RiotMeddler

That sort of thing yeah, though trying to do a much better job (fingers crossed) on how we go about doing it. I think some of the Sentinels/Ruination arc was quite good (the new champs, the set up etc). I think we dropped the ball when it came to the sort of story we told, the tone of some of it (inconsistent, sometimes too jokey), which existing champs were/weren't involved (Yorick where?, the mediums we were story telling in (a MOBA + text isn't the way to try and resolve these big arcs) etc.

I can imagine us trying them in a temporary mode someday in League, like Wild Rift did with one of their ARAM based modes. Can’t imagine we’d ever add them to standard SR games though, too much disruption and added complexity for a more competitive setting

Can offer some thoughts on ranked next week yeah

Should be covered in the video

We’ve got a video coming next week that covers next season’s gameplay and other things

We’ll save the next update announcement for the earlier January dev update yeah

We will in the next dev update yeah (which should come out shortly after the Arcane finale)

Given the Arcane tie in we did consider using Ella Purnell for the english voice acting here. The (at the time) pending voice actor work stoppage though created some challenges there. We concluded it was best to use Jinx's in game voice actor instead for this one, which both ensured we could hit the Arcane 2 release date deadline and gave consistency with in game Jinx which we figured is also pretty well loved.

Yes

There will be

Sweating bullets

A mixture

There'll be some lore stuff in the thematic seasons yes, and it will be part of the single canon approach we're taking.

What were you hoping for about Drakes? I expect we'll get back to them as a system at some point, they're not an immediate focus at least though

We'll still be doing larger gameplay changes at the start of the year, then smaller updates throughout the year. There'll be some stuff at the start of each thematic season, but not a full season start worth of gameplay change.

We're looking to get some more immersion in the world, the factions, greater understanding of champion motivations etc in for sure. We'll be trying some different approaches than short stories though for it, want to find ways to get into the lore that more players will engage with

Historically at least Spellbook's been a surprisingly popular mode, both in initial play rate and lasting play rate. It doesn't get the degree of hype, or polarized opinions that URF or Arena generate, but people for previous runs at least did play a lot of it for as long as the queue was up which is pretty uncommon

I mean, yeah. He's Gragas. He'll kill you in a combo, while being highly mobile and tanky. This time though, he'll do it with even more style and appeal than usual.

That's a large part of our caution here. We don't want a system that results in players playing the algorithm instead of trying to win the game for their team. That's why we're in the middle of a lot of testing right now, trying to determine how to get much better accuracy without introducing factors that will eventually get discovered and exploited

And then some people want random champions in Arena, while many others don't

For what it's worth, I'd personally really like that version. I don't think it's a particularly widespread belief however