Nomerology : What’s wrong with vector targeting?

Or a more accurate title, “How mechanical deficits that fail to accommodate for attention and cognition can obfuscate hero design.” Coming from a cognitive psychology background, with a significant portion of my time spent on attentional studies and spatial perception, it is extremely important for any hero designs that I am involved with to rest soundly with my academic expectations. After all, gaming in all its forms is a highly cognitive activity, a mental exercise of sorts. Perhaps the most important thing I picked up through undergraduate study wasn’t learned in a classroom, but through what I perceived to be a transcendental observation–that everything works systemically. 

At every level of biological or social organization, the greater level of organization is a macrocosm of the lesser, and the lesser is a microcosm of the greater. I’d essentially stumbled across a major tenet of neoplatonism. The mind is a system, and like other systems, it does not benefit from unlimited resource. When you play a MOBA-genre game, despite the fact that you are controlling a single hero, your brain is flooded with information. 

During a team fight, the best players will internally keep track of cooldowns of all allied and enemy heroes simultaneously, be able to predict and project multiple targets’ paths through the fog of war, accurately intake HUD information to pick and choose targets of value, keep motor control stable and accurate under duress, all the while engaging in constant communication with four other team members. This is an excerpt from an email I sent out last November regarding Bombardier addressing some of the concerns we had with him design-wise. Hydromancer was the working name for Myrmidon, who at the time sported a very different skillset. Bombarder’s Airstrike! has since had its delay significantly reduced.

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