League of Legends Dev Tracker

Not an expert on the space nor an expert on this game in particular, but to try to put it in newbie-friendly terms as best I understand it:

Many (most?) fighting games are 1v1. I pick a character. You pick a character. We fight until one of us dies. Sometimes it's best of 3 so we go again with health bars refilled. But regardless, we just fight until one of us dies.

An assist-based fighter is a 2v2, 3v3, or more. However, we're still sort of playing a 1v1. I may have 2 or 3 characters on my team, but the baseline is still that same 1v1 from before and we're mostly 1v1 at any given time. The reason it's a 2v2 or a 3v3 is that I can do two special things:

I can swap my fighter mid-round. I can also have both my characters on screen for a short time, making a brief 2v1 (hence the "assist" moniker). The how (other than "hit assist button") and why are beyond my knowledge of fighting games.

And because teams are 2+ characters deep, the round only ends whe...

I'm crying

We are investigating solutions to this issue currently. I have no promises and nothing to share, but we would like to address this pain point without significantly altering his core bush/gameplay pattern.

This is a thing that does suck about the current setup - context is hard to recognize. We have a couple ideas on how to improve this in the future, e.g. normalizing the callout to something that is universally interesting like milestones.

This is unfortunately the reality of game development and the trade off of transparency. The options are basically give an update of how things are at that moment in time with the knowledge it could change, or say nothing. I prefer the former, but it can be frustrating either way.

It's not really about how big or small the team is, it's that it's a cross discipline task. And most players also don't realize how complex game Dev can get behind the scenes.

Design needs to figure out how we are doing the representation (eg. We tried several different things before landing on the healthbar).

Once we decide this is the solution we're going for, Engineering then need to extend the UI system to include this zombie state in the UI system without breaking anything.

Visual design then needs to create several icons, before we settle on the correct one. And hooking them up in game to be playtested is not trivial either, you can't just throw a png in a folder and have a designer hook it up and call it a day. Textures also need to undergo optimization so they don't consume too much memory.

A producer will also need to weigh this work against the other priorities. Eg. Did the engineer have to tackle some emergent bugs that are negatively ...

Yes, it overrides healthbar settings, the same way it will read "stunned" or "reviving"

This is correct. Last update we gave was "need to hire more designers before we can resume work on them". This has since happened.

You do. We honestly could not make any of these things without you guys commitment and trust over the years (you know, even when we mess up).

Hi, do you mind elaborating?

Without any identifying info, I'm guessing this is the edge case that we've been running into that is quite rare, but we are attempting to fix (and micropatch as soon as we have a solid design solution).

Almost all of the negative bounty feedback has been a result of this edge case (and it feels really bad when it happens and for that, I apologize).

We are looking to fix it as soon as possible.

There are some additional changes coming down the pipe to improve chemsoul readability. The name plate will read "zombie" and display an appropriate icon. We couldn't quite get it in for ship, so it is likely to be coming next patch.

Shadowflame wasn't designed to be an anti shield item. It is a magic pen item for champions that cannot proc any of the other pure damage items (horizon, Lich, etc.) with an anti-shield cherry on top.

We found that gating the full item functionality behind an opponent team composition having shielders, when it's meant to be a core item did not satisfy those users.

These champions are often trying to nuke champions through a defensive shield like Janna, lulu, locket etc.

In those situations against a full hp ~15-1800 hp target, getting the max pen can be significant. 7 mpen can be a surprising amount of damage and it also has good effect against bruisers who are frequently at the max hp threshold and taking ambient damage.