Legends of Runeterra Dev Tracker

Hello! Great questions - we have discussed new variations of existing champions, and we think the separation of Eternal and Standard makes this easier to do (so that there’s less confusion in the Standard environment, for example). We’re always on the lookout for rework opportunities, but when it makes sense for a particular champion, new variations are definitely on the table. Since we haven’t fully committed to a new variation of an existing champion yet, I don’t have an answer yet on re-using cosmetics for new variations - stay tuned!

I totally feel you on this. I personally started about a year ago and there are a LOT of cosmetics and guardians specifically I'd like to have.

THANKFULLY the personal shop will see some of them (including guardians) appearing :)

Hi! Got some detail for you from our operations director Scott Hansen:

Hello! This is something that we looked into and decided to not push on it. Actually exporting a Mac version is not difficult, the big challenge for us comes to needing to maintain and support another platform forever. If we officially release a Mac version, we have to test, QA, and fix bugs for the platform on an ongoing basis, which is an ongoing drag on developing new features. We’ve done some investigation on how many players would actually play on Mac and made the call to focus on building other things with the time we’d spend otherwise on maintaining Mac.

To pull back the curtain a bit on international tournaments we run, we make accounts for specific tournaments and events like Worlds.

While this takes resources from the team, it’s not completely off the table for us to be able to support some grass roots tournaments or events with proven track records and attendance by setting something similar up with the TO's.

Hi! Here's the more detailed answer, from our operations director Scott Hansen:

We built a cross-shard friend challenge early on in LoR and it took a lot of dev time to maintain and test and infrastructure costs. Shards are basically designed to be self contained. For security purposes, certain things can only talk to other things in a certain way. Other challenges are for things like the databases that store what each player owns (and there’s a LOT of cards), what your decks are, etc, they get very large very quick. Then for matchmaking, it’s designed to only look within a shard for speed and efficiency, also since each shard has different weights on what your ranking is. When we enter a game, for both game start, and game end, you need to update all the back end systems that need new information. With cross shard, we essentially solved this by making a smaller “separate shard” that managed the communication between the shards, which requires servers to run, and a lot of n...

Understood that you (and many others!) feel this way. The way that Samira and her followers turned out, in terms of the VO design and delivery of those cards, wasn’t as satisfying as we hoped and want it to be in the future. It’s probably not obvious from the outside, but a lot of the work on the Glory in Navori set had already been done when we got to the point where we needed to prioritize the resources related to VO and make smart decisions about which followers to give voice lines to. On top of that, Glory in Navori was the first set where we started to do variety cards, so it was our first take on the split between core expansion follower VO and variety set VO as well. In the future, now that we can build card releases with those resource constraints in mind, we expect to have MORE thoughtful and intentional design decisions for VO to maximize the combination of our resources and the player experience.

Rubin has so far eluded our attempts to restrain him to a streaming chair 24/7.

So far.

As for the duplicate protection, Gold and Platinum vaults were given duplicate protection for champion fragments because they are intended to be rare, special rewards of a large number of champion fragments. They’re rewards for things like fully completing Aurelion Sol or reaching major Legend Level milestones.

However, as long as they could roll excess fragments, they didn’t feel special. They often felt like opening a few silver vaults in a row. Because dailies reward 4 wild fragments, wild fragments don’t feel rare or special. While 8 wild fragments are valuable because you can use them on anyone, it doesn’t feel nearly as special or exciting as opening 40 fragments for a random champion. That’s what we wanted gold and platinum vaults to feel like.

However, we recognize some of the players who had already opened most of their Gold and Plat vaults have relics th...

We’ve talked about how fast we can do new card releases, and just based on our current staff and the content pipelines that have been built over the last 5-6 years, it’s very very difficult for us to go faster than our current pace. That said, I see the frustration when new cards don’t impact the meta sufficiently, and although we have releases on the off-months (live balance and then variety) sometimes those aren’t doing enough to impact the meta either. As always, it’s a fine balance between short-term excitement and long-term sustainability, but as a team we’re open to keep experimenting here to hit that equilibrium!

More emote slots? Yeah, let’s do it! We have something in the works around that for release later this year.

Hi! The truth is variety patches are pulled in a number of different directions, partly because we work so far ahead on card sets. When we introduced them at the start of this year, they primarily drew cards that had been developed in parallel with upcoming sets, so they reflected a kind of teaser for the themes and mechanics for those sets. In the future, now that future variety patches are known to be a thing, we expect to lean a bit more into revitalizing old archetypes / providing cool new buildarounds. Hope that makes sense!

One of the great things about Legends of Runeterra is that you get to play with fantastical creatures that don't exist in real life like dragons, fae, celestials, and birds.

During a meeting a Lead Designer ended a design discussion on with, "I'm not here for Runeterran Ornithology!"

Love this job.

Can anyone guess which card it was about?