Yeah, I know they wrote PoC off as a dead game mode, but the shard dupes were confirmed by the devs to be a bug. I was hoping that'd at least earn a mention / progress report in an update focusing on bug patches.
But now it looks like they really did shut down the PoC support completely already. Sad day.
You seem to be citing a reply from me so allow me to clarify: getting dupe shards on your 3 stars is not a bug, but rather— there was a bug which caused much faster progression and acquisition of 3 star champs. Players hit duplicates in a matter of days, when designers had balanced it out as taking weeks. Designers expected to use that runway of several weeks to iterate on some solutions for dupes.
Future plans of how the economics of shards would be balanced are a bit out of whack now— so we are rapidly working on a new solution for dupes.
This may require new text (localization), new iconography, backend logic, and some other light frontend pizazz. This means it's not a fix a lone designer or engineer can quickly turn around in a single patch, but instead it's a multi-discipline, multi-week effort (more akin to a small new feature, or QoL update).
I understand the frustration— I myself am sitting on two 3 stars with more than 40 dupe shards. Rest assured that we have folks diligently working on addressing the issue. Apologies if my communications elsewhere gave the impression that we were dealing with a simple bug we could squash out easily, and not the more systemic snafu we've got to work our way out of!
Thank you, the update is appreciated.
While it is understandable that you maybe can't comment exactly on what solution(s) are currently in-progress, did completion time go into the decision making behind whatever the chosen solution was?
I.e. Were solutions that would require less resources (iconography/text) valued higher than other more comprehensive, systemic fixes?
Would it have been possible to have a faster immediate solution with a full shard-system QoL update at a later point?
You're asking the right questions— we absolutely consider time and short term solutions like you suggest. Everything we make deals with this balance.
There are lot of edge and corner cases that need solving, and some kind of explanation as to what's going on in client is likely required— necessitating some text/UI changes. I'll walk through an example to illustrate:
Say we just straight up prevented dupes purely on our backend and instead rewarded shards for a champ that wasn't yet maxed out, in a way that's entirely opaque to players. What does "maxed" mean here? A champ that has been upgraded to 3 stars, or one which you have enough shards to upgrade to 3 stars? The latter sounds good so let's go with that. Now say you are 5 shards shy of a 3 star and open a vault with 10 shards and we randomly choose your almost-3-star. Do we compensate those dupes? Probably should, so maybe you get 5 for the almost-3-star and 5 more for another randomly selected champ. Should messaging in the client explain that this happened? Does the vault opening animation even support that case without code changes? This proposed change is maximally generous, so from the designers perspective of balancing the economy, are they now in a tricky position for the future? This proposal also takes time, so like your line of questioning suggests, how much? Is it worth it if we are gonna ship a more robust solution later? And how do we properly apply this fix retroactively to players that have dupes now?
This is just an example and does not represent a proposed solution, but hopefully it provides some useful context on the kinds of gory details folks on LoR need to work out. I'm sure many of y'all can think of a myriad of other possible solutions with various trade offs and advantages. We're thinking through this too— trying to find that balance of time and quality; making something that is fun and rewarding to progress through while being free from frustrations like these dang dupes!
Always appreciate the updates nonetheless.
Now join me in prayer as I try to get 15 Jhin shards.
Edit: to my understanding, if you play a champion, you're more likely to get shards for them but is there anything in place to unlock champions as a priority also?
🙏🙏🙏🙏
Thank you so much. Am still loving the gamemode and believe this fix will only make it better.
Is there any chance relics could have somewhat of the same system? Dupe relics and inability to get certain relics kinda feels bad. Maybe a future relic dismantle system to craft excess relics into new ones or is relics not gonna be updated?
Regardless, appreaciate the effort u guys put into this game mode.
Duplicate relics are intended, as there are cases where equipping dupes is a strategic choice (I run 2 Everfrosts on my Yasuo, for example).
Some relics are useless when in duplicate (Lost Chapter, Crownguard Inheritance, most keyword granting relics, etc.). We are looking at solutions for that— such as capping the number of copies you can earn of select relics based on their utility, and compensating for copies rolled beyond the cap.
No promises on targeted acquisition of specific relics, but hopefully deduping will alleviate some of the pain!
No tahm kench capture animation fix? A dev said it would be fixed this patch.
Hiho. I just checked our version control system, and the fixes for pyke and kench are indeed in our "main" branch. However, it looks like they didn't land there in time for the 3.09 cut :(. My apologies.
According to version control both are in the 3.10 cut.
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