[2023] Preseason & Ranked Changes | Dev Update - League of Legends

Gotta keep some things a secret ;)

Hoping so, would love to have a case for it being a more frequent mode. This version's very similar overall to its past run, we'd definitely be open to gameplay adjustments though in the future if the interest is there

The people who work on midscopes are (mainly) the same team that work on preseason, so right now that's where their focus is going. Once preseason work's out of the way we'll take a look at things and see whether to put midscopes, other work or a mixture of the two on the docket.

Yeah, there's some trade off to getting rid of that preseason period on live for sure and we went back and forth a lot internally before deciding on this approach. One of the key things that flipped us though was the proportion of the player base who simply don't have any interest in playing when ranked is off who therefore bounce during preseason. Our thinking was those that want to take the break to play other stuff during that part of the year can do so regardless, so good to keep ranked on during the winter holiday period for those who do want to be playing it.

Couple of thoughts/bits of context:

1. You'll climb faster each split (this isn't same number of games more times per year)

2. Because ranked isn't turning off in November/December a ranked split will last for 4 months with 3 a year, versus 5 months this year (so not as big a change in split duration versus 2023 at least as it looks at first glance)

He's still on track for this year, we will talk about him more in the next Champion Roadmap

As in Will it run Doom? I mean, ignoring for a moment all the intellectual property issues that would create and the amount of work that could be going elsewhere for LoL, damn would I really love to see someone try

In case it got missed - Mythics as a special item type with associated restrictions are gone. Some of the mythic items themselves are removed, others are being made into regular items instead so will still be around

Oops, thanks, teach me not to check my posts...

Ionia themed map

It's possible, though we've had some content (e.g. Runes Reforged) on PBE for extended periods in the past without major fatigue issues once stuff's live. Most players don't engage much with PBE content, so the hope is this leaves gameplay changes feeling a lot fresher at season start for most players

Tournament of Souls - we feel this one went quite well overall, and really happy with things like this as alternatives to the visual novel format that was feeling played out previously. Technical issues are the exception though, while it worked well for most players it struggled or simply didn't function for others, which is definitely something we'd want to do a lot better at for whatever's next in this vein

Not today, I think we've got an update tentatively scheduled for our next video though, will follow up

It will be more focused on competitive play for worlds, similar to the larger sized patches we do before worlds patches

Current plan is a 4 or 6 week (TBD, still shuffling various things around) run starting December. Still very interested in getting it to a potentially permanent state someday. Current belief is getting it to a good permanent state will require more than just the sorts of smaller adjustments that would go into a regular patch, hence the bring it back with large updates iteration approach here.

Edit: Updated to reflect could be 4 or 6 weeks, I spoke too quickly

^{^} TFT's a reasonable reference point for how we're thinking about a lot of this. Not exactly the same of course, given solo versus team game and amount of content a TFT set replaces. But that sort of speed of ranked climb is closer to what we're thinking than the really drawn out gradual climbs of a full year

Current plan (could change) is Rocket Belt is still around, keeps the dash, loses the MS towards target

My build

There is no plan to do more than 3 ranked splits per year. That does not mean it won't happen, but it does mean that no one has discussed it anywhere near me.

2 was more a test for 3 than it is an indication of a growth pattern.

It’s currently still planned for this year

You know I do love a good hype train. I’m like the Baron of hype trains.

Not forgotten about. Apologies for the lack of recent discussion, it's a larger Riot topic in terms of how we're approaching the IP and storytelling generally, so not something Brightmoon and I can just cover by ourselves. Hoping to share some thoughts on it sometime later this year potentially but can't guarantee anything.

Currently in testing. Aiming to keep it, though looking to have it be less bound to particular champ kits and more bound to builds. So something like moving to bonus HP scaling from items only or whatever.

We do not have any current plans to change the Crests/Borders.

If we did, it would be part of a larger player identity overhaul.

That's the intent here. We were already kind of getting into a 'season start patch has meaningful gameplay changes' pattern beforehand, so there was like preseason 0.5 in November and 1.0 in January effectively. Trying to condense and then do really fast balance/meta follow ups through both hot fixes and the next patch or two post season start.

Right now the damage scales with your max HP, which means it synergizes really well with champs who stack health through their kits (Cho and Sion for example). Moving to bonus HP from items scaling would let us balance it around a wider range of champions, rather than it having to account for kit based health stacking and being significantly weaker on those without it

Within the next month or 2