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Hmmm, I can't really say, but I will say that one of the pods is the balance pod.

Simply put, it's a complicated problem.

It is certainly a limitation of the current model and something we discuss a lot internally. One of the values of having a transparent balancing process is that the community can understand why we are making certain balance decisions.

Including mastery curves is potentially valid, though while it has its benefits, it also has drawbacks and we'd need to weigh the pros and cons of including that information in the balance framework.

We'd also need to figure out the correct way to implement this information.

Example Considerations:

• Do we discard only the first game that a player plays?
• The first 3, 5, 10?
• Do we discard 10 games for an easy champion, but 30 games for a very hard champion?
• How do you weigh mastery for a person that played Lee Sin a lot 4 years ago, but has only played 5 games recently?
• Should a game played by a main matter equally to a perso...

I'll take the bait. Yes we play the game.

We have 7 designers on Summoners Rift Team split amongst the 3 pods. Of those, 1 is Master, 4 are Diamond, 1 is Plat and 1 is Silver.

We also have 2 QA analysts on the team, who are Master and GM respectively.

In addition to that, we have a separate Game Analysis Team who are typically minimum D3 and 7 of them are Masters+. 3 of them hover around GM/Chall.

We generally try to have as many different opinions from each different skill band as possible. It would not be a good thing to have every game designer be Challenger for example, because they would have such a myopic view of the player perspective that it would be actively damaging.

Every analyst has a background in statistics, usually a math degree or something similar. They are very proactive about making sure anybody looking at the data understands all the biases present.

We have an analyst that works on the summoner's rift team 100%. But what reddit knows as the balance team is actually only 1 of the 3 pods of the summoner's rift team. That analyst services the 3 different pods.

You wouldn't really assign a data scientist to service a particular team, that's too low scope for the type of stuff that they're trying to do. Their job is to make different types of data available for the analysts to have access to all across LoL, whether that's for Skins, Champions, Balance, etc.

We have a insights analyst who builds out all our reports (we have many reports that tell us a lot of different things; items, game pacing, winrate reports, an automated version of the champion balance framework, role power, champion learning curves, etc.)

Data scientists work on creating the pipelines to get the data to the analysts so that they can then write queries to get the data and put it in a usable format for designers, game analysts and producers, etc. So to answer your question, we do have both analysts and data scientists. Researchers like Blau are a different form of insights. They collect more qualitative assessments from players through surveys and player labs, rather than analysts or data scientists who are more quantitative.

There were changes to the way omnivamp is calculated and granted in the engine that meant we needed to rewrite the functionality of the tracking. I believe it's on the backlog, but lower priority than shipping balance changes or working on other unreleased content that has deadlines to hit.

Because another item may be a higher effective value for the game. Eg. If they have a lot of shielders, then serpents fang may give more damage. Or if you are already over killing but just need to Snowball the map fast then umbral or youmuus would be better. Or if you need to avoid opening cc then edge of night may be better.

Just because an item has the highest raw damage for the situation doesn't mean it's the best item to buy.

I did his mini-rework, yep. Thanks for the perspective.

So your objection is mainly that you feel it's underpowered or bound to non-bruiser champs, not that you're unsatisfied with the mechanics/pattern for AP bruisers.

Do you mind elaborating on what feels bad exactly? Is it that the items' patterns feel bad, that you think they are undertuned or something else? Also if you could describe your ideal state for the item's balance (eg. do you expect AP bruisers to have choice on their second item, or do you think a better state is for them to always buy demonic embrace second?)

Zhonyas, Banshees, Demonic, Cosmic, Rylais, Morello, Lich, etc. are all meant to be purchasable on AP Bruisers depending on the game state and champion.

Taric's is the same root cause bug as Seraphine. We caught the Taric one before Preseason, but not the Seraphine one. Someone is looking at it, so thanks for all the updoots and awareness.

Taric's was even more abusive, because he didn't need to cast any spells, just have a W link active and it would permanently go off.

In low ELO, probably Morgana or Lissandra. You can rush the defensive component (Seekers/Verdant) and then just farm and outscale them. You can also take teleport to follow them when they roam.

Hmmm well I think about league almost all day, everyday as do all the designers on the team. Everyone is constantly thinking about improvements we could make, bugs we could fix, changes we could put in for test, etc. But it's always good to remind ourselves we need to take time to separate work from personal life as well.

I don't think my career choice changed my perspective that much. League is still my master project, but yeah it is cool knowing how every little bit of the game works on the back end and everything. It's also nice to study all of the data we have access to and reason about it.

I started playing s1, I enjoy the game still as much as I did back then. If anything I actually enjoy the game MORE, knowing how much there is to learn and improve at. And there are always new champions to play and get good at.

Nowadays I'm a lot smarter with my time though. As I've gotten older I know that just grinding out games is not the best way to improve, which is not something that was obvious to 2010 me.

Yes, because it's risky, especially for this particular change. On top of that, it's playoffs patch and we don't want to increase the risk of game breaking bugs.

The bug has been tracked and will be pushed out with 11.7 deploy.

See tweet from Squad5: https://twitter.com/Squad5lol/status/1372593910929747974

Rumble Q and Zoe Q are higher

Not sure about what the Gnar nerfs are.

If the buff had side effects that we didn't predict that are undesirable (eg. enabling a new certain combo/pattern), or they buffed the wrong thing (eg. we were targeting a pro nerf, but it had no effect in pro), then that's when we'd consider reverting.

There's a few changes here that have been missed.

1. There is an AP ratio buff on R1 that's been missed.
2. W cast increases max energy by 80 (so if you use it on full energy, you don't waste the energy boost)

This is intended to be a decent buff. The Q buff is very large [you get 3 Q's every time you would have gotten 2 Q's on Live].