RiotAxes

So framing it as a disagreement makes it sound like conflict, and while that happens every now and then (people are people), I don't think this is really about internal conflict, and will propose an alternate framing:

Your content strategy and your balance strategy must be in sync with each other.

As a dev team, you're creating all this content for a reason: you are creating moments, creating memories, inviting new players into the game, whatever the exact goals might be. For League of Legends, new champions are expected to make a mark on the ecosystem.

If League's balance strategy says that we're going to change and tune champions until they win the same number of games (it doesn't, but at times it hasn't been that far off from saying that), then I can guarantee you that no matter how well designed your next simple champion is, they're going to be forgotten 3 months later. If Naafiri and Sylas are winning the same percentage of games overall, Sylas...

The initial reception was awesome, but the important bit will be how players engage with it over time, so it's simply too early to assess that.

Exploring a 3v3v3v3 mode is something we're interested in doing, as having an extra champion on each side goes a long way in spicing up combat, and a lot of champions are designed to be interesting with 3 (or more) champions on a side in fights - teamfighting is a big part of League of Legends after all. That said, there are a whole other set of difficulties, ranging from very different balance needs to concerns about setting up 2 players to blame the third random when the game goes badly, to needing to rethink how Augments are designed because fights are inherently a lot noisier. I expect we'll explore it internally, but we'll see how it actually plays out when we do, it might not be something we ever try to bring live.

For 1v1s, we don't believe this is likely to have enough replay value, and a huge portion of the champion roster is designed around being interesting with teammates - I won't rule out ever trying it, but I think it's pretty unlikely that we'd pursue that.

Our initial prototypes were pretty close to this, but just heads-up combat in a field gets old very fast - we're pretty confident that it wouldn't hold an audience for long, so we opted to pursue a version that had a better chance of being replayable instead.

This is incorrect - 42 champions currently have targeted balance changes applied, vs only 5 with ARAM-style buff/debuffs.

Going forwards, we'll likely do a mix of both. Our ideal state is that we individually balance each champion, but there are a lot of champions and they're VERY differently powerful from SR, so we'll likely do at least some ARAM balancing in the name of efficiency. There may also be some cases where it's the ideal nerf or buff (do we want to change Kayle's abilities around in a way that makes her play differently, or just make her deal less damage while doing the same stuff?), so it's not guaranteed that we'll ever move completely away from that style of balancing.

We're prepping a balance hotfix right now - if all goes well it'll be out later today, obviously until it's ready there's risk of it slipping.

It's not that we wouldn't leave cameos in for the mode forever, it's that they're one of a range of possible solutions once we get past the SF event, and we'll know so much more about what makes this mode tick in 6 weeks than we know today that it's not worth committing to any particular direction.

So if we do leave the mode on, they could stay, or we could look for a replacement, don't know yet.

It will also be back on PBE in 2 days, but yes, it's down until Thursday.

I have hope, but not confidence yet, so tempering expectations.

This mode (or another like it - high variance, lowered competitive expectations, 15 minute run time) being a huge success with the legs to sustain a permanent population would probably be the single most valuable thing we could deliver in the gameplay space for League. And I'm personally hooked on it, having played 110 games and counting on PBE just for fun. If I had a magic wand to wave to guarantee that this would maintain a population so we could keep it online forever, I would 100% be waving it. But I don't, and at the end of the day it's going to be about how players vote with their behavior.

At this time, our goal is to make a great summer event mode.

In the longer term, I think there's a really good chance we would aim to bring back a significantly upgraded version - it's not a guarantee, we need to see what the player response would be like, but I think it's likely.

There's a world where this version of the mode is so successful that we never turn it off and immediately staff up live support for it, but I want to temper expectations - that would take a really huge player response that sustains over time.

So tldr we would love for it to be permanent, we will probably (but not definitely) aim for an upgraded version at some point (no timeline yet), and if the player response is strong enough we'd change our plans around that.

There are definitely pros and cons to choosing basic attacks as the input for activating plants. Our belief is the pros outweigh the cons for now, especially given how hard the 2v2 shape of matches and the ring of fire favor melees.

In the longer run, if this mode were permanent, I believe we would eventually build out a more robust and more diverse set of map hazards to play around, instead of leaning so hard on this one.

This is pretty much spot on. The game mode needs non-champion outputs that get players moving around the map, create ebb and flow to the action (it is desirable that sometimes teams fight for a bit, then break off the fight to trade plants, then get back to it), and create combat mini-objectives that can swing the tide of a battle that looks otherwise hopeless. Both the Plants system and the Cameos system are aimed at these goals.

If these things didn't exist, you'd see problems like: Their comp is better than ours, it's not worth playing out rounds... combat pacing is always max intensity all the time, so playing the mode is exhausting... 100% of combat power lives in champions, so the mode is excessively (i.e. beyond a dev team's ability to correct for) sensitive to balance... a swingy start to a round (e.g. one champion dies unexpectedly) removes all dramatic tension from the rest of the round... and more.

Are they too strong? They need to be strong enough to swi...

That's a deep cut...

Ultimately a thematic thing. We wanted to capture a hoplite in a phalanx as much as possible given he's a single character. Swapping between weapons is a different fantasy.

The gameplay associated also didn't reaaallly pan out. There was some cool stuff like throwing the spear, having it stick in the ground, then shield bashing enemies onto the spear, but it was way too difficult in practice, much cooler in theory than it was in game.

Could definitely still be something there, but ultimately it wasn't Pantheon.

Pantheon was on my short list of champions I wanted to personally update specifically because I love shield fighters. But yeah we haven't done a lot with them.

Specifically, anything that increases how long a missile lives in the world requires us to redo all the VFX. So there's a lot of possible missile manipulation we can still do, but there are some strange limits that don't exist for any real player-facing reason but are actually hard limits we won't be able to bypass.

Oh yeah, I'm super hyped right now.

This is a good problem to have on PBE... but still irritating when you run into a long queue and we get that.

100% agree with the value. It's a lot more work than one might think and we aren't able to have it ready for this run (same for custom games). Whether it's in the next run or not would come down to what the other features it'd cost.

10 minute queue times should be alleviated on next deploy with additional hardware.

EDIT: We doubled server capacity, and so many people logged in that we're back to long queue times to save the hardware from just dying. We're working on ramping it up further, it will take some time to do that. There is a limit to how far we can readily push the PBE servers given we're only talking about a 3 week PBE here.

I manage the Summoner's Rift team, Modes team, and Champions team game designers.

A chance? Yes. It's not the current plan though. We'll see how it's received.

Our current intention is to run it for the duration of the summer event, and hopefully be able to bring it back in the future. But at the end of the day it's going to be about how you folks engage with it. If it has a huge and lasting appeal I'm sure we'll be having those conversations about either leaving it up or bringing back an improved version to make permanent, if it doesn't, it doesn't.