Wednesday, March 20, 2019

Red Post Collection: Top Tier Ladder Reset Details, Quick Gameplay Thoughts 3/20, Tristana Skin Vote Winner, & More

Today's red post collection includes details on the top tier ladder reset in 9.6 from Riot SapMagic, Meddler's quick gameplay thoughts for March 20th, the winner of the Tristana skin vote, and more!
Continue reading for more information!


Table Of Contents


Ranked 2019 — Top Tier Ladder Reset with Patch 9.6 

Here's Riot SapMagic with details on the Top Tier ladder reset happening in Patch 9.6:
"TL;DR: We’re planning to perform the partial ladder reset we discussed in /dev: State of Ranked with Patch 9.6 on March 20, subject to successful testing this weekend on PBE. 
Hey everyone, Ed “SapMagic” Altorfer here on behalf of the Ranked team. Last week we shared our thoughtson Ranked and detailed several matchmaking and rank issues affecting players in Diamond and above. We're ready to share the timing of the partial Diamond+ reset and more details based on common questions. 
Who is affected by the reset? 
Diamond+ players from all ranked queues in Riot and Garena regions. 
When is the reset happening? 
We’re planning to do the reset alongside Patch 9.6 which will be early morning on March 20 for Riot regions and March 21 for Garena regions. We’re doing some final testing this weekend—if we encounter any major bugs, we’ll update this post accordingly. 
How will the reset work? 
Here are the full details of the reset:
  • Master, Grandmaster, and Challenger players become Master 0 LP
  • Diamond players demote by one division, floored at Diamond IV
  • You keep rewards, but they’ll match your new rank
  • Grandmaster and Challenger lock until March 27 and April 3, respectively 
How does the Diamond demotion work? 
If you’re a Diamond player, here’s what will happen: 
  • Diamond III, II, and I players are demoted by one division, preserving promotion series progress and LP
  • For Diamond I players in series, 2 wins or losses become 1 win or loss—for example, 2–2 becomes 1–1
  • Diamond IV players become Diamond IV 0 LP no matter what 
We expect the reset to help fix LP gains and losses for players in Diamond+. Having said that, since this partial reset does affect MMR, it won’t be an immediate fix in terms of matchmaking quality, but we expect that to improve over the next few weeks as the ladder stabilizes. 
As always, if you have questions that aren’t answered here or just have feedback on Ranked, let us know in the comments or hit me up on Twitter. Thanks again for all your help and patience, and we’ll see you on the Rift!"

Quick Gameplay Thoughts: March 20 

Here's Meddler's quick gameplay thoughts for March 20th:
"Hi folks, 
Usual Disclaimers 
These posts will often contain talk about future work we're doing, or planning to do, that isn't yet guaranteed to ship. The nature of the work could change or, depending on what we discover, projects mentioned may get delayed or even stopped. If you'd like to see a Tweet whenever a new one of these posts goes up: https://twitter.com/RiotMeddler 
Position Preferences 
It's been a while since we last talked about some position select data. Had a couple of requests to revisit it recently too so figured it would be a good topic to cover today. Bunch of data and comments below, few overarching takeaways that come to mind for me being:
  • Preference for different roles reflects a mixture of both desire for playstyle and perceived power. We see that role preference change meaningfully for example when ranked turns on/off, when players feel a position has been buffed/nerfed, temporarily when new champs for a position come out etc.
  • Preferences vary a lot between different regions, reflecting different metas and different preferences for different groups of players.
  • Similarly they vary quite a bit by MMR, assumedly reflecting meta and interpretations of power, potentially reflecting desired playstyle IF that's correlated with player skill (the lesser factor from what we've seen)
So, first off, everything together. Most noticeable trends recently are bot preference increasing substantially post crit item changes and season start, support preference going up with season start and jungle/mid trending down somewhat since preseason. Noteworthy order swap there is bot climbing back to second for the first time in a while and jungle dropping from 2nd to 4th.
High MMR has similar, though not identical trends. Top's much less popular comparatively in this context and while jungle's down this year it's still middle of the pack.
Looking at Brazil we see a really strong preference for mid lane while top preference is close to all regions high MMR rates.
EUNE then has the same high preference for mid, but a much lower preference than most for support, with the other three positions currently in the same spot. That's historically representative with the exception of bot being low post midseason changes last year for a while.
Korea's not as big on mid at present as those other regions, though players there have been historically. Support interest's much closer to other positions too.
NA's then most notable for the degree jungle isn't favored there.
And Vietnam by contrast has a really high jungle preference, even after some recent drop, paired with a very long interest in queueing for support. Desire to queue as bot's also been more volatile than other regions, following the same inflection points but to greater degrees. 
A few likely balance targets in 9.7
  • A Lissandra nerf, aimed at pro power especially.
  • Morgana assessment, mid lane specifically. We didn't ship nerfs in 9.6 because we weren't certain enough they were needed. Planning on assessing again shortly, see if that was the right call.
  • A nerf to Dark Seal, which is currently filling both the safe early sustain niche and the supposedly risky snowball niche. Likely that nerf includes a much lower sellback value as a result so it's a more of a gamble to opt into it.
  • Wit's End experimentation, aimed at making it a more relevant item. We're 50/50 on whether we'll ship something still, expect changes to hit PBE at least however. 
We'll have some other work in 9.7 as well, those are the projects we're sufficiently confident will be getting some time to talk about right now though."

When asked about Swain, Meddler commented:
"Swain's a champ who's come up a little bit in discussion recently. We don't think he's far off, but might have room for a bit of power. Will be talking about him others in our 9.7 planning meeting shortly."

On Aatrox, Meddler replied:
"Some changes being tested internally that are still very work in progress so not on the PBE. Ongoing issues with his solo queue performance being weak while his pro performance remains too strong. Expectation is additional changes besides number adjustments are needed as a result."

On Spellthief/Ancient Coin changed, Meddler noted:
"Nothing's likely in the short term. We have been testing some alternative directions, including things like reduced gold from minion kills when you have a support item, though that comes with its own problems too. Still looking to make changes at some point, may not be for a while."

On the experimental Zephyr item from past PBE testing, Meddler commented:
"We've iceboxed that experimental take on an on hit item that stacked both Armor and MR on the attacker. Biggest concern was how strong and safe an item it was for something that also let you counter whichever lane you had given its components. We're looking at other Wit's End changes instead as above."

As for Wukong, Meddler noted:
"No specific date for PBE yet. Next step is running them past some Wukong players (non Rioters) in one of the testing sessions we do here at the office regularly. Random selection of players from a range of skill levels is happening at the moment, hoping we can therefore run that testing sometime in the next couple of weeks."

On Ohmwrecker, Meddler commented:
"We believe Wit's End is much closer to being a stable, useful item. Ohmwrecker by contrast arguably fills a niche that doesn't need to be filled and wouldn't be good for the game if it were strong. We'd have removed the item if the name wasn't a refer a friend promise, possible we instead move the name somewhere else to both better deliver on that and let us take out an unsuccessful item design."

The Next Tristana Skin Is... 

Here's Riot Stellari with details on the Tristana skin vote results - "You voted. And the winner is…"
"We asked you which Tristana skin you wanted most, and after over 4 million votes around the globe, the winner is…
LITTLE DEMON TRISTANA! 
Here’s the breakdown:
  • Sugar Rush: 30%
  • Galactic Gunner: 27%
  • Little Demon: 43%
We had to know: Did the hardcore Tristana mains who’ve mastered the art of Rocket Jumping into battle choose the same skin? The results were unanimous.
http://www.surrenderat20.net/2019/03/red-post-collection-top-tier-ladder.html
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