Revelation VR: Red Post Collection: /Dev: The Future of Clash, Versus Event Issues and Extension, & More

Today's red post collection includes a /Dev blog on the future of Clash, details on the VS 2018 event extension due to mission issues, a roundup of answers from Endless Pillows' AMA on Reddit, and more!

Continue reading for more information!

/Dev: The Future of Clash

Here's a /Dev blog from New001 with details on Clash going forward:

"tl;dr: Clash is delayed and needs some bigger adjustments to get ready for primetime. Clash will be back in a series of free regional tests before the end of the year.

First of all, to everyone that had a negative experience with the launch of Clash, we apologize. As players, we were so excited to experience Clash alongside all of you, and, as developers, we’re incredibly disappointed that your first experience with Clash may have been a bad one. The team has been working extremely hard to figure out what went wrong and what we need to do to re-launch Clash.

In this post, we’ll talk about what happened with the launch, where we’re at now, and what the future looks like.

WHAT HAPPENED

Shortly after launch weekend failed, we outlined our plan to launch one-day tests in each region to test our quick fixes. While Clash ran smoothly in EUNE, Oceania, Korea, Russia, Thailand, Singapore and the Philippines, we still encountered a variety of problems in Vietnam, Turkey, and EU West.

At their core, many of these issues stem from the fact that the platform that powers League of Legends was created quickly, responding to rapid scale around the globe. Technically, the platform was written as a monolithic service, which means that when things go wrong, it’s difficult to debug. This monolithic platform handles things like: starting games, telling your client what skins and champions you own, what level you are, etc. Over time, we’ve been refactoring aspects of the platform opportunistically, but this is a long-term process that is akin to rebuilding parts of the airplane mid-flight.

Clash behaves in a unique way, insofar as it’s the only experience in League that asks the platform to create a huge number of games simultaneously. After the success of the various public betas we ran leading up to launch, we felt confident that the experience would stand up. But ultimately this unique aspect of Clash together with the nature of our platform led to the failures many of you experienced.

We are now in the process of addressing these issues—both for the short-term and the long-run. In the short-term, we’ll be staggering game starts during Clash by making the scouting phase variable (meaning some participants may experience slightly longer scouting phases), as well as changing the way parts of Clash work to be less taxing on the platform. In the long-run, we’ll accelerate breaking out the aspects of the platform that are critical to game starts, making it easier to debug and fix and also fail gracefully.

While we do this work, we’ll be pausing all regional tests until we’re confident the next time you play we can provide the experience you deserve.

WHAT’S GOING TO HAPPEN

We’re currently working out exact timings, but we wanted to share the basic flow for how we’re approaching a relaunch:

TRANSPARENCY AND PBE TESTS
We’re going to share regular status updates on how we’re doing on the road to relaunch, and to help us verify the fixes and changes for game starts, we’ll be running Clash tournaments on PBE. These tests might be buggy as we roll out fixes.

REGIONAL TESTS
We’ll then go back to each region to ensure all our systems can cope with a staggered global release and that we have the right processes in place to support each region. Every regional test will have free entry. These will vary from quick one-day tournaments to three-day beta weekends that will be close to the full experience, but we’re likely to still be triaging some issues.

CLASH LAUNCH
Finally, we’ll launch Clash for real, but only when we have high confidence in Clash’s stability.

A CLOSING NOTE
We still believe that playing League with a premade organized team unlocks an experience that you will love. Getting Clash to you remains one of the most important efforts for League in 2018. Because your feedback is more important than ever, we’ll be back with a series of free regional tests before the end of the year. We’ll be sharing more in the coming weeks on where we’re at, and we hope you can join us in the upcoming one-day tests. Thank you all for your patience and continued support."

Versus Event issues and Extension

Mortdog noted the VS 2018 event would be extended due to mission issues:

"Apologies everyone. There were indeed some issues getting everyone's missions processed. We're working quickly to resolve it.

And yes, that means we need to make it up to you. Here's what we're doing.

--The Versus event will be extended 24 hours.
--We will reprocess all your missed missions, so you hard work is not lost. Dailies will show up again giving you another shot at them, and past progress should count as well.
--As a bonus, we'll add a very easy "makeup" mission that will award an extra 10 tokens, in case you missed the dailies.

Again, not ideal and I apologize for that. Hopefully this helps though!"

Endless Pillows AMA

Champion Designer Endless Pillows, who designed Xayah, Rakan, and Pyke, did an AMA over on Reddit! As usual, community member Spideraxe rounded up the best answers in one handy document:

"Hey everyone!

I’m the gameplay designer that worked on Xayah/Rakan and Pyke. I don’t always get the chance to answer questions directly so I thought I would take the opportunity offered to answer some here.

I’ll try to pop into this thread periodically and answer new questions I see over the next few days, but you can always hit me up on Twitter as well (@EndlessPillows)"

[Endless Pillows AMA Roundup]

Quick Hits

Riot KiWiKiD noted they would be changing Pulsefire Twisted Fate's R indicator due to visibility issues:

"Hey guys, late to the thread but I can confirm we are addressing this issue in the next patch (8.14), it will be a lot more clear to everyone.

Sorry and thanks.

-Kiwi"

Riot Tony noted an FPS optimization was rolled out with Patch 8.13 that should help some users with framerate issues:

"Thanks for noticing! We rolled out a nice optimisation with 8.13, so you should have noticed a good improvement in fps, particularly if your frame rate was already up around 80+fps.

We're constantly monitoring frame rates with each patch, and always looking for ways to speed up the slow parts of the code, and making sure we've not made things worse - hopefully we'll be able to roll out a few more optimisations that'll help even more over the coming patches."

Reav3 noted SolCrushed and Squad5 would be the designers on the next two champions:

"Currently Sol's is up next with Squads being after that, they are both a little ways off though so they could still swap at some point."

Riot Ruin3d gave some reasoning on why verified email addresses are becoming mandatory:

"Verified emails provide a number of benefits that we felt outweighed any potential pain caused by having to go through this process.

As just one example:
Without a verified email if your account is compromised we need to manually verify you are the account owner through the Player Support team which means you aren't able to play for hours.

With verified emails we can make that process automated, allowing you to unlock your own account quickly and easily.

It also allows us to add more security features like multi factor authentication which will be coming soon(TM) so you can better protect your accounts.

For those of you worried about your personally identifying data, we do not share, sell or trade it for rare Pokémon, you can read the privacy policy here. Also as we announced a few months back, as part of the GDPR evaluation we have taken steps to better protect & encrypt player data that we store.

Email preferences for marketing mails are also separate so this doesn't mean you are suddenly going to start getting promotional mails or anything like that (unless you decide to opt in). In the future we plan to add a preferences center to make it a little easier to manage what types of emails you do or do not want to get from Riot."

Want more Esports? Check out these articles and video content form LoLEsports:
- NA LCS Stats Breakdown Summer Week 3
- Rift Rivals Flowchart: A Guide to Fandom

Come Get It | 2018 Rift Rivals - League of Legends

Reminders

To round out this red post collection, here are a few reminders on current promotions or limited time events!

The VS 2018 event runs From June 27th to July 11th, you can grab new skins, bundles, complete new missions, score loot, and more! For a closer look at the new skins, check out our release post - VS 2018 - God-King Darius & God-King Garen Now Available!

The free skins promotions on Riot social media are heading to the vault! Check out the full details on this page to redeem Riot Girl Tristana, Dreadnight Garen, and Unchained Alistar before August 1st!