it's still better for the mid laner to take blue, and for the AD carry to take red later in the game, it is now always better for the jungler to take down everything else. Gromp and Krugs give them better combat presence, while Razorbeak and Wolves grant them free vision control—all of which can only be accessed to the dude with Smite. While laners can still occasionally take camps, it's most beneficial for them to time it when the jungler's going to be on the other side of the map anyhow, so that it'll respawn by the time they visit that lane again—overall a more harmonious state of affairs for everybody involved.

The most important change, however, is definitely the itemization. Yes, 5.4 kind of screws it over a bit—the implemented change cost to switch from one form of second-tier machete to another explicitly impacts jungle flexibility. But outside of that, the new system promises some real answers to the riddle of a viable jungling environment. The Spirit items were hard stat tweaks, which didn't really help to address what were mechanical deficits in the jungle design—a utility bonus, however, opens up a whole new vista of design options.

For instance: the new Bami's Cinder item currently on trial in the Public Beta Environment creates a jungler-only Sunfire Cape on the cheap. Though less effective than the actual item in combat, its 50% damage bonus to minions and monsters partially solves the farming-speed dilemma that has kept traditional junglers like Amumu and Maokai out of their prior roles for the last couple of years. Ranger's Trailblazer, released in 5.1, also does a good job of solving the sustainability problems facing more fragile junglers by granting a burst of health and mana upon use. And while it's been heavily nerfed, Stalker's Blade's Chilling Smite was clearly intended to solve combat issues for champions like Shyvana, who have plenty of damage but little in the ways to pin down a target.

It's unfair to criticize Ghostcrawler for the fundamental issues in the jungle. It might also be too much to credit him for the increased design space for their problems—after all, League's design and balance team is far more than one man or woman. But it was under his tenure as design lead that Riot has finally established the framework for a solution to the jungle riddle. The appropriate response to that is accolades, not scorn.

League of Legends is the most-played game in the world. It s also, like Dota 2 and other lane-pushers, incredibly deep, with more than a hundred champions and layers upon layers of systems and strategy. The common wisdom is that lane-pushers are so complicated, they re often intimidating and drive away potential new players. At a GDC 2015 talk on Tuesday, Riot Games lead designer Ryan Morello Scott had an interesting take on that common wisdom. Short version: he thinks it s wrong.

I feel that paradox [between complexity and accessibility] exists, I think the way we analyze it in this industry is intuitive, but I don t think it s correct, Scott said. Let s think about games that are really culturally relevant to us as gamers. That we talk about 10 years later, we talk about them as big pieces of what we re thinking about. Counter-Strike. Starcraft. Halo series. Games like this. These games all have depth depending on what you want in a game...that s what makes popular games. All those games require mastery.

Our assumption from the get-go is that players desire mastery. It s one of our core pillars of League of Legends and Riot in general. With that, we think the paradox is actually: if you try to make your game broadly appealing first, and then make it deep, you fail. Because you re building on a weak foundation. There s nothing to hold up the house. Accessibility s great, but it can t be the foundation of your game. If you build depth first, and make a game that s rich in decision making, highly challenging, lets you master things over tens or hundreds or thousands of hours, then go, okay, we ve made it, great. Now how do we make it so it s more [approachable?]

I think those games, in the long-term, are much more popular...There are people here still playing Counter-Strike. That game is 16 years old. It s because the mastery is that rich. That s how much I think our brains are hardwired to want to learn, to want to overcome. If you deliver that to players in ways that are fun and satisfying, I think it's a mistake to underestimate that people are smart and want to learn. If you assume they don t, I think that s underestimating what players are capable of.

It s an interesting explanation for why games with especially high skill ceilings—games that reward mastery over a span of months or years—tend to foster passionate communities. Lane-pushers like League of Legends and especially Dota 2 are often criticized for their complexity, but Scott made a thoughtful point about two aspects of MOBA design: complexity and depth. They might sound like the same thing, but he had a good argument for why they re separate concepts, and why depth is more important than complexity.

Complexity and depth have a relationship, but they re not the same thing, Scott said. Complexity is a cost, and you try to pay the littlest cost you can in complexity to get the most depth. So if you [say] I want this depth, how do I care that the gameplay systems around the depth are the most understandable versions?

The gameplay mechanic of denying—killing your own minions to rob the enemy team of the experience and gold they d earn by getting the kills—came up as an example of complexity that didn t add much depth, which is why Riot removed denying from the game during its beta. Dota 2 players may disagree, but Scott had an argument for denial s removal.

I think some explanation is important on that, he said. It s kind of like, the analogy I would use is, you want to add skill to the game, you want to make sure skills will be tested. So think about last hitting. You re trying to manage minions. That s taking your focus, and while you re doing that you have an enemy trying to disrupt you. Denying is actually the same skillset you're testing. [Killing] minions, being pressured by an opponent, watching your health, things like that. It double dips into the same skillset.

So does it create a higher skill ceiling? Yes. But it tests the same skill twice. Is it also superfluous? We thought, yes. It adds complexity, but it adds low depth.…The cost to benefit ratio for how much it adds weight to the game s back, versus how much more it allows for the mastery of the players is low, so that s where we started making cuts.

So, high skill ceilings and games that encourage players to commit hundreds of hours to master them? Great. Except a skill ceiling that s too high can add messy complexity while gaining minimal depth. As difficult as lane-pushers are to play, designing them is clearly a whole nother level of tricky.