Auberaun

Auberaun



12 Feb

Comment

Originally posted by blackhand226

What happens if you drop out of Diamond? Do you just get fired or do you release an OP champ that you can abuse for climbing. Actually that would explain a lot of things... :P

monitor my op.gg - when I hit platinum that is when yuumi 2 will launch


11 Feb

Comment

Originally posted by Gaxxag

How do you measure "Diamond 4 or higher"? I might have a D4 rank, but perform high gold level when not playing my main champion(s). It seems like versatility would be a requirement for playtesting.

Mostly just table stakes, other context will matter like versatility & experience but it's unlikely that someone who hasn't demonstrated they can reach Diamond 4 in whatever the most recent season is will be able to keep up in the role. Not impossible but we'd probably look at other candidates first.

Comment

Originally posted by Guest_1300

He implied that they usually have these action plans for potentially disruptive abilities in general, so they probably do do this for similar things (like viego passive, akshan w, sylas r, etc)

yep

Comment

Originally posted by SauronGortaur01

I mean then you always have the different definitions of high elo and low elo.

It's really hard to define at what point you are 'high elo' since the difference in skill grows larger the higher you go up the ladder. So many challenger players say that the Gap between Masters and Challenger is huge. So you could say that by this standard diamond is not really high elo. At the same time Dia4+ is already the 3-4% top of the whole server which you could define as being high elo. Idk.

The four brackets we typically use are:

  • Normal - everyone up through gold
  • Skilled - platinum through ~D2
  • Elite - D2+
  • Pro - Professional play only (evaluated different than the rest)

"High MMR" for me would be in that Skilled+ range, aligning with your latter take (the top % of the ladder is meaningful despite what popular sentiment often says). With these brackets you see meaningful differences in data, which makes them useful. In Elite specifically the data is less reliable due to sample size, particularly on more niche champions or strategies.

Comment

Originally posted by bz6

I have a question. One of the main reasons Riot was founded was to be that players company and go against what the data says. Over the years has the SR team become more data driven rather than data informed? Being data informed was (to my knowledge) a major ethos of Riot.

/u/Auberaun

My personal take as someone not on the SR team: over time, yes, League has become more data driven when it comes specifically to patch-to-patch balance. There are pros/cons to the approach, like how it removes bias in the process, but also how it removes room for creativity and doing things that would just be cool to do. On the whole though, I'd still confidently say that League and Riot aren't blindly driven by data.

Comment

Originally posted by lonelysoldier1

What team requires that? Is it balance team?

The Game Analysis Team. To apply we look for a rank of Diamond 4 or higher so that we're able to keep the playtests reasonably competitive. We playtest and analyze most content that goes into Summoner's Rift to predict and prevent risks, and also empower designers to take risks by providing evidence that they'll work out (example: Akshan's revive won't break the game).

Comment

Originally posted by 5ait5

just last patch the 3rd one happened to riot galaxysmash on twitter for nerfing pyke mid and they pulled the nerfs bc of it sadge

pyke mid is op btw

Comment

Originally posted by RiotRayYonggi

Whew, my job is safe

ironically, you're on a team where being good at the game is a job requirement :)

Comment

Originally posted by 00Dandy

I've seen many people flame Rioters for being low elo which makes no sense to me. You can be good at game design without being skilled at the game. And they don't make changes based on their own games but look at stats from all levels of play and consider opinions from different people.

A lot of Rioters who design Legaue aren't even low elo either. I still remember when Meddler made a quick gameplay thoughts and linked the op.ggs of the Summoner's Rift Team lol

Comment

Originally posted by Hyppetrain

You are basically saying that the best balance team would be a super-AI. Which I agree with but its unrealistic, so the point is kinda pointless.

Yes if we had ALL the data, we knew exactly what to do with it then yes we would not need to play the game. But we are humans and we cant do that well (riot is a prime example lol)

One thing I'd add to being entirely data driven is that at the end of the day, it's humans playing your game and what they think and perceive matters a lot, arguably moreso than what data says. This is one reason why we look at banrate when considering changes for a champion - something can be balanced "objectively", but banrate is an indication of if players are rejecting something for subjective reasons, which we should also take into account. And we do act on it when something is banned beyond a certain threshold, regardless of what the other data says.

Comment

Originally posted by CLYDEFR000G

If any of you have came from the Destiny 1 & 2 crowd you will know how it feels when there is that disconnect from the developers to the playerbase. The beginning of the game for both D1 and D2 felt unplayable and even during the lifecycle they add in things like stasis subtrees where any brain dead player could easily see how overturned they are, the same kind of foresight the chemdrake and map implemented into LoL was what stasis felt like (unplayable unless you had it).

I remember watching a dev stream on upcoming content and Deej the community manager was trying to equip two pieces of exotic armor and couldn’t figure out why it won’t let him. Something a person who plays like 5 hours of the game would understand.

To Mort’s point about work life balance for working on a game and also being good at it, I’ve always wanted gaming companies to have at least one person on the decision making team where their job is to be good at the game. Just playing the game every...

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Riot in general is starting to invest more in that space, and League has been pretty good about it for a few years now. Our Game Analysis Team (Diamond+ QA) gives feedback on all of the gameplay content that goes into Summoner's Rift and gets to pitch changes for every patch, sourced both from data and from experience playing the live game. They can't all be worked on, but there's always an earnest discussion about priorities and what's painful or going really well in the live game, and that helps keep the game designers in touch with the high rank perspective. Many of them play a lot on their own too in anywhere from Silver to Diamond, which gives us a diversity of perspectives on the game that lead to better changes.


01 Feb

Comment

Originally posted by poroofvoid

if I ask nicely can you make remove the restrictions on building stacking items or building items with overlapping passives. i dont see why i shouldn't be able to build 6 cosmic drives if i wanted to

Not in the near future with the current items, sorry :(. They'd have to be tuned around the possibility of getting multiple of them, so individually they probably couldn't be as strong, so you wouldn't get to experience the 6 cosmic drive fantasy you want anyway. Having those restrictions lets them be cooler.

Comment

Originally posted by poroofvoid

THORNMAIL IS RED YOU ARE NOT ALLOWED TO MAKE IT GREEN>:((((((((((((((((

you have successfully identified one reason we kept it red :)


31 Jan

Comment

Originally posted by IWillNameMyChildZoe

what is so bad about 50% winrate? Why can't they wait until it actually goes to like 54%? I don't see how is she broken

she has literally no damage and is next to useless without that ult

She's already there in higher ranks. Average winrate is a misleading metric in a champion's first patch because the first ~ week of people not knowing what to build or how to play the champion weigh down that average. We usually look at winrate by day by MMR bracket (Normal, Skilled, and Elite when there's enough sample) in the first patch.

Comment

Originally posted by GrumpyPan

Maybe people would confuse it for spirit visage or warmorgs if it was green.

Yeah I recall this was part of the consideration. There were a lot of different factors involved in all of the item icon updates, like consistency with function (like you identified that anti-heal is green), overall clarity, and keeping callbacks to the old icons so that you didn't feel totally lost as a veteran. In a constraint-free world it probably would be green today.


08 Jan

Comment

Originally posted by 100WattCrusader

“Hecarim, hold on just a second, need to get to this one spot… okay, let me just aim it… got it, LOL CANT GANK ME”

As someone who does this on Bard too one thing you don't appreciate until you try it yourself on Zeri is that you can fail the E cast and dash two inches into the wall, while Bard's portal won't cast if it's not a valid angle.

Signed, someone who dashed two inches into the wall and died.


05 Nov

Comment

Originally posted by DanielDKXD

Here is how it looked ingame, it has been removed now.

https://twitter.com/LiLippLol/status/1454500838576214020

I don't see why this needs to go when gragas E-Flash is still in the game.

We intentionally removed that before releasing Rell because of how low counterplay it was to force the enemy to preemptively flash, similar to what you see with Gragas E. We had the benefit of the champion not being released with a precedent yet, unlike Graggy, and like you see with Cait it's a big deal when we take something away from a champ that's had it for a while. So these are just bugfixes to Rell and Galio.


17 Sep

Comment

Challenger. My 9-5 might have uh...some overlap with that though.


10 Sep

Comment

Originally posted by Naerlyn

Can you share what the wildest or funniest thing you playtested was? :D

At one point when Kayle hit level 16 in development she could permanently just fly through walls and such, no terrain collision. Because she's an ascended angel, ya know. I had a good time splitpushing with her, and then when the enemy tried to collapse on me, I would just fly off the map...It was the first time someone seriously asked the question "if you go all the way off the map on one side, do you come out of the other side like Pacman?"

Comment

Originally posted by UsernameAndAPassword

question: where under the career options would we find playtest team? (like the first drop down with QA and Admin roles and stuff like that)

It would be a QA Engineer role in the Los Angeles office - not currently posted.