Quote from name:Xhieron; Let's">http://na.leagueoflegends.com/board/showthread.php?t=1522155&page=3]Let's encourage aggression by ...

Wait a second. You're trying to get people to be more aggressive by punishing their sustainability? I'm not sure I see this. If my health potions won't actually heal me meaningfully anymore, I'm not going to decide to take more risks. I'm going to blue pill more often and look for an alternative to potions. I'm going to hug my tower more because I know getting poked is something I can't recover from, and I'd rather be pushed out of lane than killed. I'll just buy Health Regen, Life steal, or mitigation stats instead. Or better yet, I'll play more champs that have abilities that give me those things.

The minion damage change is a good one; nothing is more demoralizing than being killed because the enemy minion line is in a better position to protect their champ than yours is. That said, if you want to make the game more aggressive, you have to make the consequences of success more rewarding and the consequences of failure less punishing. The change to death timers several patches ago was a start, but even after that change, I still feel like teleport is mandatory for one of the champs in a two man lane, because a successful gank at any time after level one or two will mean that the turret falls.

I guess I say that to say I just frankly disagree with your vision for the game. Honestly, I'm sick and tired of having esports waved in my face like a giant *****. It's offensive, and I think these changes are more about marketing and less about the overall health of the game. You want the game to be more entertaining for people who are watching, but at the same time I think you're making the game progressively more frustrating for people actually playing.

When Vlad was nerfed, there was a great deal of in my opinion extremely meaningful discussion about player decision-making in gameplay, and I appreciated that conversation for it even though I think the nerf was a slap in the face to Vlad players (and said as much at the time). Well what happened to that? I thought the company line was that players should have more and better choices? Making potions less useful is removing a choice. Maybe this is a totally insignificant change, but since we're still not actually testing, I have to assume the worst and argue accordingly.

If, however, my worst fears fail to materialize, I think we're still looking at a symptom of a more systemic problem. You're trying to twist players' arms to make the game more aggressive, yet you've done nothing significant to actually alter the mechanics of the game to encourage aggression. Last hitting is still the name of the game--guaranteed creep score is always a better option than a risk at a kill, especially since the consequences if that risk fails to materialize are pretty dire. That is to say, if you want to actually fundamentally change the way players in the lane behave, you have to actually change the fundamentals of laning.

That means minions need to matter less, death needs to matter less, and killing other players needs to matter more. Even though I feel like Dominion is a catastrophic failure on the whole, there are some definite things to learn from it, and if your goal is to make champion play on SR more like that, you have to carry some of those things over. Minions need to be less important; if I forego killing minions to harass and try to get a kill instead, I shouldn't be completely wrecked if it doesn't work out. Similarly, if I take a chance and die, I shouldn't come back to my lane to find myself down two levels and completely zoned out for the rest of the phase.

The counter-argument is, "Well that's the cost of the risk; you could have won and then it would be the other guy in that situation," right? Right! So play passively instead. I realize this change is aimed at moving the line between "maybe a kill" and "guaranteed kill (or at least out of lane)" from where it currently is, but as long as the base mechanics remain unaltered, the incentives remain where they are. They shift around a little--depending on the numbers, I'll probably leave base with fewer potions from now on--but my laning behavior isn't going to change at all. If anything, I'll be even more passive, because now I'm not packing any potions, and I don't have a Flash anymore.