Reinboom

Ah, let me be more specific. That quote wasn't meant to be "look what we're doing special", it was "look, we did the thing that a lot of good games do and we really should be doing, but a lot of folks gloss over."
Options like this often get overlooked by a lot of players of games. A wonderful number of games have these options. Pretty much every FPS game opens with a (sometimes cleverly disguised) gamma slider, for example.

When writing up the patch note, I'll make sure to word it more intently to that. Alla something like, "These are options that are easy to overlook but they are present in a lot or even most major games elsewhere and for those of us who need them they are critical." Or even taking out the overlook statement altogether.

Thanks for calling that wording out. :D

<3

There's an tech blog here: https://technology.riotgames.com/

The most significant one I can remember involving Lulu wasn't really a lulu bug in particular. It was a series of bugs that Lulu was just best equipped to unveil.

For most of those ones, those have to deal with how character stats actually works. AD, AP, etc.

Every 0.25s (minimum), a character's stats get rebuilt from nothing. Everything on them gets reset, then the game readds character base stats, character per level stats, all items, all script based stats (e.g. from buffs), and then there's an optional "conversion" step (e.g. for Pyke). This process is pretty...

/u/Shynkr0 did the design for these way back when they were an intern (They're now a non-intern Rioter). This has been out for awhile, actually. :)

There's also a fun bit of tech design story to these that's a good example of "building something right" to get more gameplay space:

We avoid syncing quite a bit of data when relating to minions since they are quite frequent and there's just a lot of information to cross the wire. With item inventory in particular, every character CAN have an inventory, but only champions and towers ever had it fully synced. This was mostly just to avoid the overhead of anything else.

Well, we actually found some success of people finding the tower icons when they were just starting to get more into the game and that helped to subtly seep the more nuanced...

Most of those kinds of patches only go to the server. Since LoL is entirely authoritative, this works out other than a numbers appearing wrong on the client.

The older "@f1@" style of value replacements that I mentioned earlier actually doesn't have this issue (since the server pushes the value out), but it can't be used to drive displaying ratios or similar.

Perf concern is negligible for that kind of thing, as /u/TomiMan7 mentioned. Parsers for that kind of replacement system can operate pretty linearly.

Variables aren't hardcoded into the game tooltips.

The difficulty with coefficients is more like: The tooltip says "Deals @f1@ magic damage". The champion's scripts on the game server calculates how much damage it should deal and then uses that to both deal the damage as well as send the value of what "f1" should be to the client.
This means that the game client only ever has the result, never the coefficient and has no understanding of how things got to where they were, they just are. That's not hardcoded values, but it is a process that makes coefficients rather difficult.

The newer tech looks pretty different from all of that. It's instead, a League specific formula is authored that directly drives visuals and script can ask for the result for. This is actually where all the strange "{{ qdamage }}" stuff you see on the League website comes from, as those are the placeholder tokens for that system, we've just yet to build a visual writer for them into non-G...

I do! I did a lot of advocacy for it and was part of multiple prototypes for it. I remember it quite well. :)

From the point that development actually started on practice mode was not that long to the point of ship. The team and individuals who got to work on it knocked it out impressively fast (and safe, cheat interfaces are always inherently risky).