- Red Post Collection: Quick Gameplay Thoughts: September 26th, An Update on In-Game Performance, and more!
- 9/27 PBE Update: Dragon Trainer Tristana Chroma
- 10/2 PBE Update: Tentative Balance Changes
Table of Contents
- Worlds Pick’em is Coming!
- Preseason Dev Update Number 2!
- Clothesline Karma Mini-Retrospective
- Worlds 2018 Rundown
- Quick Hits
- Reminders
Worlds Pick’em is Coming!
Here's Riot Talumar with the details on the return of the Worlds Pick'em for Worlds 2018:
"Pick’em is returning for the 2018 World Championship! Go head-to-head against friends, casters and the rest of the League community to see whose powers of prediction will reign supreme. If your picks pan out, you’ll walk away with awesome rewards exclusive to this year’s event.
Pick’em will be live for the Group Stage and Knockout Stage, and each stage will have a corresponding mission in-game.
- Group Stage: Brackets and mission available on October 7 at 9:00 AM PT. Mission must be completed before the start of Group Stage games on October 9 at 11:59 PM PT.
- Knockout Stage: Brackets and mission available on October 17 at 1:00 PM PT. Mission must be completed before the start of Knockout Stage games on October 19 at 8:00 PM PT.
Your window to make picks is smaller this year, so be sure to get in there before the next stage begins!
Prizes
Pick’em Poro Icons
Two new Poro icons are up for grabs. You’ll get the 2018 participation icon when you complete the Pick’em Group Stage mission. If you score at least 34 points during Pick’em, you’ll also receive the Worlds Wizard Pick’em Poro summoner icon.
Worlds Tokens
For completing the Knockout Stage mission, you’ll get 10 Worlds tokens that can be spent on Worlds Season loot in-game. For more information about the Worlds Season 2018 event and how Worlds tokens can be used, check out this article.
Ultimate Skins
If you overcome the odds and get every single pick correct, you’ll be rewarded with a set of five Ultimate skins: Elementalist Lux, Pulsefire Ezreal, Spirit Guard Udyr, DJ Sona, and Gun Goddess Miss Fortune.
Head over to pickem.lolesports.com or log into League and check out your missions on October 7 to get in on the Group Stage action, and remember to return for Knockout Stage picks on October 17!"
Preseason Dev Update Number 2!
"Hey everyone!
We’re still hard at work on this year’s preseason and I wanted to jump in with another update of our work in progress. If you missed the first update, it’s posted here
Our primary aim this preseason is to generally improve the quality of the time spent you spend in game. We want to keep you in striking distance of a comeback, but if you're really really far behind, the opposing team should be able to get you out of that lost game quicker. I Our four main goals are listed below with their corresponding changes.
Rune paths no longer dictate stat bonuses
After a bunch of iterations and testing we’ve settled on a “pick 3” system for stats:
- 1 slot is offensive stats only
- 1 slot is defensive stats only
- 1 slot is “free” choice of offense or defensive stats
The updated stats options we’re testing:
- Offensive - Attack Damage, Ability Power, Attack Speed, Scaling Cooldown Reduction
- Defensive - Armor, Magic Resist, Scaling Health
Stuff we’ve cut or are not currently considering
- HP regen - this ends up making lanes where nobody ever dies
- Flat CDR - In particular this option didn’t leave us any way to easily tune it. Any amount of CDR that isn't a multiple of 5 or 10 doesn’t integrate well into the other options you have from items/runes.
- Scaling resists - These fall into a category where they aren’t bad design but when we overall want to limit each slot to ideally 3, maybe 4 choices these didn’t make the cut. By the late game these resists are overshadowed by items so the up front resists were more interesting.
Overall we’re pretty happy with how the system lets you build a well tailored set of stats that enhance your champion’s strengths without a lot of the deadweight that existed in the old system. Defensive choices allow you to make some strategic choices around your opponent/s.
“Do I try to counter my lane opponent or prepare for the late game?”
“Do I greed into double offense or play it safe with defense?”
Laning Phase is improved and slightly longer
TLDR for those who didn’t read the last update - outer turrets will have a barricade in the early game that makes them more durable, but you can break off pieces of it for gold rewards.
Since we last updated, these barricades haven’t had any major directional shifts, and as we continue to polish them it’s feeling more and more like a natural part of the game flow. The goal here is that the power and balance of lane matchups are still similar, but turrets live longer and are more satisfying to interact with since there are multiple pieces to destroy and rewards to collect. We also want to reduce some of the feels bad cases of a turret falling at 7 minutes after one jungle gank when the lane was in a good position.
Comebacks are more achievable and satisfying
Integrating minion farm into bounties is still shaping up to be a promising change because it’s creating a more accurate reward for killing a player with more gold power than you. Additionally we’re continuing to tune the exact method and amount of gold this should contribute. Our rough estimate right now is that the average bounty of a fed champion should be 70% champion kill gold based and 30% minion/monster farm based.
In our efforts to make comebacks more achievable we don’t want to push bounties so high that they just seem unreasonable. So the other tactic we’re taking is to reduce bounties for players when their team is overall behind (in gold). Bonus is that we’re softening a super bad feeling moment where you’ve been the only winning lane in a tough game, only to die and give up a ton of gold to the enemy when your team is already behind.
Decided games resolve faster
Scaling up minion health and turret damage resistance more in the late game continues to test well. This change has proven to help teams that are going to win do so faster, but not make it much harder for the behind team to fight back in matches that are still recoverable. Not a lot of new info to report here since last time.
We’re also making a change to how minions scale their movement speed. We’re replacing the old system where minion movement speed scaled up based on how many turrets had been killed in that lane with a simpler mechanic of minions simply gaining MS over game time. This is a more neutral mechanic that allows teams that are behind in turrets to make a counter push if they can win a team fight.
Feedback so far
We’ve just recently completed some very informative player labs where we brought in a bunch of players from different skill levels and had them test these changes for a full weekend. As always this got us a ton of useful feedback to work on, and it also get us even more hyped and confident to put this stuff out for you all to see soon. We’re aiming to do a longer than normal PBE period for these changes so we can also make sure everything is working similarly to what we observed during internal testing. Expect our next round of info to be much closer to PBE, and you’ll see more details from the designers working closely with each feature.
Riot MapleNectar
Bonus Image! We just got the first models into game last night, Nunu & Willump have been hard at work...now they just need a paintjob (and a few more tweaks to the model)."
Clothesline Karma Mini-Retrospective
"Hi all,
I figured I’d take some time to run you through one of our recent explorations on Karma, bringing back the clothesline tether on her W. As a forewarning, the changes below are not shipping.
By “clothesline”, I’m referring to the pre-2013 rework Karma ability, where her tether affected enemies and allies that passed through it. This is a pretty unique mechanic in League, and we wanted to see if we could give Karma something unique gameplay-wise, so the direction seemed valuable. However, we did intentionally move away from it in 2013 - to quote us, “Spirit Bond’s “clothesline” gameplay is really cool, but it’d work better on a tank champion that has an easier time jumping into the fray”. We wanted to validate or invalidate this, since Karma’s role and League in general has changed significantly over the last 5 years.
For the first iteration, we took the old clothesline and refined the spell to the most fun parts to play with. Karma’s old W hasted allies and slowed enemies on contact - however, the gameplay around maneuvering it into enemies was much richer than the gameplay around your allies running through it, so we focused on versions that only clothesline’d enemies to keep the spell clean. Additionally, the clothesline play is reasonably difficult to pull off, especially in an uncoordinated environment, so we attached a higher reward to successful plays - roots and stuns over slows. Here’s the first version in action.
This version was fun, but had some issues. First, the level of attention that it required was high. If Karma put it on an ally, they would need to know what was happening and position themselves well to get the best effect, which can be difficult in a hectic teamfight. When thrown onto an enemy, they could easily misplay by running too close to an ally, accidentally stunning their friend. Karma, as a backline mage, didn’t have a ton of control over the movement of the tether unless she was willing to put herself at significant risk or had the luck of a super well coordinated ally.
In the next iteration, we wanted to put a lot more control into the Karma player’s hands. First, we removed the ability to attach it to enemies, and replaced that with a free target cast. If she didn’t have an ally to attach to, she could separate her own spirit from her body (as a pet) and have it move towards a position, giving her some control around both ends of the clothesline. This however, would still put Karma in danger if she wanted full control over the play, so we made the mantra give her a fairly reliable amount of safety. On mantra cast, she would gain massive damage reduction and movespeed towards enemies for a few seconds, and she could recast the spell to “spirit walk” to the other end of her tether. It looked something like this.
This version was quite cool, but still had some issues. Giving Karma safety on her Mantra was working as intended (folks made some really awesome Rakan-esque plays), but Karma players didn’t want to dive into the backline to execute well on the spell. When Karma wasn’t diving, the large ally coordination burden was still a pretty large issue in our tests.
The last large iteration we tested was different, trying to push the clothesline in an entirely new direction. Rather than having limited control over your spirit and full control over your own movement, we tried a version where on cast, Karma’s inputs would control her spirit’s movement while her own body was channeling (with the ability to cancel the channel if need be). In this way, she could remain on the backline while maneuvering the clothesline with less risk. A natural extension from this was the ability for her to “proxy-cast” from her spiritual projection, which we also prototyped. However, this mechanic ended up dominating the interaction (though was pretty fun to play), as you can see in this gif.
After this, we realized we were veering pretty hard away from the core promise of the clothesline mechanic, and thus put it into the icebox to explore different directions on Karma. In the end, we aren’t shipping the clothesline on Karma, but honestly, our playtesters had a ton of fun with it in the versions we tried. I could see this mechanic being really successful and fun with characters that have reliable ability to get into the backline, have flanking patterns, and/or have high mobility.
Hope this was an interesting look into our design process. I’ll be around periodically if you have any questions.
-NeuroCat"
http://www.surrenderat20.net/2018/10/red-post-collection-worlds-pickem-is.html
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