Red Post Collection: Quick Gameplay Thoughts: April 17, Ask Riot: New TFT Galaxies?, & More
Today's red post collection includes Riot Scruffy's quick gameplay thoughts for April 17, this week's Ask Riot, an extra Galaxies token mission coming next week, and more!
Here's Riot Scruffy with his quick gameplay thoughts for April 17 - "Champ Retrospective, Balanced Champion Releases."
"Disclaimer
These posts will often contain talk about future work we're doing, or planning to do, that isn't yet guaranteed to ship. The work or goals could change depending on what we discover, and projects mentioned may get delayed or even stopped. That said, I believe it’s important to share as much as we can even if plans may change.
Recent Champ Release Retrospective
We’re constantly looking back at our patches, champions, VGU and other features to pick apart what went well and what went poorly so we can keep making each project better than the last. Our retro on the recent year of champ releases (Mordekaiser, Qiyana, Pantheon, Senna, Aphelios, Sett) led us to a few conclusions:
What went well:
Iconic themes - Across a range of appeals and archetypes these recent champs have really delivered on our dreams of creating new characters that we can all obsess over. Additionally, we’re particularly proud of how these recent champions have diversified our champion cast to allow even more players to find someone that really feels right for them.
Fun Gameplay - These champs brought both a lot of unique play styles that we’d never seen before and a core satisfaction and polished feel to their spells and playstyles. We hope this forms the foundation for many years of replayability as players master the ins and outs of these kits.
Accessible Weaknesses - A goal we had been emphasizing this past year to avoid the “jack of all trades” or overloaded champion problem is to make sure that very sharp strengths are paired with a clear and accessible weakness. Morde/Sett are very powerful juggernauts but remain kiteable. Senna and Aphelios have incredible range and utility but no means of escaping an assassin or diver. This is something that we want to continue in the future.
What we need to improve:
Clarity and complexity - We are on a string of particularly high complexity releases, that also led to more than one “what just happened” type experiences for players. We’ve gone back and done some clarity improvements to follow up on some, and as Meddler has mentioned recently, we’re bringing game clarity to the forefront in our work throughout the year.
Release Balance - In general, these champs released too strong, and we took too long getting them to a good balance state. This resulted in repeated and drawn out nerfs for many of them, and them staying as dominant picks for too long.
Balanced Champion Releases
As I’ve mentioned above, something we want to improve over the next few months is our champion release balance. In particular, we don’t want new champions to warp our game’s meta or for anyone to feel like they have to pick up every new champ to remain competitive.
In the past year, we had released champions tuned so that their first weeks of play were more forgiving for players still learning out the ropes, and we would follow up as players mastered the champion (which we haven’t done fast enough). This strategy eased some pain for players starting out on the champion, but we think that overall it was a negative outcome, because by the time the average player has learned a new champion well enough for us to take the training wheels off, very engaged players have already used the overtuned state of the champion to take over the meta.
We’re focusing on two strategies to improve launch balance:
Launching with a long term balanced target
When done perfectly this is ideal, and we can leave the champion for months, even years sometimes. (Kayn and Warwick are good examples of this)
In winrates, you will see the champion start low and grow to a balanced state as players master them. I won’t be surprised if we’re seeing 44% and not buffing, give it time.
Faster / stronger followup
In cases where we do end up with a new champ or VGU that is too strong we will try to follow up faster and with a more comprehensive set of nerfs.
We really do not like how with Senna, Sett, and Aphelios, we have had to come back for nerf after nerf. If we could go back in time here, we would have bundled them together earlier.
It’s worth noting that we still expect to have to buff and nerf champs after we release them. There is only so much accuracy we can have when playing 1000s of games in development. We get 10x that amount of data within the first day of the champ in players’ hands.
Thanks again everyone for playing. Stay safe out there.
- Scruffy"
Ask Riot: New TFT Galaxies?
Here's this week's Ask Riot - "Plus... Will we do more spooky champion updates? Or explore new continents in Runeterra?"
"Welcome to Ask Riot!
Today we’re talking about horror-themed champion updates, the continents of Runeterra, and TFT: Galaxies.
BUT FIRST... a message from the editor. If you have a question for us, please be sure to ask it! The more questions we get, the better we understand what you care about, so please send away. We’re still trying to figure out whether Ask Riot will cover all games in the future, but in the meantime, feel free to ask us about anything. Now to today’s answers.
When will you add more galaxies to TFT? How’s this set going so far?
We're adding new galaxies to TFT with every patch! This week we added the Trade Sector and Superdense galaxies. Trade Sector gives all players one free reroll every round, and Superdense galaxy gives all players a free Force of Nature when they hit level 5.
In the next patch, we're adding the Treasure Trove galaxy where every NPC is guaranteed to drop a loot orb. The chance of getting the Treasure Trove galaxy will be much less than the others. We're also experimenting with a galaxy that will add two-star champions to the carousel. You can check out both of these galaxies now on PBE.
Overall, we're excited about how TFT: Galaxies is going so far, and mostly that's because you're excited about it. While we had a rough first patch with Gangplank and the other legendaries, we seem to be in a better spot moving forward. The galaxies have landed well and added a bunch of new ways to play, and there seems to be a lot of creativity and exciting moments happening. Lots of comps are able to win, and we’re even seeing good counter comps developed. We’re looking to keep that momentum with the addition of Dark Star Xerath and even more galaxies, which we hope you look forward to. We’re also open to removing galaxies that aren’t adding new and interesting strategies to your gameplay, so keep letting us know what you think!
- Riot Beernana, Communications Strategist, and Riot Mort, Game Design Lead
So obviously Fiddlesticks’ update was amazing, but what made you want to turn Fiddle into such a nightmare when someone like Nocturne is a living nightmare? It feels like you set a new standard for darker thematic champs, so can we expect champions like Shaco, Cho’Gath, or even Karthus to receive monstrous transformations, if they get an update?
I can’t say for sure what will happen when and if those champs get VGUs, since that will depend on where the creative process takes us and what makes sense for each of them. I can talk a bit about Nocturne and Fiddle since that was something we discussed a lot in the early ideation phase on Fiddlesticks. Both Fiddle and Nocturne are in the scary/horror camps with kits to support it. They both jump on you out of nowhere, so horror themes are a pretty solid thematic fit.
When we talked about Nocturne and Fiddle, we wanted to make sure they felt separate and unique from each other. After a lot of discussion, we decided that Nocturne was more about psychological horror and Fiddle was more about physical horror. Fiddlesticks makes people physically terrified when they look at him, immediately fearing for their lives and fleeing as fast as they can, with almost zero chance of escape. Basically a “slasher flick” kind of horror.
Nocturne is more about psychological terror, haunting its victims dreams, slowly building fear… the anticipation mounting. It’s more about breaking victims down psychologically and feeding off of their terror. He's much more in the “suspense/horror” camp. You know he’s out there. You know at any moment with the press of a button, the screen can go dark and he will be right next to you—but you don’t know when that will happen. That anticipation is horrifying in a very different way.
Don’t worry, we plan on making Nocturne scary when we finally get to his VGU. I don’t know about you all, but the anticipation is killing me.
- Reav3, Lead Producer of Champions
Are there any plans on expanding or exploring other continents of Runeterra? I just want to see a world beyond Valoran, Shurima, and Ionia. I'm so curious what the other continents look like!
As of right now, we’re working on the understanding that the “known” map of Runeterra represents about 1/6th of the world. We’ve still got plenty of those three continents to fill out and define, though—the map is nowhere near completion, yet.
In terms of adding new lands to it, it’s not something we’d ever rule out, if those lands are proven to exist. But it would likely require us to actually set more stories outside of the three continents, and thus far that is something we have not done.
But we definitely do know of events that have taken place outside of the known map. Many of the oldest civilizations in Shurima came from a westward cultural migration, meaning that there are (or at least were) much older civilizations in unknown lands far to the east. Neeko’s vastayan tribe, the Oovi-kat, also appear to have suffered some sort of catastrophe in fairly recent times, forcing her to flee into what is now known to be Ixtal. It’s also very likely that the original homeland of Hecarim, Kalista, and Ledros existed somewhere else, since there is no clear indication that this kingdom continued to exist anywhere in Valoran, after the Ruination of the Blessed Isles.
Are any of these things linked? Right now, it’s impossible to say… but we will continue to explore them, and who knows where that will take us in future.
- Riot Scathlocke, Narrative Editorial Director
Have a question? Head here, drop your question in the box, and ask away."
Miscellaneous
Riot Xenogenic noted they were providing a mission with extra tokens after feedback:
"Hey folks - we're going to be delivering a mission to grant 140 tokens with an objective of "Play 1 game." We don't want to swap out the existing mission because that would cause players to lose progress, so adding another mission to grant the extra tokens is the best approach.
Sorry for the headache in the meantime. We're grateful for your feedback and patience during this bumpy transition from working in our HQ to working from home. Unfortunately, some things slipped through the cracks, but we appreciate the hell out of you and are working aggressively to fix these issues.
The 140 token mission should be live sometime next week."
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