Reinboom

Ahh, if newer champions / skins are built with newer techniques?

If so, then absolutely yes. There's fairly extensive differences in tech between older champs/skins and new champs/skins. As an example, old ultimate skins would push an entirely new character to replace the older character to get large transformations (e.g. DJ Sona transforms). And given how isolated these characters were, they couldn't share a lot of resources. Whereas newer skins now have a "gear" system that lets them more easily target updated parts of a skin and swapping out sections of their VFx resolvers, meaning we could do things like that now both much more easily... and with less impact on total memory cost. But unfortunately, older skins were just not build that way (due to the tech not existing).

Generally no. Minor fixes are done, but exhaustive fixes tend to only occur when there's a VU.

<3

Thank you for collecting and sharing all the details you have done. I wish I got to provide more first hand, but I tended to not notice threads like this until days after they went up. :(

The League engine in most significant ways is not the same engine that League shipped with. The collection of tools and systems that make up what could be considered the engine has had multiple renderers, VFx pipeline has been near completely replaced, UI tooling and its underlying tech has been completely replaced, audio systems, all complex game data has been supplanted into a new structure, localization systems has been replaced, and so on and so forth. The engine does have shortcomings, but it's also VERY good at the things it does do. Which is all optimized towards League and, now, TFT.

Most of the issues described are *not* Engine level issues. Weird, niche, and complex bugs also tend to not be an engine issue. Instead, generally, it's almost always a content issue of some kind. Or, they're issues that is so incredibly specific to League interactions that there really isn't a generalized solution within another engine. That is, the cost to "do good" is the same in the...

Correct.
There is a far greater overlap between Normals players and UltBook than there is Ranked players and UltBook.

Sort of.

If you've never played the mode before, it will seed an initial MMR based on your existing normals MMR, but it's allowed to drift after that.

When the mode was first released, this configuration was missing. But that was corrected and reseeded even for folks that did play in that window. That first weekend last year though was rough.

But, if your ranked and normals has drifted, the system doesn't detect / handle that well. So, you can sometimes get folks who have climbed significantly on Ranked, but that never got reflected in their initial UltBook seeding. Fortunately, currently, that drift seems to be a fairly low percent.

Amumu with Nunu ult appears to be.... Amumu's 11th strongest ult. And the actual winrate is fairly low in terms of strongest ults. Sitting at about a solid 15% lower than the strongest combo's winrate.

Best users of each ult tends to always be a bit surprising. For example, Nunu ult has Karthus and Quinn in its top 3 users.

Rell R and Janna R. But not so high in winrate as to be a significant problem (at least, post micropatch).

Stat Boosts are overtuned and will be reduced slightly next patch.

Incidentally, neither two ults show up as the highest winrate combo. Though, Rell R on Nocturne does get pretty close.

I will leave highest winrate combo up as an exercise for the reader.

Yep, there is a chance for that.

We've been hesitant to avoid doing anything super special for any one ult, to make sure the mode continues to be low cost to develop on. But, Cho has consistently been enough of a special consideration that there's a good chance that decision is revisited.

Extra random info:

• Weighting even in the left-slot is only based on champion. Position has 0 influence. Top won't give you preference towards Cho ult.
• Yes, "random bullsh*t go" is at least one important facet of the mode. We would rather the mode be more random than not. But games where you truly get nothing playable in your selection are truly incredibly frustrating. It's a balancing act.
• There are situations where you can still roll an ult in left-slot even if it wasn't weighted for your champ (including cho ult) due to how the weighting system works. It happens very rarely (~0.05% of games). It's caused by the system happening to fill out every other player on your team's selections first and all the selections it filled out happened to be something that was specially weighted to your champion. When the weight pool empties, it just pulls from anything.
• The weight classes are very broad and simple. Yuumi always gets weird...

Only the left-most selection slot in Ultimate Spellbook has any weighting to it. All three other slots are fully random*.

Even for the left-most slot, the weighting that is there only looks to remove ultimates from the pool that would be highly unusable. e.g. We avoid giving long range champions Camille R. Or to put it a different, Ultimate Spellbook tries to ensure that at least your left most slot is usable. And, again, there is no weighting on all three other slots.

* Only exception: Kled can't be offered Mordekaiser R. Which is technically a kind of weighting. This isn't intended, just until we fix the interactions between how Morde R gives bonus health and how Kled uses it. We try to fix these restrictions whenever possible, but haven't been able to get to this one quite yet. e.g. we used to not offer Viktor ult to: Lulu, Shaco, Annie, Leblanc, Ivern until we fixed the underlying reason release.

We're still interested in revisiting the vision game for ARAM. WR's iteration, utilizing Scryer's Bloom, is an example of that and was directly informed by PC League with an interest of pulling it back into PC League's ARAM. Unfortunately, there's no reasonable timeline I could give here.

Important to note, when the time comes that we do revisit it, it won't be returning to Oracle's. If that was an acceptable solution, we would have already reverted it. The decision isn't winrate based either (albeit, it's a notable factor: trap champions had around 7% "invested player of that champion" winrate delta between high and low MMR that's now at about a 1% delta).

In spite of threads like this the major factor is... sentiment. We do track frustration specific to champions and often specific to certain changes. And often, even, social media sites (such as here on Reddit, but also many many more) will trigger us to reinvestigate. Which has absolutely happe...

Ruined Dragon and the Hextech / Chemtech dragons are (mostly) independent developments.

Ultimate Spellbook's old Ruined Dragon came as the result of needing to reduce as much client-side memory usage as possible in the game (adding an extra ability, especially ones with loud visual sells such as Ults... turns out is expensive). One of the biggest things changed to achieve that was to remove the elemental terrain changes - sticking to just one (and removing underlying environment sections) - as well as removing all the dragon variations. Since we were cutting down to a single dragon anyways, we decided to pull back the old Mordekaiser dragon texture and reuse that.

From there, Ruined Dragon was considered as just a tool to solve the mode's needs. The reason why the stacking buff was a DoT on towers, for example, was just to get the game to an end in case one team had extremely powerful ultimate synergies. The revive dragon soul was ideated independently of what the...

Every game significant action is processed on the game server. The game server runs game logic at 30 fps. And it batches some visual updates to send back to clients together, including stats and health updates. In addition, there's a small client side delay to updating health bars (perf reasons).

You can get an effective 1 to 3 server frame delay from just that (0.033s to 0.100s). In addition to regular connection latency for each part to receive the packet. In addition to client processing. Some things can just send whenever and don't deal with batching. E.g. Smite particle will have at most a 1 server frame delay.

If you hit Smite at the same time, it'll get processed with the same game server frame. And in the order the packets were received. Failing smite contests are still on you (/ your latency)

Thank you so much for posting this video, especially starting from the time just before it starts. All that contextual information was the key thing that helped us hunt this one down and fix it.

This was a bit of miscommunication on my part. :x Cho'Gath R has the same selection weight as a rather large number of other ultimates.

When UltBook was initially released, ChoR was had extra weighting in favor of a specific set of champions. As does most ultimates, there is slight weighting towards making sure your selection has 1 thing playable in it.

The change of weighting to ChoR was to remove that special weighting. Meaning that champions it had been weighted in favor of before will get it less (and instead it will show up about the same as, well, most other ultimates for them). But also that every other champion will get it more. Without special weighting, effectively every champion has an equal chance of ending up with ChoR.

The net result is that there's overall fewer ChoRs in the game than in that initial release. But the difference is small, matches it to plenty of other ultimates, and for many characters you actually see it ...

There were a few ults that could break Teemo's auto. All of which should be addressed with today's PBE release.

This should be addressed with today's PBE release. :)

Hi again! I'm Reina Sweet (aka Riot Reinboom), Lead Game Designer for Modes.

Ultimate Spellbook will be reenabled on PBE soon. The mode will be active on PBE all through this patch cycle (and into being released!). Since 11.22 had a fairly short run, I will be including those changes and the 11.23 changes together in this post. For 11.23’s cycle in particular, there’s a few additions to the available ulternate summoners and a new system for handling Smite. There’s also been a fairly significant number of bug fixes throughout.

New Ulternate Summoners

• Akali
• Blitzcrank
• Caitlyn
• Camille
• Dr. Mundo
• Evelynn
• Jinx
• Kindred
• Orianna
• Seraphine
• Urgot
• Vex
• Vi
• Viktor
• Xin Zhao

No Longer Available Ulternate Summoners

• Malphite

Ulternate Summoner Ba...

They're still in development. They will be present in a later run on PBE as we gain more confidence in the final direction.