Of which champ in particular were you surprised by its popularity or the overall reception of the community? Also will we get more cats anytime soon? We need to be able to make a 5 stack cat team = ^ - ^ =
Neeko and Mordekaiser were 2 Champs that we were surprized by there popularity. Both were targeted at being "Niche" Champions but both ended up a lot more broadly appealing then we anticipated
How does the champion design process work? Is it one person proposing a rough draft and then a collaborative process from there? Just kinda curious what the system looks like.
The Champion Design process begins with a opportunity space which I create as the product lead. This space is based on a overall Champion Roadmap which ensures we have different classes, themes, tones, genders and such. That opportunity space then goes to a "Core pod" consisting on a designer, narrative writer and concept artists and they start ideating against the opportunity spaces. For example, Zoe's opportunity space was to make a cute/adorable high mechanics mid laner, since it was a space we felt didn't exist in league
Why are there so few bird like champions? Is the idea of a natural flying living or mechanical thing uninteresting?
Well we have a lot of bird like champions (Xayah, Rakan, Azir, Quinn) but only one bird Champion (Anivia)
How does the champion design process begin?
Also, favorite champions to work on?
The Champion Design process begins with a opportunity space which I create as the product lead. This space is based on a overall Champion Roadmap which ensures we have different classes, themes, tones, genders and such. That opportunity space then goes to a "Core pod" consisting on a designer, narrative writer and concept artists and they start ideating against the opportunity spaces. For example, Zoe's opportunity space was to make a cute/adorable high mechanics mid laner, since it was a space we felt didn't exist in league
u/Reav3 is there some hope for my little boy Kogmaw, he was the reason i started many years ago, and nowadays he looks (and sometimes feels) so outdated. I feel could get a mini update like ezrael (or at least some spell effects) to make him the best little worm (or butterfly) he can be :3
I for sure want to VGU him at some point, there are just Champions that need it more right now. He is creeping up on the VGU priority list though
Has there ever been a champions team discussion of a true dual wield champion? That is, one where using a two-weapon style is actually a core of the gameplay, rather than just an aesthetic choice like all of the champions who currently exist that use more than one weapon.
E.g. Olaf, Katarina, Draven, and so forth. The only champion I can think of whose kit kind of takes a weapon in each hand into account is Lucian and he is still pretty loose and also ranged.
I’d like to see something where the kit takes into account the possibilities of a two weapon fighter - benefits to that would be a possible stance change based on last ability used or sequence, things of that sort or a unique ability chain system.
Also after all this time, aside from the champions who won the poll, who does the team really want to update - even if it isn’t necessarily the “worst” candidate in terms of how poorly the assets have aged.
We discuss that a lot actually. I hope we can fully realize that fantasy at some point in the future
With the huge roster of champions, we have spartans, killer clowns, pirates, ninjas, rats, cats, knights, spooky skeletons, etc. Is there a theme or archetype that you think League is missing or one that you really want?
There are so many! I don't think we could ever run out
As a trashy Riven main, of course all of my questions are going to be about her :P.
- How did Riot respond initially to the bugs on Riven that became features, like doublecasting and the fast q?
- When Riven e's into a wall from a certain distance, she will briefly clip into the wall before being pushed out, but this small window allows her to jump some massive walls, such as raptors to midlane. Why/how does this occur?
- Riven for a while now has had a bug where her q will go backwards when you lock-on q while close to someone, is Riot aware of this?
EDIT: Why does Nidalee Q convert sheen damage into magic?
How did Riot respond initially to the bugs on Riven that became features, like doublecasting and the fast q?
With any champion and any bug, we have to make decisions like that about whether to fix something, or whether to even think of it as a bug anymore. I can't speak to exactly how we make those design decisions. But I have seen "bugs" specifically on Riven that happened because we fixed things that we considered systemic bugs, but we then needed to reimplement the behavior that Riven relied on. Specifically around animation cancelling.
Riven is aimed at a very specific combo/animation cancelling gameplay fantasy that means she stresses our animation and spell casting flow a lot. As a game engineer, I love having a champion like that in the game to make sure we're questioning our assumptions and building with an open mind.
Read moreWhen Riven e's into a wall from a certain distance, she will briefly clip into the wall before...
What’re your thoughts on the current state of Zoe? It’s definitely safe to say she’s in a better spot than release where her W missiles would one shot squishies, and she currently isn’t pick or ban.
I think she is in a great place right now. I still play her whenever Akali is banned :P
Happy 10 years!!
Who in your opinion is the best designed champion in league? also do you have any funny or cool stories that you havent told before?
Best designed Champ in LoL? Though probably controversial in this subreddit but to me it's probably Yasuo. He has had a solid winrate in all elos of SoloQ for along time, which is hard to accomplish for a non-ADC. He sees some competitive play without being pick/ban. He also really embodies the feeling of playing a Samurai and is the most played Champion in the game.
PBE Servers live in LA still if I'm remembering correctly
We used to house the PBE in Vegas but its currently in Chicago. You may experience a different ping as we are experimenting with hosting game servers in the cloud.
i'm sad
Me too, at least the last Champion he designed is his most ambitious one to date
If I understood correctly, the behavior described by LtRandolph is only used by Yuumi's Q. Other spells have absolutely no use for such a system since their direction / location / target etc. is determined upon casting (the calculation only happens once). So the issue you're raising may not be related, but it's a good question.
Correct, this mouse tracking was built specifically for Yuumi Q.
What you're describing sounds more to me like an issue somewhere between input latency and human perception. Any game engine needs to take into account delays between when a button is pressed and when it is reacted to. You can shift input samples around within a frame. Some games are drawing "last frame" while setting up "this frame", which leads to an extra frame of latency from your input. But also the human brain is bad at identifying exactly what's happening on extremely fast timelines, like the framerate of a video game. Sometimes the brain's prediction of "I'm going to do the thing" winds up dominating the perception of what's actually been done.
I'm guessing, Poluact, that you're experiencing a mix of both of these phenomena, making it so that if your mouse moved a lot in ~1/30 of a second or so, the game won't necessarily agree with you on exactly where it was when you pushed your key.
A lot of the time, champion design begins with a certain archetype or gimmick (for example, Tahm Kench was based on the phrase "fishtank" while Yuumi was designed off the familiar archetype) in mind.
What archetype would you like to explore to develop into a full champion?
Yuumi ended up a familiar, but she didn't start that way. She just started with the goals of making a enchanter who remains attached to a ally more then 50% of the game. We also wanted to make a enchanter for our core enchanter audience since we didn't feel like we have made a Champion for those players since Nami. She ended up a familiar as the Discovery phase went on. RiotEarp while exploring different concept for the Champ had one image of a fat lazy Cat, which the whole pod loved, as the cats are generally thought of as lazy, which thematically fit perfectly for a Champ that never really walks themselves in game. This is what led to explore Yuumi and then narrative was excited about the idea of her being some witches familiar since she was a magic cat.
Why did aatrox end up changing such a dramatic amount from his original concept. You said yourself that people really liked his thematic so why did you guys end up changing it so much. It cant have been for balance reasons due to the sheer amount you have changed him over the past year.
On a side note how do you guys feel about akali and aatrox being changed so constantly every patch, even after they were adjusted to be easier to balance. Do you think you will ever reach a good "balance" for them or are they candidates for another rework similar to how ryze got reworked a bunch.
With Aatrox of survey data showed that players really liked his theme of demon blade wielder, but really disliked his gameplay. He was like is the bottom 3 lowest scores of all Champions for gameplay. I wanted to try something with Aatrox based on that data, which was basically the "Start over" with his theme, since the theme was so liked while the gameplay was so disliked. The idea was to basically take his visual theme, and create a fully new kit that really delivered on that visual theme.
In the end that was extremely successful as he had one of the largest jumps in playrate of any VGU we have done, if you look at is historical average playrate pre and post VGU. Unfortunately, this upset not only mains for the Champions but a lot of the community that didn't even play him and created a mistrust for future VGUs, where players were afraid there Champ would change as much as Aatrox did.
Since we know from data that a majority of players play a Champ for visual the...
Read moreWhat caused it to stutter when Yuumi was released?
When it first came out, there were some challenges with it deciding what height to draw at. Our game logic (almost) all takes place in 2D, but we then need to draw missiles at a height that makes them understandable, dodgeable, etc.
I added a new field to the "follow terrain height solver" that controls the maximum slope that a missile can follow. That prevented it from jumping up and down as it crossed over walls, down into the river, etc.
as in they don't do that the rest of the year?
Normally we prioritize bugs based off assessed impact, frequency and ability to reproduce them. Today we're just going off what players request that we're able to fix over the course of the day.
Read moreThese are going to be kind of all over the place, apologies.
1 - How does Morde ult work? The video at his release talked about "different interaction layers", but what went into building that separation? Is "realm" now included in all position values? Does every ForEachUnitInXXX now have flags for which realm(s) to look in? Did you have to make a lot of changes to spell scripts to handle units being in different realms?
2 - How does Yuumi Q work with the cursor following?
3 - How did you get extra spell slots to work with Sylas ult? Just assigning each one before casting it?
4 - What was the removed "Baubles" spell slot supposed to be used for?
5 - What was the removed "Scriptable" missile type for?
6 - Why does Aurelion Sol passive have a different missile type than the other circle missiles?
7 - Why does Xayah passive have a unique missile type not found on anyone else?
8 - What are NextSpellVars for? Next cas...
13 - Did you ever fix the servers dying when the game reaches 25000 seconds of game time? It's not exactly something that's easy for me to check myself... Do you know what exactly is timing out that causes it?
Depending on the hardware we can run over 100 games on one physical machine. There is a single process called the local server manager that is responsible for all of those games. One of its duties is to kill off any game server it thinks is misbehaving. If a game runs at 100% cpu for too long or if it seems like its a ghost game running forever it will terminate the process. So if your game runs for too long you need to close out or the LSM will judge you.
What was the most difficult ability to make?
And how difficult is it to visualize and execute the champion designers concept into an ability?
Also super awesome ur doing an AMA! Love you guys! Never change swain anymore pls
What was the most difficult ability to make?
The hardest ones I've been around for have been Sylas ult, Neeko disguise passive, and Mordekaiser ult. All of them share one specific quality that makes them way harder to build than a typical spell. Each of them required special care to make sure that every other champion works with them.
For Sylas ult, we needed to get a much cleaner definition of "what is a spell?" It couldn't just be a miserable little pile of scripts.
For Neeko disguise, there were a ton of special cases for things like Aurelion Sol missiles, Graves auto attack, DJ Sona, etc. that required special handling to take the visuals and auto attacks without taking on the entire identity of the character.
For Mordekaiser, we specifically needed to think about what happens with every spell in the game when it's cast as you transition into/out of the death realm. We tried to come up with solutions that work correctly...
Read more
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