phroxz0n

phroxz0n



09 Jan

Comment

Originally posted by bz6

Biggest positive is the emphasis and acknowledgment of the possibility of not buying a Mythic first or even at all really.

Re positional agency. I hope the goal isnt to homogenise power across the game. Would definitely make the game boring and less strategic. Class, champion, and role fantasy are awesome RPG elements to have in League. Different counter-play breakpoints within the early, mid, and late game flow of the game is important to emphasise these identities.

Any thoughts on Ability Haste creep? On Bruiser/Skirmishers being tankier than tanks?

Cheers /u/phroxz0n

We think a lot of that is from Jak'Sho, but our intent is to reduce poaching by some amount from fighter class (it's intended to be bought sometimes, but not always)

Comment

Season start was filmed last year, so a few things have changed since then.

Top&JG excitement and select look good, esp for average play.

This resulted in some sadness for bot; the roles are still being balanced. 13.1 hits some of the anti-bot outliers (mundo, ramm, jak'sho) and we've started work on some satisfaction passes for ADC.

We're continuing to look at healing outliers post ravenous and tank changes. We have some small scope changes to GW in a few patches or so and are testing well (small component gives 40% is the main one)

Notes from the vid; we don't consider legendary rush an abuse case (BORK/Demonic/Sunfire) and we'll continue supporting non-mythic rush

AP item and mage satisfaction is on our radar, we've buffed a few outliers in 13.1 (Horizon, Seraphs), but other items/champs need more work


06 Dec

Comment

Originally posted by TargonBoi

Yuumi teaching new players the nuances of positioning? Like HOW???

I could have phrased that better :( Sorry, what I meant by nuances of position means you can observe what people are doing, have touchpoints to get exposed to positioning yourself (hopping out to ward, swapping to allies, abandoning if necessary) and hopefully your friend is teaching you while you don't have to pay the consequences of dying 12 times a game while focusing on learning other skills first.


30 Nov

Comment

Originally posted by AuryxTheDutchman

Are you guys mulling over changes like having CC affect her too while she’s on someone?

We've considered it, I don't think it meaningfully reduces frustration, while sometimes making Yuumi's inputs not function, which makes it feel like your buttons aren't working. As a result, I don't think it's a good change.

Comment

Originally posted by Hue__hue

When the audience for Yuumi is new players why is everyone in higher elos sick of that champ then?

I don’t see high elo players complain about Garen.

This is what we need to resolve first. Long term we want to tune yuumi to be weaker for sophisticated players, so that she can be tuned around her intended skill bracket. These changes are the first step at that.

One of the primary reasons for her effectiveness in high elo is because she can get out of lane too reliably and then hop on a fighter/assassin late game and reduce their counterplay too significantly.

The intention of the changes is so that she is less likely to get out of lane unscathed in high elo, which would directly reduce the frustration as a second order effect (that's the intent at least). The root duration change is to make it so when she gets out of lane, she's not reducing the counterplay by as much.

Comment

Thanks for the post. I think there are some good points in here, but there are some core assumptions that we disagree on.

Yuumi's main value to league is that she is a champion that can help a player bring their friend into the game by drastically reducing the importance of one of League's skilltests (positioning), which allows the new player to focus their mental energy elsewhere.

Live Yuumi has 3 main issues: 1. As tuned, she is a Pro Play bound champion 2. Yuumi can be frustrating for some player segments (varies significantly by region X skill bracket) 3. Tends to abandon lane partner later in the game

A few further notes. Each change we make to increase the power of active yuumi (as coined) directly makes it less likely to succeed in hitting the goal for the intended audience (new players), especially when it involves yuumi jumping out in a Teamfight where she can die instantly.

While active yuumi is less frustrating to play against, we can o...

Read more

17 Nov

Comment

Originally posted by Exoriah

Its honestly great Glad they revived it in a healthy manner

Revived. I see what you did there


16 Nov

Comment

I mentioned this on Twitter, but the changes that we had weren't quite at the design quality bar, so we've taken it back to work a bit more on it and will release it when it's ready.


15 Nov

Comment

Originally posted by HiVLTAGE

I had a question regarding champ diversity.

Champions that have been purposefully dissuaded from jungling such as Camille, Sylas and Twitch could see a return with the clear changes. Is the balance team still planning on barring certain champions from jungling by other balance levers if they’re a problem or is the goal to give as many champions jungling ability?

We're leaning towards being inclusive by default and then assessing champs case by case.

Things that might cause us to reduce a champ's strength in JG specifically might be because it's:

  • Unhealthy (excessive frustation, exceedingly low counterplay, etc.)
  • Damaging their main role (eg. if the off-role JG is too high WR which causes us to nerf the main role)
  • Too strong in Pro. Multi role flexes are really valuable for regular players, because players love to play their champions in multiple roles, but we know this makes champs inherently stronger in draft for Pro
Comment

Originally posted by DM_ME_YOUR_HUSBANDO

I think these changes have good potential. I don’t have a problem with making jungle easier, getting more people into the role will probably be good for the game.

Our goal is to make jungle easier to get into and increase the skill floor, but not change the overall skill required to master the role (not that anyone has really mastered the role anyway).

We wanted to move mastery out of unintuitive mechanics that were only satisfying for a small subset of players to mastery that is more clear and satisfying (eg. choosing and optimizing your companion, more champs can jungle, etc.) and we're still keeping some of these optimizations (like camp dragging).

Features like rec jgl paths, displaying leash ranges, etc. aren't intended to allow a Gold player to become Canyon.


01 Nov

Comment

Lol fun fact, I was the observer for this game. Terrible job... Didn't know where to look LOL


29 Oct

Comment

Thanks for doing these as a non Korean speaker and dopa fan :)


11 Oct

Comment

positive comments aren't allowed on reddit


05 Oct

Comment

Originally posted by Stubrochill17

Hey Phrox, someone mentioned a tweet from you confirming that those new TP items weren’t meant to be included. Someone posted a thread asking about them and I wanted to give a source on what I heard you had said, but I couldn’t find the tweet. Any chance you could comment here or link the tweet/comment regarding those? Just wanted to help out that other guy who posted.

I think Phlox tweeted it. Phlox aint Phrox :)

Comment

This is still a task to do on our backlog, but we're not planning to change how Epic Monster leasing works for Preseason, so it'll be live functionality for now.

Unfortunately, epic monster behavior, healthbar, etc lives in an entirely different flow to camps and so it's been a non trivial task to make adjustments to them without overhauling the way the system is architected.

I do think patience bar is a good thing to add to dragon though, if we can figure it out.


03 Oct

Comment

Originally posted by kaz-amars

If it was an easy fix they would have done it by now. Top lane would need a complete top to bottom rework that also doesn't make it so that bot doesn't just swap to top.

There are million things that can go wrong with even the slightest change to the lane. Not to mention there are plenty of psychopaths that enjoy it the way it is that will be very upset if it ever gets changed.

Basically this yeah. We're still investigating, but no promises. The other issue being that there's a polarized audience, one group loves 1 v 1 want to win by themselves, another group wants more interaction with the rest of the map. Typically mutually exclusive.


29 Sep

Comment

Hm interesting. I think I fixed another bug 7 years ago that seems to have created this one lol 🙃


07 Sep

Comment

We try not to add additional ratios, because each ratio added makes the game 0.1% more complicated. Multiply this by 150 and suddenly the game becomes a lot more complicated. We only do it if we absolutely have to.

It's already daunting to come back to League as a returning player. Imagine how daunting it is to learn League now as a new player.


12 Aug

Comment

Originally posted by ThatsAToad

Riot finally listening to the community and adding a dedicated “harass” ping.

Haha. We filmed this a while ago, but harass ping only lasted a few days. As some noted, it was an iteration on the "poke" ping which was too niche, so we tried to make it more general with "harass", but it's still too niche so now it's gone


01 Aug

Comment

Originally posted by Kurumi_Tokisaki

Pretty interesting, some points that interest me or was sort of obvious but stated from first ~20 mins:

(first 20 may edit if not lazy):
-15 to 20 ppl on the balance team, sometimes 10-15, data oriented obviously (data for fun factor plz 😎)
-a champ is not strong in any skill bracket = buff but strong in any 1 = nerf also strong/weak vary by their skill brackets
-looks at Win and Ban rate, mastery data and riot has an understanding of how a champ is balanced or not at various skill levels and such
-everyone on balance at least multi season diamond
-at least 2 ppl per role and they put forth a list of champs that need to be buffed/nerfed
-aggregation of data from all the regions, China has some weird trends the team hasn’t really understood yet
-certain champs tilt players in regions differently (yuumi Korea and yasuo in China aren’t nearly as bad as NA salt against both)
-item wise before they nerf the item cuz it’s strong but now c...

Read more

There are not 15-20 ppl on the balance team (designers), there's significantly less, because it's the optimal amount and becomes too difficult to get alignment on anything. When the group gets too large, it's unwieldy. There are ~15 people in the room at the meeting. This is: data (though I also pseudo function as a data analyst), player comms, game analysts (the master-chall people that represent each role from a partner team), producers, QA, other designers from off-team (my boss, etc.)

Keep in mind that the balance portion of the team is only a small part of summoner's rift team's day to day function, given that things like Durability Update or Preseason take 6 months to a year of fulltime work with multi-disciplinary teams (art, engineering, sounds, qa, production, data).