League of Legends Dev Tracker

Thanks for sharing fruitful. Not only for sharing about your mom, but your perspective on Thanksgiving. Best to you and your mom.

My father told me something when I was a kid and did well in one of my classes, “Now that I’ve seen you get an A, it means I can expect an A. With greater performance comes even greater expectations of future performance.”

Here’s hoping we can continue to deliver on what are ever-evolving expectations from our players.

As requested: https://imgur.com/a/TMkXoTU

You’ve got quite the family of fur babies. :)

Also +1 to the passion coming from high expectations.

Truth

Some of you out there already know who I am, for those that don’t, my name is Bellissimoh and I’m the Product Lead for Personalization and Events on League.

Here in the US, many of us are separated from family on a day known for togetherness. Sitting at home and thinking about what I’m grateful for, a few things came to mind that I thought were worth sharing. Here we go.

I’m grateful for the mentors and coaches who believed in me early in my career and invested in me. They gave me opportunities, positive feedback to raise my confidence, and criticisms or perspective to check my ego.

I’m grateful to have a wife that shares a love for League with me. It makes staying up for Worlds or geeking out over things like KDA into things we share and remember together.

I’m grateful for our two Shiba Inus, Ahri and Teemo. In a year where it’s been hard to be home all the time they’ve made it a joy by constantly reminding me to play and be silly, and indulge ...

I cant give ya a timeframe or even say which is the intended functionality but I'll make sure its in our database and someone looks at it

I'll pass this along so we can make sure there are eyes on it, thanks!

We've definitely considered it, but quickly decided against it. One of the underrated aspects of league is that actions have consequences. You can teleport into a situation but it may turn out badly and you die. You can flash in to kill someone but actually put yourself in a worse position or flash into a wall.

There is a strong design theory that actions that carry high reward and high consequence can be more satisfying in the long run. This doesn't mean that we shouldn't give forgiveness on spells, but generally speaking consequence tends to be a good thing for player mastery and longevity of the game (I can always get better at doing this difficult thing). When a player masters and can reproduce a difficult thing, it is on average more satisfying than reproducing something that is more forgiving (see frame perfecting qss).

Oftentimes, feeling bad over poor execution can Ignite the drive to improve (eg. If I had just placed that wall a little better, I might hav...

This is something that we are aware of and are considering options to address. For this season, we wanted to make Haste a combination of a "progression stat" and an "intentional choice" for AP users and we knew it would be at least a little painful (especially compared to the amounts of cdr from last season, like many have pointed out in the comments, getting to 30, 35, 45 for many champions was happening too early and too reliably). I don't think we've nailed the balance of it on the first go, but I'm at least pleased with the way the structure has been playing out (but not the balance of the structure).

This structure is: Get a good baseline haste with Mythics (so your champ feels like it's casting more spells throughout the game), choose between burst/defense +haste/scaling/offensive haste for legendaries/runes and choose between burst/defense/haste on boots.

Lucidity boots on champions are generally underpurchased right now (majorly due to preference/familiarit...

What's the issue?

My dude, I’ve seen people work themselves crazy trying to do something cool for players that no one internally asked for, I’ve seen features that would have made stupid money canned because they wouldn’t run on lower spec machines, and I’ve literally never heard anyone talk about deception. (People were bummed when the boards had to be shut down.)

I’m a designer not a comms person. I don’t like....know how to massage a message or anything. You can either believe we act in good faith and f*ck up occasionally just like the rest of humanity, or you can believe there’s a back room where we plot to ruin your main and the client one knowingly awful decision at a time.

Why do you think so many people play Yasuo? Why do so many people find Yasuo frustrating?

Yasuo in may ways is "too fun". He gets so much agency, and so it makes it REALLY frustrating to play against a Yasuo who plays perfectly.

That version of Yone's kit felt AMAZING to pilot, but even if it was nerfed and tuned as much as we could, you would feel powerless playing against someone who played it perfectly.

As a side-note, I do think we've erred on providing characters with more agency, skill expression, etc., and thus more champions that push this (Irelia rework, Akali rework, etc.). Overall, I like that version of League. Zed vs Yasuo, Akali vs Ekko, Riven vs Fiora, these are some of the matchups I prefer to play and watch. But that's just my take, though I do definitely think we've designed more high skill expression, mechanically demanding, flashy, etc. characters in that direction in the last 5 years of LoL compared to the first 5 years.

This was my response to a similar post the other day: https://www.reddit.com/r/leagueoflegends/comments/jwmpsv/i_would_like_to_talk_to_you_about_the_discrepancy/gct4i25/

There will always be an optimal build and players will always want to find it.

I think this is true to some extent, but it doesn't mean that you can't strive for it. Pragmatically speaking, we know that there will be some hard bound champions, because we can't make double the number of Mythic items due to complexity of the game.

To push back on your point a little bit, I would argue that in a lot of cases, where players think things are optimal, there is actually a hidden build that is competitive, waiting to be discovered. In the best case scenario, the newly discovered build doesn't take over the old build, but is situationally as competitive. We see this in many games, not just League.

To give a League example, the AP items that were changed in patch 8.4 took almost 2 years for Pro players to discover that there were builds other than Ludens -> Morello -> Sorcs on champions like Orianna, Syndra that vary based on the game stat...

Wait Hauntzer and Bio are teamless?

I've followed Doublelift ever since I was a kid and getting into League, many many seasons ago. I've followed his highest highs and lowest lows - cheered alongside him when he won his titles and cried when I heard about his family situation. He's the main reason I got so into League and eSports. It's incredibly sad to see the end of his professional player journey, but I'm excited to see what comes next for him.

ROA (with a transformation mechanic) was a mythic for a few weeks in development. It was ultimately pretty unsatisfying as a mythic, due to the time to ramp up, leaving the player impotent for too long.

Our design goal was that there shouldn't be a "one mythic" for a given champion (there will always be a few champions that we can't achieve this on, but is the goal). This is one of the reasons why we're trying to unbind a few of the champs OP mentioned from mana, so that they can engage in Mythic choice in the system.

Some of the champs you mentioned are quite squishy without ROA, and that's a piece of feedback that we've heard and considering how to respond to. Everfrost and Non-Mana AP Mythics with some health should theoretically be an option for some of the champions that used to buy ROA.

DL is the most iconic NA player. So many story lines (as hero and villain), so many defeats and triumphs, so many memes.

Really gonna miss him. He was the reason I flipped from being a fan of so many different teams, and emphasized that for esports, player affinity > team affinity.

The end of an era.