Legends of Runeterra Dev Tracker

I'd disagree. Jinx can fizzle out much more easily than Yasuo. Yasuo is harder to pilot perfectly but if you pilot it well it's very hard for anything to kill you. Jinx is just strong and extremely easy to play and very fast so very efficient to play.

In terms of absolute win rate if you play correctly, Yasuo is easily in my top 3. Frankly I'd rank only Asol higher than Yasuo when it comes to my own win rate. However, playing with him to full power isn't obvious to many players and it's easy to make mistakes that dramatically reduce your win rate.

First, you need to know to hard-mulligan for key cards like Bladetwirler and Concussive Palm. Many people don't realize that Bladetwirler is basically the second champion of the deck, and getting one down early is way more important than getting an early yasuo. A turn-1 blade twirler puts the opponent on a very fast clock and can scale dramatically over the course of the game.

Second, you need to find opportunities to bank spell mana which involves refusing to play cards you don't need to. Yasuo with 3 spell mana in the bank is very hard to hurt but yasuo with 0 spell mana in the bank can be overwhelmed. Many experienced players will do this automatically but others use...

its gorgeous!

First, Chess-bot research has been decades in the making and there's only a few pieces. Cardgames have far more interactions.

Second, players in pve campaigns generally prefer to be smarter than their opponents and win via superior play against a foe that has more resources,. Entire series like the fire emblem series relying on players exploiting the AI's mistakes and predictable actions. Players don't necessarily enjoy a game that's outplaying them and making them feel dumb. They mostly want the AI to avoid any super-obviously-stupid plays like using a removal spell on its own dude or failing to block lethal.

So it's a huge amount of effort to make truly great AI for a cardgame and many players might even prefer you not do that in the first place. When it comes to opportunity cost, would you rather hire 3 extra AI engineers to make the AI harder over many months, or would you rather hire 3 more designers/gameplay-engineers to make more adventures, champions, event...

Each champion has a star rating that tracks their most important star upgrades in their constellation. So there’s a lot of stars in their constellation but only the “major stars” are tracked for that system.

It’s a bit confusing, I apologize for that. It was a natural result of a simpler old linear system being expanded into a full constellation skill tree.

Great advice. Also, you need to think about the gameplan you have vs the final encounters early on and draft accordingly. For example, when I was using original Lux at 2 stars with chemtech duplicator vs the 4.5 asol, I already knew I would win the game if I could start the turn with 6 mana and Lux in play. That meant I never took any upgrade that just made her more powerful, none of that was relevant. The only thing I needed was to survive to 6 mana and keep her alive.

This meant taking an Ionia support champion. Inforget which one it was some terrible one I never played once in the adventure but all I cared about was getting access to cheap Ionia stun and recall spells in shops to stall until 6 mana.

I also took any cheap defensive spell that could generate units so I could build my board while stalling.

For powers i took anything that could stall. I passed up incredible powers like “double all your slow spells” that are amazing with lux1 whenever I could ...

Part of the issue is that even if they did start charging more for cards now, many people have massive stockpiles of green shards. They’d have to make the new cards not purchasable with green shards or something. One reason pve works is that it effectively reset the economy so it could be priced in a sustainable ways. If you could use green shards and existing collections to progress pve they’d be in the same situation.

This is so similar to all my friends' Elden Ring experience too. I love it.

Warwick really spikes in power at 4 stars for context

If you want, I could list many games that let you spend in game currency to get a random in game item? Many will be classic buy2play rpgs.

You barely even do that with Tpoc anyway, 99% of the time you spend resources to buy known things like starring up a champion. It isn’t until you’re buying golden reliquaries that you’re spending in-game currencies on a random outcome with any regularity, and that happens only once a month - plus has duplicate protection. It isn’t even set up like a gacha pool. Every epic has the same chance of dropping.

The only reason it’s done via accumulating a currency is for system convenience to give players more options for saving up a granular reward - if you get a lot of unexciting duplicate relics eventually you can get a super exciting epic relic that is guaranteed to be one you don’t have yet.

Also, there are other things rotating through the shop you can buy instead. This gives players more options and agency compared to ju...

“So the only difference is that the pulling is not endless but time-gated in PoC… In the end they are all just lootboxes with random rewards. .”

WoW classic has random drop tables. Diablo and Dark Soils have random drop tables. Countless rpgs and roguelikes have random drop tables. They aren’t gacha games.

Gacha game is a specific and useful term in the industry. It does not mean “uses random rewards sometimes”. Gacha games are primarily monetized through buying random pulls on the “lever” hoping to hit a jackpot. This distinction matters because it causes dramatic ripple effects that affect the entire experience.

In path it’s basically the opposite - the free rewards that have RNG while most monetized bundles are built around specific items you can count on. You aren’t buying “just one more pull” hoping for the ultra rare s-tier champion. You’re buying the swain bundle to get swain and his epic relic.

Some bundles have random vaults throw...

Yeah I agree on the difficulty. I was erring on the easier side already, but in addition to that, it was developed separately from the rest of the event maps and thus wasn't tested with Teamwork enough. We'll keep this in mind for next time.

I always find writing about design fun!

Fiddles adventure was "gameplay first", e.g. the encounters were designed before narrative was hooked in, but knowing that the Warwick adventure was meant to pair with Arcane, we wanted to try a "narrative first" approach. We told League's central narrative team the core bits (use WW and/or Amb, set on this PZ map), then they pitched a story and selected followers that fit the rough arc of encounters.

Based on the character/landmark, encounters can be developed mechanically (Sump Monument just summoning itself) or interpreted flavorfully (Zaun Bouncer is an annoying blocker rather than a Flow deck). Being narrative first, I tended toward flavorful interpretations to make the characters feel more like people you were interacting with. The decks occasionally make less mechanical sense because of this, but I like that Academy Prodigy is hanging out with a bunch of other students and they occasionally celebrate Progress Day.

I could write something up, anything in particular you'd like to hear about or just a general design thing?

Wut? Generating comments talking about specific star power applications? Some folks just think Warwick is going to play better than he reads, and I’m definitely one of them. There are so many ways to stack up lots of damage instances, especially in P&Z, and those effects are often less useful in Path so I’m very happy to get new reasons to draft them. Also I’m going to make some HUGE unit.

That’s fan design that had him popping out of the deck was cool too, but since arcane likely brings in new fans I get why they want Warwick to go simpler. Am more hyped for ambessa printer though. :)

Read Warwick’s star powers. The relic is going to be great for them. It’s cool for tahm bench too.

Mark my words - Warwick is going to play a lot better than he looks. That Design is one of those that doesn’t read as exciting but is going to play very well once you get a few stars and realize all the ways he synergizes with piltover cards. His units are going to get huge.

Don't worry, I wasn't laid off. I posted a whole departure post about it at the time. I just got an offer to build an exciting new project from the ground up and couldn't resist. I was as surprised to hear about the layoffs as anyone when they happened,

I'm just commenting on the design as a fan of the game :).

I read Warwick's design yesterday, and went "oh, that's smart!"

I guaruntee you Warwick's design wasn't lazy, they would have had many other designs they tried out too. This one is doing some subtle, important things:

First, the design is prizing simiplicity for new players, the kind that might come in soon with Arcane Season 2. Second, it wants to be an open-ended buildaround that has high synergy with P&Z cards and encourages you to play with effects that are usually not strong in this mode.

TPoC has different design goals than PvP champions did: those champions were usually created alongisde several new followers to be played in specific highly synergistic pvp archetypes based on their small number of cards. Adapting them to TPoC is awkward because TPoC is all about putitng together cool relic buids and in-run power selection, deckbuilding choices, etc.

Warwick is a simple, thematic design that is all about doing lots of little instances ...