League of Legends Dev Tracker

Overall we feel it's important to keep the game feeling modern and fresh since we believe that LoL has the ability to last a very long time. This means that we feel it's good for the long term to update things that are old and dated in our game like old Morde and breath fresh life into them. We feel this is important enough to do, even it it does cause change aversion among some of the mains of a Champion. It's also something that the community asks for and wants as player demand for VGUs is always very high when we survey players.

Aatrox though is a case where we felt we strayed too far from his previous game play identity. While he was pretty successful from a engagement perspective, we decided not to push Champions that far from there identity in future reworks.

Here it is, my magnum opus:

DEMACIA, AT DAYBREAK

The sun begins to rise, its rays cutting through the morning haze. The smell of bread fills the air as bakers prepare to open their shops. Children began to wake for school. And in a courtyard in Demacia's capital city, one man in commoner's clothing practiced maneuvers with a greatsword, while another in full plate offers suggestions, adjusts his posture, demonstrates with his own weapon.

After a particularly challenging set of exercises, the smaller man lowered his sword and leaned on it, breathing hard. He wiped the sweat from his brow, and smiled at the man in plate. "Well, what do you think?"

"It may not feel this way, but your form is beginning to improve, my friend," said Garen, watching the man in front of him attentively. "Though maybe not as much as I'd expect. Have you been practicing daily?"

"I've been trying," said the smaller man, with a hint of a whine. "It's...

I think Skarner needs a full VGU at some point, as I dont think a small rework is enough to get his kit to where it needs to be. He also needs a lot of work on the visual/theme side as well

I usually come up with the Goals for the Champions. Anyone on the team can pitch ideas, but I am the one that puts them together into opportunity spaces and then into a larger Champion Roadmap. I share this with my entire leadership team though as well as our Stakeholders, get feedback, then refine it. After it has been refined I share it with the whole team.

The ones we ended up reverting, like Rengar, Zac, LeBlanc. Sure there are lessons we learned on almost every VGU or Rework we did, or places we think we could have improved, but for the most part we think all of the big VGU's put the Champions into better places then they were before the VGU, even if there was room for improvement

This thread is so wholesome!

Enjoy the celebration today everyone.

=)

It does include the Non-traditonal Marksmen. It wasn't a typo, though 2 are really just mentions, kind of like how I mentioned we were working on a Assassin (Which later was Qiyana), but didnt go into detail on it. Just kind on mentioning the classes on the 2 Champions after Voli/Fiddle

Not anytime soon, no

Fingers crosses she is in a good place right now. She is still seeing some competitive play, while also having a healthy playrate in SoloQ. I know SoloQ winrate is low, but she is a hard champ to master, so that's to be expected

Gameplay hooks can come from a variety of spaces. Like RiotScruffy mentioned one way is from designer brainstorm meetings they hold pretty often. Sometimes they can come from product strategy, like Pyke's hook came from the opportunity space I created to make a support Assassin. Others can be derived from a thematic/visual pitch. Kai'Sas hook, for example, came from the idea that BravoRay came up with when he was doing concept exploration for the champion. He came into one DNA meeting with this awesome drawing of this "Void Diver" her called it and said that it was Kassadins daughter. The concept looks so bad ass, that the whole pod got excited about it which led to RiotJag coming up with the Ultimate which was basically her "diving into the void"

It really depends on the designer. August, for example, prefers to start with cool concept art, then derive a gameplay hook that he feels matches the character art. He's always like "Draw me a awesome character and I'll make you ...

yeah guys let’s have a normal AMA with some players wait what in the f*ck

Imma get u for this

Default we go to mana - it's generally good to have the long term attrition.

When we have something special like rage or in the few cases where we want a more spammy "action spell" champ (usually melee).

Can't speak for music as I can't remember the composers red name but the concept art was done by LoneWingy. She's now the Concept Art Lead on Champions Team right now. I love a lot of her work which include, ASol, Nami, EvelynnVGU, Qiyana, Kayle/MorganaVGU, GalioVGU and many more

Zoe, Akali & Pyke were some of my favorite Champions of all time to work on.

The origin of Pyke was really interesting, in that, at that time there was a high level goal for the entire gameplay initiative at Riot to make support a more appealing position. This was because when we introduced position select to the game it caused queue time to go up since so few people were selecting support. That's what led me to create the opportunity space for Pyke, which was to create a support Assassin. Assassins tend to be our most popular role, and Champions that tend to get a lot of kills tend to be extremely popular as well, so I thought, if we make a support that can kill people it would cause more people to play support. This actually worked out and Pyke has caused the support role to have a slightly higher queue rate then before he existed. So good guy Pyke has made queue times better for everyone.

Zoe was fun because I think we were really pushing the boundaries of our a...

Currently Garen changes seem to be going well - we simplified and cleaned up the villain mechanics (which no one seems to miss).

We're having to nerf him some but he should still have the profile that we want - even though we're puling some early game damage he's still a lane bully (just not an unstoppable god)

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I will be talking about Voli/Fiddle and 3 New Champs in details, but also a small little tidbit of 2 new champs we have in development for after Voli/Fiddle

Overall in my eyes Aatrox wasn't the perfect rework but not a failure, actually overall a good one. Don't expect a revert.

Things that went well -Super fun and iconic new playstyle weaving sword attacks and dashes -More deep and sticky playstyle has created a larger and more sticky set of Aatrox mains (we see this in the data) -More clear counterplay for opponents

Things we would do better if we could go back in time -Keep more of the oldtrox gameplay fundamentals there (aa based etc). We made something new and fun but unfortunately a lot of old mains feel left out. -He ended up not having enough weaknesses at super high skill play, making him dominant in pro while not really being viable for normal players

It’s kind of a never ending cycle since as time goes on new champions look and feel better and better which causes older Champions to feel more and more dated