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I'll start: Did you know that Jhin's in-game movement speed is always a multiple of 4? This ties into his obsession with the number 4, which appears in many aspects of his character design and abilities!
External link →I'll start: Did you know that Jhin's in-game movement speed is always a multiple of 4? This ties into his obsession with the number 4, which appears in many aspects of his character design and abilities!
External link →Hadn't considered other languages, that is an interesting thought
All of these types of references ("Yuumi" brings up Moonstone Renewer etc) are directly translated, but often probably won't make much sense in other languages unfortunately.
Given I worked as a data analyst at Riot for 10 years from 2012 to 2022 (and returning in 2 weeks!) I have seen most every random fact there is and I know I've shared some before so here are some I don't think I've shared before or at least in a long time.
When we were analyzing Red vs Blue side win rates by champion we saw that champions like old Poppy and Taric were pretty equivalent but champions with long range abilities like Xerath were favored on Blue Side likely do to with the prevelance of locked camera and the perspective difference. Rumble was a MAJOR stand out, like a 8% win rate difference which we attributed to his ult but one patch it went up to like 13% and we didn't know why. Turns out, some how, on Red side (Purple side back then :D) his Q would only tick every other time functionally doing half damage. That was a fun one to track down.
Similarly, there was a time when Ezreal Q had a hidden like +5-15 range on only his base skin which we found when analyzing win rate by skins to check in on Pulsefire Ezreal when he first came out. That was tricky since win rate by skin could be biased for super engaged players, but since all the skins underperformed we were able to solve that.
There was also a time, way way back, where abilities would sometimes call the same code block; e.g. the thing that lowered Xin Zhao's cooldowns on his reworked Q called the same code as Karma's passive. If both were in a game together, I think Xin Zhao would lower Karma's cooldowns and Karma would lower Xin's if his Q was active but not expired. This came out when we analyzed champion synergies and even though Karma and new Xin seemed like they'd be solid together, it was still worth digging into.
My favorite that never shipped to players and was definitely a for fun test was when we tested out Snowball as a regular Summoner Spell on SR not just ARAM. This was OG Snowball that had like 3x the range and did crazy damage but with it, my colleague and I slammed Darius + Renekton in a playtest and that was the last time I remember we tried Snowball on SR.