phroxz0n

phroxz0n



16 Jan

Comment

Originally posted by shinomiya2

How does the team feel about the sentiment around master tier at the moment? the higher elo community have started to really disregard its prestige and the players that reside in the rank have a huge variance of skill levels, are there plans to attempt to resolve the large population and skill discrepency? it also feels quite awful for master players to see that the next rank above them requires an 800 lp climb to achieve grand master

Master tier varies region by region. For big regions like EUW or KR, there's definitely a lot of Masters. We need to consider how to go about solving that problem, because certainly a lot of Masters in the tier are deflating the prestige a little. It's also not helped by a lot of positions on those ladders doing things like climbing to masters on their 5th account.

Yeah the 800LP climb to achieve GM is also due to how prestigious we are keeping those ranks, because they have number limits. I could believe that they're meant to be percentile based, but for now, it's a set amount and smaller for smaller regions.

Comment

Originally posted by Neither_Fee_2616

Hii, Are midscopes coming back?

We certainly are still interested in doing midscopes! Just need the right opportunities and the right expertise from the team in pulling them off

Comment

Originally posted by JTHousek1

Hello League Team, hope you are having a nice day.

  • Are you currently happy with the amount of burst in the game?
  • Do you think the Lethality change could result in being a mistake?
  • Any thoughts on bringing Critical Strike Chance on items back up to 25% like they were pre-Mythics?
  • What are the main things you think about/design pillars when wanting to add a new item? Is it similar to how the Valorant team thoroughly explores the need to include one and the space it would fit into?
  • Are you currently happy with how red side bottom lane is performing? It feels hopeless to try and ward the tribrush that divides river and the path there.
  • Do you foresee a possible collaboration similar to Zeri/Neon with other parts of Riot in the future? I suppose Ambessa is sort of going down that path, can we expect more of that?
  • What is the upper limit for a Legendary complete cost? For example, something like Phantom Dancer right now...
Read more
  1. Not happy with the amount of burst in the game, imminently bringing it down
  2. It's possible, but we're also bringing lethality numbers down to compensate
  3. Something we've experimented with, but nothing to share just yet
  4. Mainly if the item is satisfying, if it will fill a hole that we're not serving, if it will have enough users
  5. Yes, it's similar to what blue side bot lane has had for a while now. Having the map be symmetrical is good overall
  6. Possible
  7. I think over 1000, except for late game items like Rabadons is probably closer to the upper limit
  8. We always need to strike the balance of clarity vs functionality. Players will always ask for more functionality improvements, but we also need to make the game accessible for new players. We clearly went too far though and are bringing some back
  9. Yes, definitely possible. it's showing its age a bit
Comment

Originally posted by t-e-e-k-e-y

With nearly 170 champions, has there been any discussion about increasing to 2 bans per player?

Disregarding the taking longer in champion select and UX work to be done (which both are significant), we feel it's healthy for players to both be able to play their champions and by extension for players to see a broad range of champions. Having more bans would hurt this pretty significantly.

Champions are meant to be some amount of frustrating (ofc there's too much), but it's healthy for League to have villains and champions to be some amount of frustrating.

Comment

Originally posted by SomeDude3882

Phroxzon already mentioned some reasoning to this question, but I want a more detailed response.

Why remove so many stat tracks from items? Why have only very few been left in the game. It's hard for me to tell what items are actually working and what are not at times. Sure veteran players will know what works, but for less experienced players, the stats were a very good indication of what works in what situation.

We had much more of a focus on clarity this season. For tenured League players, it's easy to overlook how difficult and confronting it is to look at tooltips in the first place, so we wanted to reduce this burden by some amount.

There was a bit of muddled wires in terms of communications around which items should/shouldn't keep stat trackers that got lost in the general chaos of releasing a big season, so we weren't super consistent across the board, but we have much clearer directional alignment internally now around the topic.

We do intend to add more stat trackers back into the game. We want to strike the balance of having good experiential and statistical ways to determine whether things are good. ie. You should be able to intuit and feel when Void Staff is a good purchase compared to Rabadons.

Comment

Did the person play normals or just aram?


12 Jan

Comment

Originally posted by phroxz0n

Ahhhh mb guys, I'll resign tmrw

In all seriousness, the patch being live with ranked on was confusing, forgot that preseason is normally on with ranked on, but the season reset and preseason being live being close together meant there was between 0-9 hour discrepancy in some regions

Comment

Originally posted by JTHousek1

I assume they're seeing what happens after both her core items get nerfed.

Yep


10 Jan

Comment

Originally posted by Immolar

In your tweet you say that this was an issue caused by “people not demoting often enough”. Does this mean the demotion shielding is going to be less impactful this season, causing people to demote more?

Follow up question, If this is the case, is it a product of the new system attempting to adjust MMR off “player skill” as opposed to just wins and losses?

yes, people will be demoting from tier boundaries more this season as we made promoting easier. Frankly it was pretty off that a player would be playing with Silvers, while they have Plat rank. or Gold with Emerald rank, etc.

Comment

This was meant to say "closer to where your mmr". We still want players to reprove themselves on the new content!


27 Nov

Comment

Originally posted by iDobleC

Is the idea to ship the current iteration with cinders to live with 14.1 or is there like a chance for a different version to show up in PBE?

It will be this version with maybe some tuning

Comment

We've tried this idea multiple times and it hasn't really panned out for the most part. (both for the original 2019 version and the recent version) Players get more irritated when the terrain is making their pathing worse/making them pay more attention to pathing around the map. It also didn't actually make gameplay more fun. If the current terrain doesn't work out, we have a lot of potential mitigations to make it less snowbally, but over time found that players enjoyed it more and more


21 Nov

Comment

Originally posted by Playful_Consequence7

So all the map changes made were built around the existing elevation system of the old map? interesting call

it's more like it doesn't cost us anything to design it within the current constraints of the map. It's just the map, so it doesn't really affect whether we have to design around elevation or not.

Comment

Agree with the opportunity. In practice though, it is way harder than it seems to remove the height, on top of the art considerations. I'd estimate probably ~40% of the scope of this Season Start's Engineering and Art budget would be required just to flatten the map, because it would require re-architecting how the game is inherently structured on the backend.


11 Nov

Comment

The arena is about 80% full


29 Sep

Comment

Originally posted by Epyimpervious

People whine about Phreak but since his joining the balance team the champion buffs have gotten pretty interesting and many not damage related: Veigar range, Trynd range, Zyra E casting lockout, Ziggs radius buff, Rumble E1 + E2, Liss CC duration, Reksai health scaling on passive etc.

I like this direction a lot. Some of the older champions especially really benefit from a little TLC.

Edit: minor clarity

Wanting to give credit where credit is due here: Veigar: truexy Trynd: phlox Zyra: zenith and phlox Ziggs: raptorr Rumble: phreak Liss: me Reksai: truexy


26 Sep

Comment

Originally posted by MazrimReddit

Galio sucks at his one job.

I want galio to exist as a malphite for anti ap, I wouldn't even pick galio to counter a 5 ap comp

I think that's a possible direction, but would require at least 1 ability to be reworked to make it happen. Rn he has the anti magic flavor on W and R, but it would need to be a lot more of his kits power budget. I remember solcrushed trying something a bit similar to this in Dev but it was too niche and unsatisfying. This was a reasonable compromise to get some of that anti magic flavor in there without making him completely useless when a team wasn't all AP (teams usually have about a shields worth of magic damage). Hopefully that gives some context for the reasoning there.

Comment

Originally posted by namegeneratorsystem

"Since he's already successfully fulfilling his role as an anti-mage in lane, we'll be buffing him in a way that increases his general power without altering his matchups."

"Generally pretty weak and is countered particularly hard by some of the mid-range mages in the meta. "

So is Galio actually fulfilling his role as an anti mage or not

Galio generally loses prio to mage matchups in lane and that's intended. For Galio to actually beat these Champs in lane and get prio, his combat pattern would need to be pretty overtuned.

So we think his lane is fine; he loses push, but won't die and can farm defensively relatively fine.

Where he is intended to excel is in using his globals to impact the map, hence buffing that aspect of his kit rather than make him generically powerful. Sorry for the confusing wording there.


16 Aug

Comment

We're going to be putting a QGT out sometime in the next few weeks that chats about durability, snowballing, game time, etc. that will talk about a lot of the things in specificity.

But for now, the high level thoughts on durability here are that we're not close to being back to pre-durability, but natural patch balance, item changes, new content, etc. do contribute to pulling it back some.

We expect if we're taking good swings at balance we can't only nerf things, we have to buff things as well in ways that align with a champion's fantasy (preferably in ways that aren't durability, like MS buffs to Nidalee or mana buffs to Sylas like you mentioned) instead of damage. But sometimes, the thing that is going to resonate with a Caitlyn player is their damage being buffed.

Ultimately, it's a push and pull. We track the number of buffs/nerfs we do in a patch, and the number of damage and durability buffs/nerfs net we do patch over patch.