RiotMeddler

I'll refer back to this post in 2027 when we ship 3 swords and triple crit.

And then again in 2043 when we're at 4 swords and double double crit

Ok, now I’m convinced 

Vanguard - one of the big issues right now is the number of accounts that get levelled with bots, creating a range of relatively disposable accounts that a certain type of player will then use without care for how they affect others, whether their account gets banned or restricted etc. Vanguard should let us rapidly detect and ban said accounts, hence the improvements to smurfs/inters/ban dodgers.

Arena - Doubling teams won't double duration, agree that Arena doesn't need to be a dramatically longer mode. For most teams it'll be about the same length, if you're in the final two it will likely run a little bit longer. Regardless of the number of teams present though each round half of the teams in game are going to be losing health, so elimination will mainly happen at the same pace

Thank you for the kind words, we're going to keep working on the communication thing throughout this year too of course as well :)

That's a huge part of the rationale behind adopting Vanguard here yeah. Direct cheating isn't as big an issue in LoL generally as it can be in some genres like shooters. Botted accounts however have been doing quite a bit of damage to many queues, be it encountering levelling bots that are miserable to have as team mates or people on botted accounts who don't care about their account/identity. We think addressing that should be a pretty significant improvement to the overall experience for most players

Project L is still trucking along and announcements about it will come direct from the Project L team, not via those of us on LoL, or at a LoL event like League's 15th birthday/anniversary.

Yet. Haven't seen her fight yet :)

Live service here is just a short hand for the sort of game League is - online game with very regular updates over multiple years etc (versus a finished, released and done single player game or a new unreleased game still being developed but not yet publicly playable etc)

Not Skarner, then Skarner

Mystery icons and wards should be in, FAQ needs to be updated again.

Only exception to that is gifting said icons and wards, that hit some last minute serious bugs and won’t be in this run unfortunately

Unreleased games are tackled by a different part of the company. If there's news to share that'll come from those folks in different formats rather than as part of the existing live games messaging

No current plans to. Forge games are a pretty different offering since they're single player, completable, aimed at being accessible to an audience that hasn't necessarily played League before etc. We took a different distribution approach as a result

Hmm, to the best of my knowledge Jeremy/Brightmoon has never played Mundo ADC. Sorry, I think you must be overqualified as a result, we'll have to pass.

Yeah, this one did feel lighter, especially the lack of core gameplay stuff. We'd originally pencilled in some time to talk about 'preseason' changes, particularly what needed clarification, what was controversial etc. Didn't end up with much to say there though since things have been generally going pretty smoothly. We concluded we should still do a video, stay in the habit of talking regularly even if there's sometimes a bit less to say. You'll also get a much longer, chunkier set of topics early January with season start of course too!

Exactly how Mythic Variants will interact with the loot system is something we haven't determined ourselves quite yet, which is assumedly why Player Support had to tell you they couldn't say. First couple were a trial to see what interest was like, so we hadn't sorted out all the longer term details. Apologies for the lack of answer beyond that, we'll definitely get it clarified soonish, didn't want to just leave the question unanswered at all though either

Update gets released fairly early next year

Yep. For decisions like this we look at a mixture of current % of player base, decline in usage of said operating systems each month and where the larger gaming market is going in general (other games deprecating accelerates players moving off them even more etc etc)

I think there's a really understandable concern in there that cosmetics in general might shift towards all being really expensive. One of the things we wanted to highlight here is that high priced content for those who want something exclusive due to its price is an addition, not a replacement, to the stuff we're already doing

Agreed, we'll very much miss him on the League team once he moves on to do other stuff at Riot (though you'll still see him for a couple more months or so!)

Also, shameless plug to people possibly reading - if you love League and have experience leading a large dev team (ideally live service) we'd love to hear from you! We'll be posting the job opening on our website sometime really soon

We'll keep looking at min spec, memory included, each year or so. While we'd love to open up some options for the dev team we also don't want to exclude a significant number of players to do so, so it's an ongoing balancing act