- Red Post Collection: ARURF Weekend, Clash Cancellations, Quick Gameplay Thoughts: 5/25, May bundles & More
- Champion & Skin Sale: 5/29 - 6/1
- Free Champion Rotation, Week of May 29th
Table of Contents
What’s next for Clash?
"Hey everyone,
Thanks for your patience so far with Clash. The launch weekend obviously didn’t go as planned, so we thought we’d share what happened, what we’re doing for those of you who missed out, and what’s next for Clash.
What happened during the launch weekend?
As soon as the first tournaments for Clash were starting in the Philippines and OCE, we realised games were not starting and teams were automatically losing, something that we had not seen in this fashion or scale in internal testing or regional betas across Vietnam, Turkey, both European servers, North America, and Korea.
We started pulling in engineers from across Riot to help triage, but because the global rollout was ongoing, we had to scramble to find a fix as soon as we could. Unfortunately, more and more regions were due to roll out while we were actively working on finding the source, forcing us to make late cancellations.
As our confidence dropped in finding a fix on Friday and the knowledge that teams across the world were ready to go and set time aside to play, we made the call to cancel Clash for the rest of the weekend and regroup for a relaunch as soon as we could.
What’s happening for players who were affected?
We apologize for the inconvenience of getting your teams together, making time to play and ultimately not being able to. We’re giving out some one-time freebies to make up for it, which are detailed below:
First, we’ll be returning all used tickets to your account if they were spent. Further, as a thank you for your patience, we’d like to offer a bonus for everyone who was on a pending or active roster of 2 players or more. We’ll be granting a Clash Orb containing a 3 win XP boost, two Clash team logos, one for MSI and the second at random, and a shard for a 750 RP skin.
This will be added to your Loot tab by June 2.
What’s next for Clash?
Before we try to release Clash again, we want to be as confident as possible before announcing a new global launch date. We believe we’ve pinpointed the underlying issue, but we need to keep testing, and are implementing more diagnostics to see if our fixes are working out. We’ll be testing Clash in one-day betas in every region. More details will follow!
Once again, we’re sorry for how things went down, and we’ll be working flat out until we’re sure we can confidently launch Clash to everyone."
NaKyle provided more details on went down over the weekend:
"I'll add a little detail to clarify. This isn't to say this weekend featured perfect decision making. Devs are in LA, so launch began around 1AM (LA time) in the Phillippines and moved westward from there, with NA due last. Out of the first few regions in Asia, some fell over and some went just fine. That led us to believe we might be able to fix things ahead of Europe--a bet that turned out to be wrong and ultimately led to later cancellations.
While we raced to fix things, we worried that putting out communications that made it unclear whether the tournament was going forward would just make things worse because people would have mixed information while trying to organize teams and weekends. Once we had enough info to know we weren't gonna be able to fix it, every server from Russia west was cancelled within a couple hours as we discussed with regional offices around the world, but naturally it was later on Friday in Europe.
You're right that we saw the issues in Asia and could've immediately canned the regions in the timezones covering Europe and the Americas, but we wanted to try and preserve it if we could, that's the short version of how it went down."
/Dev: Diving into Champion Bios
"Hello narrative friends.
With Pyke’s imminent release into the watery wild, Scathlocke and I thought it’d be a good time to dive into a question narrative gets pinged on a lot—champion bios. As this is one of our primary tools for communicating the backstory of a champion, we thought it might be useful to dig into what they are, why we make them, and then run through the process with our favorite Titan of the Depths, Nautilus.
Let’s start with the shortest version and the one most players are familiar with, the client description, or what we call it in-house—the “short bio.”
THE SHORT BIO
This is a brief paragraph of information that describes the champion, and because it’s the only narrative description that lives in the client, it should also reinforce why you’d want to play that champion in game, from a fantasy archetype perspective.
Up until recently, the information in the client was all over the place in terms of length and subject matter. Some were not actually bios, but flash fiction. Some were extremely short and some were so long, the gist of the champion was lost. Overall the experience was wildly unpredictable, and that left some champions feeling neglected and under-served. This is why we decided to standardize the in-client champion bios last November.
In their intended form, these biographical appetizers are meant to be read quickly, in about the time it might take to queue for a game. To do that, we aim to keep them short—ideally 80 to 100 words. That works out to about four sentences. A strong short bio should cover who the champion is in the world of Runeterra, where they came from, and their personality, all while trying to avoid direct repetition of the words in the champion’s title.
Some of you with mains that once had an overflowing cornucopia of biographical information might be making an angry face right about now. When we put the new standardized short bios in client last fall, we heard complaints that we had erased information from a champion’s history. In most cases, these details weren’t cut from a champion’s story, they just lived more appropriately on their page on Universe. Thankfully last February, we were able to get a Learn More button in the client, which makes connecting to this information a lot easier, and brings us to the next incarnation of a champion’s life story…
THE FULL BIO
This narrative text should summarize a champion’s backstory and current place in the world of Runeterra. Though longer than a short bio, we still like to keep it on the brief side, ideally no more than 600 words. When a champion’s history is a little complicated, we might bump that up another hundred words or so.
You might be wondering, “Why have a word count restriction at all?” (Or as I like to refer to them, a strongly suggested creative goalpost.) It might seem like having an unlimited word count would be awesome and let us share more about a champion, but there are two major reasons we like to keep the bios concise.
First, the full bio aims to highlight significant events in a champion’s life. The keyword there is highlight. We’re a big fan of story being told through… well, story, and not biographical text. To me, it’s the difference between a history textbook and historical fiction: The textbook is informative and interesting in small doses, but I would much rather immerse myself in a story where a character can live and breathe. Any events mentioned in a champion’s full bio should be ones that proved influential to the person they are today, and any relationships to other champions or regions that are noted should be significant. How they are depicted should make the reader want to know more, preferably in the form of a story.
The second reason we stick to a word count restriction, and perhaps why I personally enjoy writing full bios, is that the small space forces a writer to be exact with their craft. When you have to count every word, every word must count. Putting together a champion’s bio is a good exercise in figuring out what really matters to who that champion is, and finding the right words to communicate that effectively to a reader.
We want the full bio to be accurate to the whole experience of a character’s life. To do that, we may update a bio with additional information after telling a significant story, like we recently did with both Yasuo and Riven after “Confessions of a Broken Blade” finished. Both of them are now on different parts of their continuing journey, and we believe it is important to reflect that in their bio.
So what does all of this look like in action? Let’s take a closer look on a champion who presented an interesting challenge.
THE NAUTILUS DILEMMA
Before November, Nautilus was a character we’d largely left alone, narratively speaking. As an older champion, the information in the client wasn’t outright contradictory to the world of Runeterra, or other champions, but it wasn’t terribly deep either. This put Nautilus in the lore triage category of “not an immediate emergency, but we’ll revisit if that changes.”
As the Champion Team began working on the idea that would become Pyke, we saw the need to take a closer look at the Titan of the Depths. Pyke was shaping up to be a Bilgewater champion that had been pushed onto his character journey by betrayal, and then touched by some eerie power. The player-facing information on Nautilus that had been alright a few months earlier was looking less so. We knew that, narratively, we’d have to revisit and deepen Nautilus as a function of developing Pyke.
Writers and editors love questions, and one we endlessly debate is, “Why?” For Nautilus, the questions were, “Why is he the way he is? What was the power that touched him? Where did it come from? And why does it still push him ever forward?”
In our desire to find a place that made more sense for [Nautilus] in the lore, we had undermined something that players had previously loved about him.Like most people who love story and character development, the folks who work within the narrative discipline have a lot of personal headcanon about League’s cast, and we do a lot of theorycrafting around what “could be.” That healthy internal debate helps us poke holes in our own logic before it becomes public. There were a number of possible explanations for the questions surrounding Nautilus, and we took the opportunity to hint at a connection to Nagakabouros that had been pitched. This would not only put some more character distance between him and Pyke, but could elaborate on Nautilus’ in-game support persona.
Unfortunately, of the nearly 140 bios we updated at that time, the change to Nautilus was one that players took major exception to. Specifically, Nautilus working for Illaoi’s god made him feel like less of champion in his own right. In our desire to find a place that made more sense for him in the lore, we had undermined something that players had previously loved about him.
Looking at the Nautilus challenge, Scathlocke and I were teetering on the precipice of a particularly deep chasm of self-doubt. Nautilus was a champion created long before either of us started working at Riot. As much as we narrative folk are excited by the prospect of creating characters and worlds from the stuff of raw imagination, the craft of writing is often an exercise in humility. Each edit a draft goes through reveals what you didn’t know about your story, or what you did a poor job in communicating the last time around.
Nautilus was much more than his armored bulk. He was a lost soul, dragged down by darkness, but one that persevered no matter what.So, we started there. What else did we not know about the armored goliath? After considering a couple of options on how to get to the bottom of this, we contacted as many Nautilus players as we could and pointed them to this question on the boards, hoping to find some answers. (While this instance of feedback was sourced in one particular channel, we’re always looking for better ways to understand player feels from all over the world. If you want to tell us what you think about our decisions, please feel free to reach out to us in the comment section of this article.)
At first the posts trickled in, but it soon became a torrent. In over a thousand posts, covering fifty pages on the boards, Nautilus mains delivered a masterclass in what this champion meant to them. One of the many things that makes me excited to write for League is how deeply player passion runs for these characters and their world. (It also gives me a crazy set of nerves whenever writing of mine is in placed front of that passion!)
So I read the posts. All of them. And they were amazing.
Nautilus was much more than his armored bulk. He was a lost soul, dragged down by darkness, but one that persevered no matter what. He was the embodiment of inescapable dread, of burdens that cannot be put down, and the will to survive even the most intense pressures. In his anchor and his lonely trudge across the bottom of the sea, there were beautiful metaphors for dealing with depression. Through all of this, even his betrayal, Nautilus was not evil. Inside the diving suit was still the soul of a man.
We’ve taken a new crack at Nautilus’ short bio (up now on PBE). And since you’ve gotten this far on an article that’s nerding out about League champion bios, here’s a sneak peek at where we landed for the full bio for Nautilus, Titan of the Depths.
To understand the legend of Nautilus, one must first know the man—for even the tallest of tavern tales agree, he was indeed a man.
Though the waves have washed away the name he was born with, most remember Nautilus as no mere sailor, but as a salvage diver. Just beyond the southernmost reach of the Blue Flame Isles lies a graveyard of ships, rumored lost while searching for a blessed land, looking to trade wealth for immortality. On a fair day, their glittering holds beckon from beneath the surface. Many crews sought divers to collect the lost fortune, and none could match the skill of the quick-sinking hulk of solid muscle that was Nautilus.
With lungs that could steal the air from a galleon’s sails, Nautilus preferred to freedive. Always bringing up plenty of gold or jewels for the crew, the man demanded no special wages—he asked only that the captain toss a coin overboard as they set out, honoring and appeasing the vast ocean. A sailor’s superstition to be sure, but many a sea-fearing crew made such offerings to ensure a safe return.
http://www.surrenderat20.net/2018/05/red-post-collection-whats-next-for.html
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