RiotAxes

I don't think Riot should change champions exclusively to make them more popular.

I agree with this statement. It's hard to get much nuance into a blog post with this many topics.

In the case of Ahri and Janna, we're working on them because we believe that players who they have previously resonated with aren't enjoying them as much anymore. The goal is make them feel fun and well-supported. We do expect that if we succeed with this work, they'll be more popular, but that's a secondary effect.

I do want to be careful talking about concepts like who champions ought to resonate with - there are a lot of confounding factors and in Janna's case survivor bias is a real concern - she has lost approximately 50% of her pick rate since we pushed her lane phase so hard towards repeatable point-and-click harass, which implies that a lot of people who previously enjoyed Janna were hurt by those changes, but certainly some (most?) of her current...

Is the suggestion that the game should be more snowbally/more decided by who wins lanes?

It's definitely not forgotten. The goal of the change was to reduce the proportion of games where one team has an insurmountable advantage, but no incentive to close out quickly. The actual results were a net reduction in average game time between 30 seconds and a minute, and a substantial increase in the overall rate of comebacks, implying that decisive advantages resolve into either victory or a comeback much faster than before (and more of them result in comebacks).

And yes, if you're deeply invested in wave management as your way of expressing dominance, you might be sad at the reduction in consistency / effectiveness of that particular strategy.

Every new champion pulls a high ban rate for the first few patches - need to see where it goes. She's still relatively new. Her winrate is high but within reasonable bounds. If it goes up significantly we'd probably be discussing nerfs, but I don't believe she's on our radar right now.

Beyond that, have to see how preseason impacts her, and if she's prominent in pro play.

This data is reasonably consistent with the internals I've seen, though I haven't seen an internal investigation into this exact hypothesis. Just to add a little to this: per internal data, the net effect is that Vex is significantly better (i.e. wins more games) against mobile champions and worse against immobile ones.

She's on target for our internal shotcalls - when you read the kit, you should conclude she's better against mobile champions in midlane; she should in fact be better against mobile champions; and the degree to which she is a counterpick is in line with counterpicks generally, i.e. both players have a rich game to play and she doesn't completely invalidate her lane opponent but is definitely favored. On top of that, she's significantly more popular than we projected.

It definitely is a bit odd. There's a few things going on:

• From a gameplay perspective, we had to make Vex comfortable playing at shorter ranges for the anti-mobility stuff, so closing to short range is less of a cost than for most Mages, which made this a unique opportunity to do this gameplay on a mage.
• From a thematic perspective, Shadow is something like Vex's id - the part that cares passionately about stuff (i.e. making people miserable), that Vex never wants to let show because caring is lame. R is basically mega Lee Sin Q - and like Lee Sin Q, once you hit the first missile, psychological pressure builds to recast it, it's hard not to recast, which dovetails nicely as an experience with Shadow egging Vex on. It's a little bit off her first read personality, but still fits within the broader character.
• It's a super fun spell, so we were pretty excited to ship it all along, even if it's a somewhat off class moment. That said, we spent significa...

You heard it here first.

and probably last.

It does apply on blinks, actually. Sorry for that confusion.

It's the latter, but you do need to get a hit in between each dash.

Champions refund 25%, minions refund 10% (obviously these are both tuning values so could change)

Grounded would need some major clarity concerns addressed before I'd be happy to push it any further.

It moves the minion wave towards the losing team's base, which provides more opportunities for the winning team to actually crack the base, but also means the losing team on average doesn't have to move as far out of safety to get gold, and attempting to crack the base means taking a risk.

The idea was pretty good but I think not tweaking it for years made it a bit less optimal over time.

Agree that it has likely degraded over time.

Minion pushing changes, where minions get more powerful vs other minions for the team with a lead. Hard to feel or notice, but shaved about 30 seconds off average game time, yet led to an overall increase in the number of games with comebacks - teams either won faster or lost their lead faster.

Aside: Don't know whether to be alarmed or happy about the number of these where I was one of the designers pushing for it.

Fair enough. We do have a young/conventionally attractive champion coming up, but I think the next 6 months - and honestly, the whole next year - strike a pretty good balance. I'm happy with each individual piece of content the team has put out, but we're looking to bring a bit more balance to things from a more holistic view.

Sure.

He started as "Grappler" and as a designed Juggernaut (we hadn't done a new Juggernaut since Darius except Illaoi, whose gameplay hits on fairly different hooks and resonates with a bit different audience). That also informed the desire to keep him simple to play, and the contrast with some of the releases around him - he was the champ after Aphelios - made a simple champ especially desirable.

Early explorations focused on ways to have him grab, throw, and chain combos together. When it became clear that that champion was a tank, not even really a hybrid juggernaut, he pivoted towards street-fighting style mixed martial arts (still a bit grappler but a lot more punching). This dovetailed nicely with his c*cky, arrogant personality, which then informed what I'd say is his elevator pitch - "Strong, arrogant fighter who is going to let you hit him first because he's so confident that he can afford to give you the first swing." If Pantheon is all about courage, S...

theory that Seraphine was a Marketing department idea

I realize that nothing I can say is going to convince you here, but Seraphine was an authentic character first. She was most certainly not created as a marketing stunt or a skins vehicle.

What do you want to know?

It was never driven by China the way you're suggesting. These aesthetics resonate with large numbers of players in all regions. We will certainly do more of them. They just shouldn't be all that we make.

Slightly concerning that so many different aesthetics get lumped together as 'anime' as a catch-all, by the way. Akshan, Rell, Samira, and Lillia certainly are not anime visual designs; Gwen has some anime influence but a lot of influences that aren't anime. It sometimes seems like "anime" in this context just means "conventionally attractive" + "it didn't resonate with me personally".

I don't, unfortunately. That's far enough from my area of expertise that I wouldn't be comfortable endorsing any of the resources I could find.