Thank you Riot Games for adapting at the pace you did and easing some of the struggles in this year.
Thank you for keeping League of Legends updated at the high standards and cadence we know and love.
Thank you for executing a pre-season of this magnitude from unfamiliar work environments.
I hope you all have some relaxing holidays and take care of yourselves 🙏🏼
😄
Thanks everyone for the kind words!
Thus is amazing! I'm an avid crocheter myself. :) I'd love to gift you something if you give me your IGN and region!
Much better Muramana changes that actually consider what champs want. I'm still praying for less painful combine costs on AP+mana mythics, hopefully that gets looked into soon.
Yeah this design is so much better. Shifting the power to +AD and removing the silly damage-type constraint is better all around.
LETS GO! The popoff!!
Yuumi W OFC. Not only does it disable her basic attack, it also makes it so she can't move!
Are you judging this in terms of winrate loss if the ability was removed?
Hey Reinboom can you share how you feel about Nexus Siege and Dark Star Singularity, I felt both modes had some potential with a lot of the uniqueness added from the newer elements
Nexus Siege is unlikely to ever return. It's a very high cost mode to upkeep. Mostly in part due to the "game reset" part of it. And it wasn't really that popular.
Dark Star... I can't say for sure. Personally, I loved Dark Star. But it definitely got old fast. And this reflected in play rate as well. It was effectively a 1-weekend mode, in terms of a supportable queue size. It will definitely not return anytime soon, but I would love to be able to capture some aspect of it again eventually.
For that same reason is it unlikely to see Butchers Bridge return?
IIRC, Butcher's Bridge was built on a new renderer, so it could return. I would need to see where it's at though.
On note of that, have you ever thought about bringing dominion map back only in customs though? Honestly it's an entirely selfish reason but I would love to play hide and seek again, it's just not the same on SR.
Crystal Scar is very unlikely to come back.
The Crystal Scar (and Twisted Treeline for that matter) were built for an old environment renderer that's no longer around. To return those maps, they will need to be rebuilt entirely. The only map so far that was built for the old renderer that was then rebuilt as-is for the new renderer has been Howling Abyss.
In turn, that old renderer also is unable to come back since utilizing it prevented League from adopting newer versions of DirectX. For maps, when things articles or comments mention the trade off between cost to keep around vs the popularity of the map or mode, most often that deprecation is one of the most significant costs we had to consider.
Read moreThat's interesting, as it suggests (based on just that statement, of course) that the popular game modes may be those that adhere the closest to normal League play. ARAM is teamfighting-focused, OFA is one champion, and URF is faster, but all three have fairly normal League play outside of those additions.
I'd be curious to see if that's an actual trend, and if, say, reducing the value of Nexus Blitz events and using them more like Dragon buff-level rewards instead of the (often) increased power they have now might actually increase player interest, since that would make the normal gameplay a bit more similar to the apparently winning formula of Normal Gameplay + secondary gimmick. Right now NB does feel a bit event-dominant conceptually, even if in practice events aren't as large a tipping point as actual gameplay. That might also be due to the fact tha...
"SR variation" would be an incomplete analysis. Some of the least popular game modes, Nemesis Draft being perhaps the most extreme example, are also SR variations.
I also strongly believe that "SR variation" doesn't really capture why URF isn't played.
Our current hypothesis is that modes that present a strong - positive - gameplay fantasy are the most widely appealing and with an element of "changes every game" causes interest to stick. That is to say, folks play URF because they imagine all the cool sh*t they do in URF. They keep playing URF because each game has all the rest of the champions also doing cool sh*t (and different cool sh*t than last time), and that makes each game different and exciting. Really, the same is true with OFA as well.
That is to say, it's really about the champions. Not about the environment those champions are in. The environment, though, can be altered to support such spaces. "What does my champion ge...
Read moreIt sucks we don't get new events in blitz with each new run. Riot then wonders why modes fall out of popularity.
For this run of Nexus Blitz, we're starting it knowing it didn't get enough attention, but that will be taken into account when looking at the data. We, simply, ran out of time but changes are still planned.
Nexus Blitz is not one of the more popular modes to begin with (OFA and URF are the current reigning champions there), at least in terms of % of people played or how much folks are playing. For every release so far that has been true. But it's also not unpopular so we are interested trying more on it. :)
Oh woah! This design space is wonderful and had not been considered yet. Awesome idea, /u/gramineous :D
Hey Reinboom, any chance you could comment on whether your approaches to PvE modes has changed or remained the same? (e.g. not doing them as too much effort for too little engagement etc.)
They have. I won't go into much detail here, but the short of it is that it'll likely be awhile before we return to PvE modes and if/when we do, the approach will be something pretty different than Star Guardian or Odyssey.
Ascension coming back confirmed???
Ascension is unlikely to come back in the form you're familiar with. If it's coming back, it'll come back on a different map. Currently, we've actually considered modifying the Nexus Blitz map for it (given how rounded the Nexus Blitz map is). If you notice the changes to terrain in the center "arena" area of Nexus Blitz, these changes are meant to help support much more interesting gameplay for other ways we can use that space. :)
The Crystal Scar is dead. Like so dead. Like omg dead.
The renderer for League's environment is completely different and new from what existed when Dominion (and so, Ascension) was made, meaning that a lot of what was made for that map is unusable and will need to be rebuilt. All the environments you see now were either built initially for the new renderer (Nexus Blitz or any of the TFT environments) or were rebuilt (SR, Howling Abyss). Keeping a map has to overcome the cost of that rebuild. :(
Since you are adressing things anyway I have another thing that comes to mind: the current health damage from Botrk on the DPS dummy isn't capped or reduced, so you deal well over 2500 per hit. It's not uncommon to do over 150k damage during a single event.
Considering Brand and Vayne's max health damage is reduced it doesn't make a whole lot of sense that Botrk's damage isn't. The damage is only the first problem, the healing is also quite insane due to the damage you do.
Thank you for bringing this back up!
Awkwardly, the reason the HP is as high as it is is to avoid an awkward damage timing bug. Also, champion damage is easier to isolate than item damage is.
But. We actually now have tech to solve that particular bug correctly now, which in turns lets us lower the HP. That is certainly something we can address now (albeit, for next run).
What you sacrificed a little of that tankiness for a little more movement and/or damage? I bet she might be a decent top laner or even jungler given just the right tuning.
Probably not, high durability is at the top of the list of things that should be true about Rell. If Rell becomes a somewhat niche top/jungle with our efforts to serve support Rell that's fine, but we don't have plans to intentionally support those roles right now.
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Yeah I think that's a valid concern. How it feels might change over time too, we're only one week into the release of a brand new character, the winrate hasn't stopped climbing yet and optimal skill order/builds haven't quite settled. You can join us in monitoring her for now, from the points already raised above we know that base stat buffs are a pretty justifiable candidate if we need to buff her.
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Will caveat this with "I'm not a game designer", but to me this is a question of magnitudes. With base stats closer to the upper end of tank supports, she was really tankier than everyone else given her other tools. With base stats closer to the middle/lower end, she's still on the upper end of durability taking into account her other defenses (passive steal, W shield, W resist amp). If we said, "hey here are these tools that let you be really tanky" and then you used them and you weren't, that would be a failure imo but it doesn't seem like that's the case.
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