phroxz0n

phroxz0n



26 Sep

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.


24 Jul

Comment

Originally posted by nfect

I feel like the biggest issue with Shiv is its insane waveclear potential which I don't think is addressed with the upcoming changes.

Waveclear is Shiv's identity (and it's a pretty satisfying one). Items are meant to be strong at a specific thing and that may be frustrating for some, but it's part of the item's power budget and we intend to balance the item around it.

Granted, when the waveclear is too powerful, such that you're one tapping the casters at range, then yeah that can lead to stalling and lower interaction, but we intend to tune the item around that property.

We also intend to allow AP users to buy it sometimes as a bridge to AP AS builds (like Nashors).


12 Jul

Comment

Originally posted by UNOvven

Question, how does this line up with, for example, the mastery curves that Riot Blaustoise posted 5 years ago that showed a significant divergence in the ratio of mains to new players, and as such a visibly signifcant effect on the winrate that is much higher than 0.4%? Or the quite common examples we get of a champions winrate falling by well over 2% when the only thing that changed for the champion is that their playrate increased?

It's about the same. the NET EFFECT is 0.4%, which is (high mastery effect on the observed winrate) minus (low mastery effect on the observed winrate).

High mastery players still perform significantly higher (~2% than the observed WR) for most cases

Comment

It's worth noting that different champs have different "Mains Game Share" at different MMR's.

I tried many different interpretations of mains (MMR + Played over X games of champ, MMR + games played at Z rating, MMR + Y champ mastery, MMR + Games with a decay function for when the games were played), etc.

The most consistent one was just champion mastery at 100k+ (which helped, because it was also simpler to implement).

At 100k (compared to something like 50k) players were consistently outperforming 50k players, but hit a plateau of performance, so that's where I put the bar of performance increase for "being a main". It was also a relatively consistent static increase whether Masters+ players were considered or Silver players were considered.

The TLDR of this is mainly that:

  • Newer players of the champion tank the winrate about as much as the mains increase it (lower quantity of mains, even if they are performing better relative to ...
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Comment

Originally posted by Damurph01

Karthus adc im looking at you

We know that players continue to not change their defensive shards against karthus Bot and that inflates the WR at least some amount relative to their true power level (and similar to a bunch of other mages bot).

Some of this is due to how hard it is to figure out where opponents are going in champ select, some autopilot and some ignorance.

Comment

Originally posted by HS_Cogito_Ergo_Sum

Uh, we have two different sets of changes for Rell on PBE.

There's the one u/phroxz0n put out, and these ones that are actually one the pbe.

Which one is the right one?

The ones I posted are the right ones


11 Jul

Comment

Main reason is for tempo so you can roam or recall. You can Demat to hit level breakpoints for fast allins, to get targons from range in hard matchups or to hit surprise hooks.


27 Jun

Comment

Hi everyone, we've been trying to add more helpful contexts to our patch notes now for why we're making certain decisions. We've always had these thoughts, but things like loc pipelines have historically been problematic, but have been getting more streamlined recently (which means more context for y'all). Please let us know if you'd like to see less, more, what you like, don't like.


22 Jun

Comment

Originally posted by Aeiou-Senpai

What about the ghost nerf? Maybe it's better to just use same approach so ranged wont't use the tool arguably designed to help against being kited?

We're pulling ghost nerf from the patch for the same reason

Comment

We intend to keep Tri Force good for melee and will try to use certain levers that will be more punishing for ranged than melee. While we're going to entertain the use of a melee/ranged split, if we can avoid it we will. Melee ranged splits are a nominal increase in complexity, for a small game health gain, which on balance is probably net negative.


14 Jun

Comment

Originally posted by whitedarkwhite

Phreak seems to be quoting Reddit a lot when it comes to changes. I wonder if the balance team have people that browse the Korean or Chinese equivalent of LoL discussion and see what they have to say about balance.

We do, yes. A mix of things like patch reports that come from regional offices, balance designers that speak the different languages, etc.

We have a Weibo account that we also use to communicate with Chinese players.

I personally try to stay up to date with all the different regions to make sure I'm making the right decisions.

Comment

Originally posted by justice_for_lachesis

the best champ to play with a completely new friend to learn the very basics of the game, like how to kill people, use your abilities, win the game, etc. (1-10 especially, but 10-30 also). After that, people can choose to stick with her or play a more traditional champion. She has a 5% higher winrate than the number 2 champion, while being in the top 5 pick rate for this player bracket,

How do you know these stats are not contaminated by bot accounts that prefer yuumi?

We did a pretty exhaustive analysis of it.

Separation of smurfs, bot accounts, separated games played with friends vs without, etc.

The only places in 1-30 where Yuumi didn't perform the best was when smurfs "new players were actually smurfs". She didn't perform that poorly in those though, because usually it was double smurfs playing with each other :shrug

Comment

Hopping in here is a bit risky, but here goes...

We agree Yuumi can be a frustrating champion and we're not trying to say otherwise. We're going to continue to balance her out of Pro and Elite play.

Having said that, the main point I wanted to make a clarification about is that the 1-30 experience is different from the average player (~mid silver) experience.

Despite being sub50 for average players on paper, if you account for her steep mastery curve, she sports very reasonable performance metrics. A lot of this is due to how different she is to other champions for a player who's played thousands of hours of league, so she has quite a different playstyle (similar to singed in that respect) and tanks a lot of winrate on games 1-5.

Having a steep mastery curve for the average player doesn't mean that's the case for a completely new player though. The reason why we tried to design around the attach is because she is far and away the best champ to pla...

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05 Apr

Comment

I can give a bit more insight on this data, since I pulled it (I also moonlight as a data analyst in addition to my day job :D)

  • 3.3% is the correct number

Of 4 vote failed early FF's, a significant number get dragged out:

  • However, if a game ends before 21 minutes, ~90% are held hostage (45% get FF 20'd, 50% end naturally by 20 [open mid or just lose])
  • 80% of the games resolve by 25 minutes
  • Games that make it to 30 minutes have a 10% winrate
  • Games that made it to 40 minutes had a 45% winrate (but the incidence was very low)

While the "come back from behind, win at 45 minutes" moments are some of the highest moments in League, the vast vast majority of the cases are experiences where the majority of the team doesn't want to play the game out and are trapped in a suboptimal experience.

Add on to that that a significant portion of our playerbase is paying by the hour to play....

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01 Apr

Comment

Originally posted by raphelmadeira

Some of them are tied to the Champion which makes it impossible to separate them

But during the recall, Yorick PUT IT ON and then threw his own hat on the floor...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fdzWMdwwvNM&t=64s

Animations that use hats are not the same as vfx that use hats

Comment

We took all the hats that are separated from the Champion model. Some of them are tied to the Champion which makes it impossible to separate them


24 Mar

Comment

Originally posted by SometimesIComplain

Oh awesome, that's good to hear! Can I ask if that type of data is publicly available anywhere? It'd be interesting to see for the various ranks and regions, but I understand if it's kept internal.

It's not and we don't intend to. But there's a quite wide variation in preference between regions. But the stats I referenced are for all regions combined

Comment

In that bracket, JG has settled out at ~20% increase in pickrate, which is pretty massive. Went from equal lowest to 3rd and has been stable for about a month now


15 Jan

Comment

Originally posted by bigheadsfork

Ok but what new player is gonna read all that text and not be confused???

I've been playing since s6 and i haven't even touched jungle this season because I don't wanna read all that shit lol. Might as well shift click an ability and open a new website with that essay of words.

The goal is if you didn't read what it did and I were to ask you after the game what the pet was doing for you, you'd probably get about 60% of it. In the old jungle item, it'd probably be closer to 0-10%

We know new players don't really read. That's why the colors are red, green and blue and why many games piggyback on this color trichotomy