League of Legends Dev Tracker

One of the tasks coming up (IDK if it's on my sprint or not, I wasn't in last week) is identifying what we want the shape of top lane to be in modern League of Legends.

Most players tend to really not like the results of pure split pushing and I think I agree with them. Feels like they single-handedly decide who wins. Compared to a fed ADC, you can usually one-shot the ADC with Rengar or something and at least more people are involved in the game. This is a very short summary, to be clear.

I have ideas. Regardless, there needs to be a holistic look. Top lane in particular probably needs to snowball less, at least in the early game. It probably needs to be less decided by jungle ganks. And we need to figure out what actions a top laner is meant to take after 10 or so minutes into the game. Again, there is a lot to look at here.

What's funny (and this isn't really targeted at you in particular), last time I made a video talking about how I'd like to see top la...

I think punishing a champion for being popular is a very silly approach.

Yes.

Worth noting that this is specially LCK games, not necessarily League of Legends as a whole. Historically the LCK has had incredibly low bloodiness, which was not remotely representative of the typical League game.

Lolalytics win rates are fake. Look in the top right corner. See where it says "Average Emerald+ Win Rate: 52.xx%"? Yeah, you have to subtract that. That's the baseline for any champion at that tier for that website.

The vast majority of "but look at the win rate!" posts make this mistake.

I got trolled on the nexus in game 3, but hopefully recovered when it finally went down.

I'm happy to see how well G2 played but feel a little deflated for XL because they are a better team than they showed today. I'm hopeful to see how they will perform during the season finals.

I hope you had fun despite the short series, and I'll see you all for season finals!

My pleasure. My challenge now is to have better emotional control and not let the frequent antagonism get to me.

It’s like 51-52% at every skill bracket. That is well within the charts.

This wasn’t a thorough analysis. It was simply, hey, in 15 minutes we can check a binary patch note. This was just an off-hand comment, don’t read too much into it.

We have much better ways of tracking the actual game impact. We have a report for how long each death takes, for example.

Yeah absolutely. However, a huge portion of the game is driven by pro play. I'm not talking about our changes in reaction, I'm talking about actual regular player behavior. Azir's play rate spiked when he got buffed in 13.11. It then spiked again (at a somewhat similar magnitude) because he got picked in pro. Like, the act of Faker picking him almost had as much impact as 2% win rate of buffs.

So when the pro play meta was Jinx vs. Aphelios every game and a snoozefest tank vs. tank in top lane, it's incredibly easy for players to say, "See? The game is just all about whichever bot lane wins, top is useless." And while certainly that is directionally accurate, the degree to which that's true isn't. But from what I've seen of playoffs so far, the carriability of each role seems a lot more fair. And I expect that to trickle down to other players.

Outside of that, pro is also a decent indication of the game overall. It's certainly not identical to the ...

Plenty of reasons. A few:

• Side lane 1v1s are cool
• This is a role with a dedicated source of gold/xp income. Players of the role should be able to use it.
• Every role should be able to carry but you shouldn't have to every game.

Tank vs. tank top lanes are generally low excitement and tends to actually pan out as just waiting around to fight around whichever bot lane wins. That said, tanks are good for League of Legends. They should be viable in many roles so that teams always have access to a strong tank in champ select across a variety of roles.

Sion isn't perfectly balanced. When planning changes on 13.14 his win rate was well within reason for calling for a nerf in anywhere except the top ~1% of players. But that's discretionary. We don't balance the game purely by numbers, we are merely informed by them. We've stated that we'll nerf something if it reaches some threshold and we hold to that. The rest is our choice. For example, Kai'Sa only just barely qualifies as a data-driven nerf because she was 80% present in top leagues over 13.12 and 13.13. If she had 8% lower pro presence in 13.12 she wouldn't qualify. But even outside of that we'd have acted anyway.

Also, K'Sante hasn't qualified as a data-driven pro nerf since the 13.12 nerf. There's no data in any level of play that says he should be a nerf target. Nothing indicates he's "problematic" from a solo queue win rate, ban rate, or pro presence stance. This doesn't mean he shouldn't receive changes.

To clarify:

You're overstating the gulf in late-game somewhat. There are some top laners that still express their late game leads as game victory better than even the most snowbally bot laners (Kayle and Tryndamere are the biggest standouts). You're correct that the overall trend does shift toward bot lane as games go later.

My belief is that every role should have both solid early snowball and late game carry options. Darius and Kayle don't need to have the same agency curves as one another. That likely means reigning in some things as well as buffing others.

Let me shoot part of your claim down real quick:

1. We want carry tops to be relevant. This is the true part of your claim. For example, there were tentative Sion nerfs in the patch because K'Sante changes weren't ready for 13.14 and we want to hit a 2:1 ratio of carries to non-carries in top in pro play. There are no individual favorites, just a general goal for the shape of pro play.
2. The goal for Aatrox was +1.5% win rate. Personally, I like to skew changes toward flatting out win rate by MMR and also want to skew top lane changes toward fewer kills early game (lane is thus less snowbally and thus over after first blood or a good gank) and stronger late-game carry potential. Either way, the goal was 1.5% win rate. What we got, averaged out across all ranks, was like 3.5%. As designers we have oversight from the rest of the team and GAT (Gameplay Analysis Team, a group of largely Masters/GM/ex-pro players) who also help validate magnitudes and direction. For wh...

LEBLENK

She has hotfix nerfs on live already

Thats what you actually are "playing" if I understand it correctly, or at least thats how it used to be.

Pre-rework Swain E used to multiply true damage on purpose so that it multiplied him running Ignite. It was designer intent of "this works the way I feel like it should" benefitting the player being more important than rules consistency.

To be clear, consistency is never the most important rule. It's nice to have when there aren't more important priorities. It helps the game be learnable and is a positive, just not the most important design consideration.

Is this "Ixtal" in the room with us now?

and frogs