League of Legends Dev Tracker

Arcane was written before one runeterra. Skarner old lore was as well. Every narrative choice we make has consequences and hundreds of hours poured into pros and cons of each decision. We are no longer at a point where we can wave our hands and decide because we want to make sure our Runeterra is cohesive for decades and decades. We learned alot from the past rewrites etc etc. We want to make sure moving forward, every decision matters because it will be held as universe truth.While I can't completely show everything right now, which I understand makes it a bit hard to empathize with what we are trying to accomplish, but these choices did not come easy. It took months and months of looking at options.If this comes from you loving old Skarner lore, it is completely understandable! Players hate it when we take away something that is beloved (I myself still really love the old Trundle lore tbh). We did have to weigh our options here. While its not ideal for you, we did pretty deep res...

While its true we can try to continue the story afterwards... it would be a bit odd for Arcane to not touch on it at all if we are a shared universe. This gives both team creative freedom and space to do their best work instead of putting all of the energy into how to twist a story to fit Skarner's background.

The other problem is that Skarner's lore is already in the space where he isn't given agency. His past story left him collecting the rocks of his brackern. Fairly siloed.. off on his own.

His new background puts him at the center of political struggle of a region.

This. And stay tuned for S2 :O!

You are correct in some regards. It was a couple of things. When we looked into it, what we didn't like about Skarner's lore is that he didn't really control his future and outcome. This really made him someone who was suffering an outcome rather than a main character with compelling goals that can be expanded upon, loved and empathized with. We don't want players to just feel sorry for the sad scorpion. But instead to understand his goals, his ideal outcomes and knows he has the power to potentially influence the political systems of a region. We also didn't want to completely take away the sense of loss of his beloved bond, so we thought the Ixtal people and the history he had seen can be part of that forlornness. His decisions has impact on the world versus being a victim. He is now in a position to decide, if he wants Ixtal to go down one path vs another. This also help build out Ixtal and the differing view points of some of the key players in that region. Previously, it was ...

Sending love your way Annie Bot

xD

I think it was an LCS fresh hoodie from 2023? It was cold for the first 2 holes then I took it off and put it in my golf bag lol

Everyone played it. It was played a ton. They just didn't KEEP playing it...

Dev updates tend to take a week and a half to two weeks post filming until they're ready for release on average. That covers editing, addition of gameplay footage, localization to other languages etc.

Idk we already have enough AP champions who are hehe xD one shot machines. Don't feel particularly enthused by galio being another one of those, given his theme, etc.

My suspicion is the yuumi account didn't play any normal games, so they did not have any seeding info on the account for when they entered ranked.

The other account seems to be placed a lot more honestly, though probably still too high overall.

I'm also suspicious of some shenaniganry going on, given the first player played 100 games of yuumi and 50 games of veigar in normals, then suddenly plays 9 games of Warwick in ranked.

This isn't ideal and we're working on ways to better account for these cases. (from accounts being botted and sold to inappropriate seeding, etc.)

Galio is just weak right now. I don't think he lacks identity, he has a pretty clear one, he is meant to be as close to being a " defender/enabler from midlane" with an ability to shrug off some AP damage as is reasonably supportable by gameplay.

Preventing your team from getting run over on the entire map is obviously pretty broken, so his tools to prevent that need some clear weaknesses, eg. He doesn't turbo stomp lane to trade off for his ~semi global presence. He has a lot of CC capabilities, which also need to be compensated somewhere.

When you have galio on your team, you are meant to feel more supported/comfortable, because he could come save you/support you if you need it.

When galio was unconditionally strong (eg. think back to faker galio), it was because he could get prio in every lane and was not movable in any matchup, while having high pressure/uptime on sides.

This state wasn't particularly sustainable, so we had to give him a laning...

I cannot believe anyone on earth allows League players to become responsible for other folk's careers. (Myself included)

Appreciate the Philly slang as a guy from Philly myself.

We are always updating the engine that League runs on.

But let’s for the sake of argument say we thought that it would be easier and better to switch to a new off the shelf engine:

First, you need to update the networking. The Hextech engine’s networking I am told is like extremely overpowered relative to the market. Valorant and other games expend significant effort to get theirs into a similar state.

Now you need to port all of the content from our current stack to a new stack, including all champions, game systems, cosmetics, etc.

You can use some automation to get the bulk of the data across, but you would need to have humans hand-tune the rest. (Imagine making sure that Riven’s combos felt “just so” to her mains and ensuring that translates) In order to hit our quality bar this could actually take several years with many devs involved. Those are people are years that are not spent making League better.

You probably also need s...

I’ll make a note for next week to see how difficult it is to just let him ult without condition with Samira R, and whether that’s something we’d want.

We typically just allow Sylas to be OP with new spells and don’t stop designing because of him. It would be really lame for 1 designer to ship a champ that restricts every designer after them.

As for the Samira Sylas thing, my understanding is that Sylas does not get Samira passive, which prevents him from casting R. This is definitely not ideal from the player perspective, but would require us to either move passive logic into R (which means Viego can’t stack it) or special case Sylas, which may be more cost than value.

This was all a bit before I started learning to read/write champion code myself, but my understanding of the cause was:

Most champions had spells/passives/etc that only had to check for “themselves” to trigger logic. So when it was Viego running their logic instead, it would not know what to do.

So in Zyras case, it would spawn a plant, then check “Zyras” passive cooldown before sending another one. Because there was no “Zyra” passive to check, it would just fire off another plant, and repeat until Viego left her body or until some other bug stopped it.

As for the final question, Viego/Sylas/Renata etc all caused us to have new “standards” for how to properly script to not run into the common bugs with them. So new champs should follow these standards and just work, but regardless, our QA teams would test to make sure it works anyway.

You are correct in that Viego and Sylas were both nightmares. Once we “locked” the general mechanics of the ult/kit stealing, we had to play test with the (very slowly growing) list of champions that wouldn’t break the game when interacting. This meant a LOT of playing simple stuff like Jinx until we slowly bug fixed every single interaction.

Did mean some funny moments when a champ labeled “functional but probably bugged somehow” in our champion tracker was played and would break the game somehow. For example, Viego possessing Zyra spawned about 6 thousand plants all around the map in around 5 seconds due to a bug with her passive.

Seeing how that development went, it’s a miracle we untangled all the spaghetti to where they function reasonably as expected on live now.

Things could always be improved for sure, but the Engineers have done some amazing improvements over the past few years. As far as Gameplay goes, there's not too much that we (Designers) are not able to do as far as prototyping and implementing goes.

eg. Consider the Season Start changes we just did. Just a few years ago, would not be remotely possible. In this Season we changed basically every map geo, many many items, all the objective flows, spawning rules, dynamic map terrain changing through the game, etc.