[2023] Riot Phroxzon tweets on the state of Yuumi and Zeri in pro play.

"Personally, this seems to indicate to me that the Yuumi changes were not successful at all. Wasn't the entire point to have her be playable for casuals without being too strong in pro?"

It's worth clarifying that Yuumi had a 45% solo queue win rate and like 80% presence at Worlds last year. Getting both of those to move in the correct direction is a success. She's currently 50% win rate in solo queue and trending toward ~85% presence in pro.

So if she winds up 47% and 2%, that's a marked improvement from 12.18. A partial success is better than nothing at all.

Hopping in here is a bit risky, but here goes...

We agree Yuumi can be a frustrating champion and we're not trying to say otherwise. We're going to continue to balance her out of Pro and Elite play.

Having said that, the main point I wanted to make a clarification about is that the 1-30 experience is different from the average player (~mid silver) experience.

Despite being sub50 for average players on paper, if you account for her steep mastery curve, she sports very reasonable performance metrics. A lot of this is due to how different she is to other champions for a player who's played thousands of hours of league, so she has quite a different playstyle (similar to singed in that respect) and tanks a lot of winrate on games 1-5.

Having a steep mastery curve for the average player doesn't mean that's the case for a completely new player though. The reason why we tried to design around the attach is because she is far and away the best champ to play with a completely new friend to learn the very basics of the game, like how to kill people, use your abilities, win the game, etc. (1-10 especially, but 10-30 also). After that, people can choose to stick with her or play a more traditional champion. She has a 5% higher winrate than the number 2 champion, while being in the top 5 pick rate for this player bracket, despite her previously expensive cost (6300).

It may turn out that she can't even live sub50 without causing problems, in which case, we have some tough decisions to make. But that's our hope at least.

At a minimum we're going to listen and make whatever changes we think are necessary to get her into a good state, but thought this piece of info would be useful for the discussion.

We did a pretty exhaustive analysis of it.

Separation of smurfs, bot accounts, separated games played with friends vs without, etc.

The only places in 1-30 where Yuumi didn't perform the best was when smurfs "new players were actually smurfs". She didn't perform that poorly in those though, because usually it was double smurfs playing with each other :shrug