AzuBK

We don't balance based on winrate data from the PBE, because it's pretty much incomprehensible. We do balance things while they are on the PBE. There's a big difference here.

This is a bug, it's fixed as of next build.

Lots of the icons, VFX, and SFX (basically production phase stuff) are still in flight while we're on PBE, including the three you mentioned. Like EduManke said below, if it has a purple border temp art, and also if it still has the live art it's temp art!

Temp art isn't even directionally indicative, really, because they're just icons that designers pulled from somewhere in our files and threw a border on.

This is fixed, thanks. Rageblade should only convert up to 100% crit, because 100% is the effective crit cap. Also, the item will likely be reworded and scripted to prevent critical strikes as a whole, not just from attacks.

Hey, I did this set of changes. There's an 0.5s delay on live before the first tick happens. There will still be an 0.5s delay before the first tick.

I'm not in the office today (whatever that means nowadays...), but I'll make sure QA is aware of this bug so we can get it fixed.

Nice, this is definitely what I needed to see on my lunch break.

I'm not sure I understand the request here. The tooltip can be read before buying the item, and the tooltip is accurate. There are almost certainly things we could do to improve the out-of-game experience, but I don't think moving a third-party site to first-party makes too much of a difference in the end and costs resources that could be going elsewhere.

Disclaimer: I don't work on any of that stuff. I just stopped in to answer a player concern real quick in between doing in-game design :)

The tooltip is accurate.

Pretty sure the item works as written and the wiki is incorrect. Did anybody here test it in-game?

I tested quickly in our Release branch, which will match the game unless it's a bug that was fixed this patch cycle and not yet pushed to live, and it works fine.

Oh, I do. Was just being cute in response to "I don't even know who works at Riot anymore."

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 ...

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...