League of Legends Dev Tracker

Its not that Galion doesn't do magic damage, its just that his impact is less reliable than other males. so mad can lean more towards armor than in other games which is great when vs a varus as well

thanks, that game got a little crazy once it was clear mad would win but I had a good time with medic :)

Hi, I work at Riot anymore.

Mostly, we weren't community engagement people to begin with, we're just devs trying to make a great game. It's never been a Riot policy to force us to engage, but instead we simply wanted (or continue to want) to. I will say, personally, that engagement with the League community can be very rewarding but also extremely tiring and disheartening at times. Candidly speaking, it's ultimately just not the core of my job as an individual dev at all. Doing it too frequently is also not great for mental health, at least for me. I tried the Twitter thing for a bit and will probably continue to try it on occasion, but it quickly became too much for me because it was entirely direct interaction from a huge number of people rather than being able to jump in at will.

I know as a player of other games I really appreciate when the devs come out and talk about stuff, from the serious to the not-so-serious, and it gives me confidence that they're in tun...

I worked with and then under him on balance and then seasonal content for the last few years. He is one of the most (maybe actually the most?) aggressively player-focused developers I've known, and he set a bold example for both teams, leading the way for both of the last two preseasons and creating the new balance framework and circulating it to players so you can have more trust in consistent balance and understand why changes are made.

Could possibly work. The flipside to consider is that it it becomes too risky (and too close to certain death) to jump out, Yuumi will refuse to do so and will instead just content herself with having almost no output, which both makes her less interactive for opponents and less fun to play. I think being at low health is pretty different on feel than being at low mana and having other mechanics that make being un-attached risky, like the CC trigger. Right now, I'd say the goal is not to make jumping out riskier but to make her actually do it with much greater frequency.

Yeah, I personally preferred the old boards as well—I think the upvote structure of both Reddit and the new (and now defunct) boards leads to the spotlight being hogged by inflammatory and extreme opinions which are really difficult and often not that productive to engage with, and I often stumble on topics I do want to engage with too late to even make a post that will be noticed. Good luck in your career, maybe I'll see you at Riot in the future :)

Well, it's not my personal approach but I definitely had a hand in it, and it's definitely possible that it was flawed. The other possibility being "it was just hard, and we got it wrong," which doesn't necessarily indicate a philosophical flaw in approach but rather execution error. Or, maybe it was some of each. Either way, I think it's pretty clear that Akali's post-release balance was not a success.

We absolutely must balance her for pro unless we discard the notion of pro balancing, so there's not much to be done there re: priorities. In retrospect, we could have acted faster on bigger mechanics changes to avoid patch fatigue from constant changes. I think that's been a problem in the last couple years with new champions in particular, and we have recently somewhat ...

From the beginning of the Summer Split, we've been operating in a "hybrid" model, with a reduced skeleton crew working in the studio and more crew operating their positions remotely from home.

With the announcement above, the crew division is remaining the same, with the exception of the on-air talent team moving back to their homes.

We have some new functionalities and tools at our disposal for this remote broadcast compared to how it was/looked in the Spring Split! Big props to everyone for acting quickly to get these systems setup.

Edited for clearer + more info!

Hey Everyone It is Becca and I that have come in direct contact with someone that tested positive for Covid19.

Neither of us are showing symptoms, and we feel fine, but for the safety of everyone, we are going remote broadcast until the results come back. The LEC Broadcast Team has been incredibly supportive and put the safety of those potentially at risk in place, and the Misfits office has also adjusted to ensure the players and team are safe too.

Thank you for your support here, and I'm so sorry that the show has to change cause I may have introduced this to the talent team :(

Don't believe patch fatigue has much of a measurable impact on breadth/depth, but we still keep it in mind (even more so now, with a more rigorous framework) as a less tangible outcome to try and avoid. It's always a push-and-pull, with factors for and against. Sometimes a champion needs changes more than we need to avoid patch fatigue, and some players will eat that cost. Unfortunately, it's almost impossible to do any real change at all to a game of this size without causing some segment of players some level of inconvenience or worse, which is a reality that I'm still not really happy with but have had to learn how to stomach over time...

It sounds like what you're describing is somewhat approximated by MMR? So, high-MMR mastery curves include players with greater mastery over all of the game's systems. Of note, I don't believe high-MMR mastery curves look different in any consistent way, though it's been a while since I looked at that in particular. A big part of this is that the skill and knowledge of your opponents also scales up commensurately.

That is, a Challenger picking up Akali for the first time on release would still have a much steeper learning curve than a Silver player picking up Garen for the first time on release, because, while their skill level is significantly higher, there is still more room to misplay on Akali than on Garen and more champion-specific mechanics and knowledge that must be leveraged to yield winrate. Challenger opponents have equally mastered their champions and will exploit errors to the fullest.

I hope this helps at least somewhat, although I can't shake the feeli...

I tried exactly that damage threshold -> knock-off mechanic briefly. It's possible that it could have worked out alright with some new UI/UX for both the Yuumi player and her ally, but overall it was really jarring and confusing. Yuumi felt like she was randomly falling off even with some pretty loud prototype visuals/signaling, and her ally was just not interested in playing the "keep Yuumi from falling off" game because they're trying to play their own champ at the same time. It's a pretty complex space, because none of our characters demand so much coordination in a tense competitive multiplayer game. Yuumi really stresses the social contract folks sign when they queue up.

Generally, most of the things you're suggesting might work, but they're pretty laser-focused on solving this specific problem, and as a result don't respect the reasons Yuumi is successful and worthwhile. We have to consider the fact that Yuumi is, as the article mentions, a highly resonant champion th...

Yeah, I generally agree with that. The tack we're trying right now is making her significantly suboptimal when she refuses to give opponents a window of interaction. It's a bit tough when Presence of Mind exists, but we're giving it a go regardless.

To use an extreme example of why I don't think this is a qualitative problem and is instead an issue that can be solved with proper incentives: Xerath could play by only using his Q from out of range, and he would be borderline uninteractable. However, when we gate a bunch of his power behind actually getting closer and therefore becoming interactable, he becomes tolerable to play against. Right now, too much of Yuumi's output is accessible without detaching. In an ideal world, which hopefully we are moving towards, you would look at a Yuumi that never detached similarly to a Xerath who only uses his Q and R: "Why are they playing so incorrectly?" rather than "Why can't I do anything about this?"

I understand that we may...

Yes, of course we considered and even tested a number of mechanics like this, both in original develompent and when I was making the large set of balance changes to Yuumi. Mina came up in conversation more than once, as well. They generally felt absolutely terrible to play, and generally betrayed the core conceit of the champion. They also often led to a lot of resentment for the person you were on, because they were actively killing you with everything they failed to dodge, and that was a pretty huge miss on the feel we were looking for. Ultimately, my takeaway was: was a fine path to look at, glad we tried it, it really was not even close to working in any incarnation we tested.

I think a totally different champion could probably exist with a mechanic like this, but Yuumi is quite far off from being that champ and (more speculatively) that champ also likely doesn't hit the same audiences that we aimed for with Yuumi. That's a good question though, thank you.

I've never considered this because it's definitely not realistically possible. It is theoretically possible for a high-skill champion to have a flat mastery curve if every person who played that champ is already skill-capped on it from their first game. So, your answer probably depends on how you define "skilled player." If it's "high MMR player," then no, for a number of reasons. If it's "someone who has mastered the champ already (somehow, even though they just came out)," then...maybe.

Yes, they'll have a different depth score. That's what depth is meant to measure.

To your second point, absolutely. It's easier to identify this lack of counterplay when the champion looks easy or the result is consistently achievable across all skill levels, but Akali and Irelia at high levels of play during that period often completely shut out their opponents' options.

This is correct. Power is definitely impactful to both breadth and depth, but nowhere near that impactful.

Ekko R every 10 seconds OwO

Hi, we respond to this in the post. Yuumi should indeed be more punishable, which is a counterplay issue and makes her non-interactive. A champion can be both hard and non-interactive—that means opponents are likely to think she's "braindead" when she's actually not. That's not an excuse, but instead a more accurate statement of the problem, which should still be resolved as much as possible. If a champion has to play 34-dimensional solitaire to win but is permanently invisible and untargetable and never leaves the fountain so opponents have no input into their outcomes, that's no good.