phroxz0n

Ngl I laughed at the Renata thing. This is definitely some peak cooking. Reminds me of playing with captain gameplay in Dev. Some absolutely cursed stuff

No lp loss should come in next deploy yep. Incidentally, I've been on the receiving end of some absolutely atrocious builds from my soloq partners... Maybe they were you... :) :thinko

There's a bandaid adjustment to 60% grievous wounds that we pushed on last deploy that hopefully hits on some of that. Finding a more elegant systemic long term solve to healing is something that the team has been thinking a bunch about. Eg. GW Component / GW Juice (this one is probably bad idea though), stacking GW debuff over time, globally healing modifiers and rules that are clear, etc. All this to say we agree.

Champs like Mundo and swain have pretty middling placements overall, but some combats can feel pretty beyond the pale, that's for sure.

Ideally we find a solution that doesn't hit small amounts of healing (which would have pretty dire consequences for the mode), but hits healing when it starts to go giga infinite.

Going giga infinite is also a major draw of rogue-like style gameplay fantasy so it's a fine line to make sure we don't overdo it.

Ranked has certainly both harmed us in some aspects and helped us in others. It has undoubtedly harmed branching out when people are playing Lee Sin for the 100th time because they're scared of losing rating.

It definitely contributes to ladder anxiety. One of the reasons we're turning LP losses off until Gladiator.

It also helps make it feel like you're progressing towards something though.

We wanted to add challenges like win/play with X champions to also give some progression and incentives for playing more broadly. Hopefully the combination of these things all help.

yep, that's the plan. Definitely want to hear if y'all see any. It's not intended to be like that. Even if they're absolutely destroying all their normal games; we don't want it to be easier to run accounts up the ranks and sell them.

The intention is you don't have full control over your prismatic items. If you rolled a good one then you're probably more likely to have a good average placement. If you didn't, it doesn't mean you're doomed, a strong player will still be able to have high average placements even through suboptimal item offerings.

yeah this is something we're monitoring closely. If you get a better pulse on it, let us know.

The design intent is that we think ~3 items 3-ish augments is the best state of moment to moment combat pacing. (Similar to League's 3 legendary items + boots timing).

It allows for the most dynamic fights, everyone has enough HP-ish, CD's are roughly in the right spots and we want to extend those combats as much as possible (so we use stat anvils and other things to achieve that).

Having said that, it directly fights against players' ability to just get power and construct a build. We ultimately need to weigh up is it more fun for players to just get a whole bunch of augments and items and reach the "blitzcrank is permanently knocking up this person" faster or is it better to realize "peak arena combat".

That direct tradeoff is pretty unclear to us and time will tell.

The client could handle 16 bans, but it took up too much space, extended time in champ select and played against breadth motivations of the mode.

If we're trying to encourage people to play more stuff, more bans works against that. Having said that, too few bans, means a few meta dominant picks.

If we allowed everyone to ban at once, there were too many duplicates selected. Best threading of design intent and all of the above was 8 bans.

https://twitter.com/RiotPhroxzon/status/1771644991120789627

yeah I talked about it here

I've seen 20 or so threads like this and I've yet to see a single person that plays normals before playing ranked who has been incorrectly placed after the change to fix those seeding issues (~early feb). We've also done some comprehensive data analysis on this.

Having said that, getting ARAM and bot games players in their first ranked games is a priority for us (it's currently not considered in seeding due to how different those modes are). It is not trivial to fix this for some reasons that aren't particularly relevant, so will take us some time, but we agree it's a problem.

The unfortunate reality is that there are about as many people who are alt accounts that are trying to ego boost themselves as there are new players that go through this ARAM/bot flow, which is why we haven't changed the initial starting injection point. We could move it, but we'd just be trading one issue for another (eg. why is there a 90% winrate player stomping their way through my silve...

Can you dm me some accounts?

We believe we've fixed it forward facing, but we can't fix them retroactively :( We've investigated, it's just not realistically possible at this time

any warwick enjoyers

Idk we already have enough AP champions who are hehe xD one shot machines. Don't feel particularly enthused by galio being another one of those, given his theme, etc.

My suspicion is the yuumi account didn't play any normal games, so they did not have any seeding info on the account for when they entered ranked.

The other account seems to be placed a lot more honestly, though probably still too high overall.

I'm also suspicious of some shenaniganry going on, given the first player played 100 games of yuumi and 50 games of veigar in normals, then suddenly plays 9 games of Warwick in ranked.

This isn't ideal and we're working on ways to better account for these cases. (from accounts being botted and sold to inappropriate seeding, etc.)

Galio is just weak right now. I don't think he lacks identity, he has a pretty clear one, he is meant to be as close to being a " defender/enabler from midlane" with an ability to shrug off some AP damage as is reasonably supportable by gameplay.

Preventing your team from getting run over on the entire map is obviously pretty broken, so his tools to prevent that need some clear weaknesses, eg. He doesn't turbo stomp lane to trade off for his ~semi global presence. He has a lot of CC capabilities, which also need to be compensated somewhere.

When you have galio on your team, you are meant to feel more supported/comfortable, because he could come save you/support you if you need it.

When galio was unconditionally strong (eg. think back to faker galio), it was because he could get prio in every lane and was not movable in any matchup, while having high pressure/uptime on sides.

This state wasn't particularly sustainable, so we had to give him a laning...

Things could always be improved for sure, but the Engineers have done some amazing improvements over the past few years. As far as Gameplay goes, there's not too much that we (Designers) are not able to do as far as prototyping and implementing goes.

eg. Consider the Season Start changes we just did. Just a few years ago, would not be remotely possible. In this Season we changed basically every map geo, many many items, all the objective flows, spawning rules, dynamic map terrain changing through the game, etc.

I guess no matter how you slice it, having hundreds of people work together seamlessly is pretty difficult. It's hard to get 2 people to agree on something, let alone hundreds.

Other operating models are having one person call all the shots (which can make things extremely fast, but lose that diversity of thought).

On Gameplay, we like to give the teams as much autonomy as possible to do the things they want to do/believe are good for the game, while trying to strike a balance of removing roadblocks, providing vision and making sure we're ambitious enough for the future, overseeing quality to make sure changes to the game are going to move it forward.

Fun challenge that makes everyday exciting.

It's something we've talked about and think is generally valuable. It's a lot more complex than it seems on paper to implement though...

It's on our list of things to fix, yeah. But this type of case is not ideal :( We don't get seeding information from bot or ARAM games

Are you playing normals or ranked?

If you dm me the ID, I can take a look