Originally Posted by Morello

Don't be scared to offer new depth and new skills, and make players learn all over again is my main point.

Originally Posted by Fredmonroe

To be frank Morello, I'm surprised you would use the smash example as it is actually contrary to your points.

I don't know if you're in touch with the smash scene, but judging from your post, you aren't, so I'll elaborate.

There are currently more melee than brawl tournaments, and there is a much more alive competitive scene for melee.

Melee is actually going to be at Evo 2013, the biggest fighting game tournament that there is, because the melee community won a donation drive, raising 100k dollars for breast cancer research.

Melee players did "cry wolf" about how bad Brawl was, and how it ruined smash, but you know what? They were right. There was a wolf that killed the flock.

http://www.smashboards.com/forumdisplay.php?f=51

You can see tournament listings here, a lot are just casual and small tournaments, not even the bigger ones like Evo which typically only have melee or only a very small brawl following. By the way, Project M is a mod for brawl that makes it like melee, and may've surpassed brawl in popularity

Since this is such a damning counterexample to what you said, I'll expect you to just ignore this. Oh well.

So in conclusion, you're doubly wrong with your smash example.

1) Brawl is a less competitive game (and much less of a spectator game..) which did generally ruin the game (as evidenced by more melee tournaments with bigger turnouts) with what I speculate to be a less cohesive community and less players (as evidenced by melee blowing brawl out of the water in the donation drive and also extrapolating from tournament data, and youtube video views)

2) Releasing a melee clone would have been a safe move and a better move, as evidenced by a user-made (now they did a pretty fine job, but it's not professionally made by most standards) mod for brawl that has skyrocketed in popularity.

Edit: And to your point of melee players can still play melee even with brawl's existence, so no harm done?

Yes harm done. Melee is a game which could have used some balancing and a bigger cast. It could have also used a graphical update (the game is 2001 for the gamecube) and also needs a tech upgrade (all melee games that are competitive have to be played on CRT tv's due to the low res output lagging if it is upscaled to work on any modern TV. Maybe this is why PM is so popular?) Oh the melee scene was also drastically damaged by brawl as a lot of players left for brawl and it took a while for them to return to melee. Oh and melee's clout among the Fighting game community was also heavily damaged. EVO 2013 is the first evo that melee (and i believe smash in general though I could be wrong) will be at since EVO 2007 (the year brawl was released.)

SO yeah. Damage done.

Don't get me wrong, I like LoL a lot, but your point that "all sequels need to be different than their previous incarnations in order to exist," is just clearly wrong for this circumstance.

Originally Posted by Morello

A couple things;

The feedback here, in this case, is not representative of most players. The people complaining are a very low number, but the people interested in the skin lines are massive. The problem is more a perception than a reality.

Secondly, we aren't good at prioritizing theme clusters - this is somewhat related to why Steel Legion Lux is a problem. We'd never done the work to prioritize the "right" skin for Lux first - a problem that needs to be solved quickly, imo

There's things to solve here, but it's less critical than presented in my mind. This is about filtering signal-to-noise.

Originally Posted by ItemsGuy

: )

Originally Posted by Kato75

Something that,while doesn't bother me that much,is the Popularity=Skin paradox

If a champions is popular,he gains a skin
If he isnt,he normally does not
But if he doesnt have more skins,will he have more popularity>

Also,even tought I cant see where soraka could fit in the current meta,how much do you think you guys lost in NOT releasing a soraka skin with her VU>

Originally Posted by Cyrad

Super Smash Bros Brawl
No explanation needed. I will say that while I don't disagree with their decision to bring more casual appeal, I feel they made the wrong decisions to achieve that.