[2021] The changes to the mission system seem overly tedious.

I've been talking to a few folks about the Debonair pass changes, and on this note in particular since to me it has echoes of the first-week Sentinels tuning situation. The team explained that the problem is that the smaller we make the numbers for the repeatable token missions, the more points get lost to rollover.

....which itself is obviously a problem, and as easy as it seems like it should be to solve, there's no cumulative "points" tracker in the background. Changes during the mythic content overhaul will mostly address this, but that's not here yet :X

(As an aside, I do want to confirm the rollover thing is not a secret tactic intentionally built to sneakily squeeze more games from y'all--if we wanted to do that it still would've been better to implement rollover because then we'd have much finer control over how many more games you have to play. We don't get anything extra from people who land at 0 rollover loss or just a couple points' worth.)

So, when we try to do this type of stuff, we see players getting really upset that they're forced to play a "role" in order to do the mission effectively. We don't want missions to warp player behavior or change the way you play to the point that you're not having fun any more, and the more granular and "interesting" we get with missions, the more they tend to feel this way.

This type of feedback is why we rely so heavily on "or" Missions. Do a thing that is a little out of the norm to complete a mission quickly, or just play the game and complete it more slowly. It's interesting, because it begs the question:

What are Missions actually for? Are they meant as just daily / weekly reward dumps that don't encourage you to do anything different? Should they be mini-challenges that break you out of your normal gameplay patterns to try something new and reward you for it? Can they be both without delivering an unsatisfying experience?

I think, in general, we lean a little more towards making these just markers of progress - play the game to make progress, win to move faster. These tend to be the most satisfying missions, but also the most boring. It's a trade-off, but curious to get more thoughts.

We were trying to solve the feeling of a 40 minute loss giving you an unsatisfying amount of progress - the previous system rewarded quick stomps and punished longer matches, which is something we thought was not respectful of your time. The overall tuning should be nearly identical to the previous setup, and so far, the data suggest that the vast majority of players are progressing at about the same pace or just slightly over / under.

A quick note about lack of overspill - this existed in the old system, and also exists here. It's a sh*tty limitation of our mission system, and it's something we are going to address in the future. I can't give you an ETA because it's the final week of the year for Riot, but this is something we absolutely want to fix because it sucks.

It has been somewhat masked in the past by the fact that objectives weren't always consistent mission to mission (e.g. Mission 1 could be earn gold and Mission 2 could be vision score) so overspill didn't always make sense in those contexts. Now that mission objectives are more normalized with similar objectives, it has become more apparent how big of a problem this is, and if we choose to continue with some variation of our current design, overspill will need to be solved.

Depending on when you bought the pass, your Milestone Mission progress may have been reset due to a bug. We'll be compensating players for that lost progress with something soon. I was affected by it too and it felt pretty bad.

Yes, absolutely. I'm one of those players.