Revelation VR: Red Post Collection: Quick LoL Thoughts: July 17, Ask Riot, & More

Today's red post collection includes Meddler's quick LoL thoughts for July 17, covering Nexus Blitz, thematic lines, and tooltips, plus this week's Ask Riot, reminders, and more!

Continue reading for more information!

Quick LoL Thoughts: July 17

Here's Riot Meddler with his quick LoL thoughts for July 17 - "Nexus Blitz, new thematic lines, tooltips."

"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

Nexus Blitz

Nexus Blitz should be live next week with patch 10.15! We’re really excited to see what you all think of this updated version, both art and gameplay. It’s going to be out for two patches and our plan is to also have it return in the future again for other events. We’ll continue to work on Nexus Blitz over time, so would love your feedback on it to help with that. Our plans and when we could act on what sorts of feedback are as follows:

Patch 10.16 - We’ll be in a position to make balance and pacing changes. If you’ve got thoughts on things like class/champ balance, snowball rates, game length, frequency of sudden death etc we’ve got a brief window where we could act on them here. We’ll also be using this time to see if we can get Mordekaiser working for Nexus Blitz, with a small chance Ivern also gets enabled.

Next time Nexus Blitz returns - For Nexus Blitz’s next outing (exact date still to be determined) we’ll have the opportunity to act on larger feedback. Things like event design, rewards, the mechanics of the sudden death walking nexus fight etc would be feasible to change on this sort of longer timeframe.

New Thematic Lines

Speaking of feedback as we discussed last month player sentiment on a new theme, and its potential in the future, are some of the key factors that determine whether we return to a theme again or not. We’ve got a few new skin/event thematics coming in the second half of this year, starting with Spirit Blossom in 10.15. If there are particular elements of those themes you really like, champs you think would be fantastic in them, ways they miss the mark that can be addressed etc please do let us know. We’re looking to flesh out our stable of themes we return to regularly to make sure we’re providing content for a wide variety of tastes and to avoid overusing our existing popular skin lines. Understanding which of our efforts are resonating with you folks, which are rough but have potential, and which just aren’t of interest to you helps a lot with that.

Tooltips

On the clarity side of things we’re just about to start rolling out updates to our in game tooltips. Our goals there are to:

Standardize how we present information to make it easier to process quickly (get away from every champion having a different approach for example)

Cater to two different audiences (those who just want to understand high level functionality quickly and those who want all the details)

Make better use of color, symbols etc, particularly when it comes to updating tooltips that were written years ago when we didn’t have as much functionality as we do now.

Lillia will be the first champion to get the updated format after which we’ll regularly update older champions until we’ve got the whole roster addressed. That will involve changes like:

Adding the ‘Hold Shift to see more info’ functionality to all champs (eventually some items too), ensuring things like ratios are consistently in the expanded version.

Cleaning up unnecessarily wordy sentences, including places where it’s not clear whether mechanics are being discussed or just theme.

Adopting consistent standards for gameplay elements (it should be clear what we mean when we say ability, versus spell, versus skill etc and isn’t always at present)

Etc

As some of you may recall (or may have assumed from the way we’ve got things like Shift for more details functionality on only some champs) this isn’t our first attempt to unify and improve our tooltips. Past efforts got hindered in part by a desire to overhaul a lot of our tech and to roll all the changes out at once. To make sure things work out this time we’ll instead be rolling things out over many patches and going back to integrate new functionality rather than having everything wait until it's ready."

Ask Riot: Find a Clash Team

Here's this week's Ask Riot - "Plus… Why don’t all skins with different forms have toggles? And why do Aspects need hosts?"

Welcome to Ask Riot!

Today we’re talking about finding Clash teammates, toggles on skins, and Aspects in Runeterra.

Can you add an option to auto allocate players into Clash teams? Or add a way to find them? Not everyone can find teams on their own.

We’ve definitely recognized that one of the biggest things keeping people from playing Clash is not having enough people to play with. But we don’t want to just start throwing random folks together into Clash teams, because then the experience starts feeling a lot like “Solo Queue, But With Trophies.” So we’re looking into solutions that can help you find like-minded Clash players so you can make a Clash team that still feels like a team.

We’ll be talking more about the upcoming new Build a Team feature later this year, which will be focused on helping you find teammates among your friends, friends of friends, and folks you won with in regular games of League. But if that isn’t enough, I’d also recommend checking out the Clash LFG Megathread on Reddit, r/TeamRedditTeams, or one of the other team finding websites that have started to crop up since Clash launched. There’s a lot of other folks out there who are looking for teammates too!

RiotIAmWalrus, Game Designer, Competitive

Why can't we have toggles for all of the skins with different forms?

We know that toggles are a frequently-requested feature for skins, especially Legendaries. Just like any other skin feature though, it takes time to build and test, so we prioritize against other value we could be adding. Sometimes a toggle fits the narrative and we believe it’s worth it, but many other times we’ll choose a different route.

Recently for Spirit Blossom Thresh, we really thought being able to freely swap between demon and human forms enhanced the power fantasy of our favorite soul-sucking heartthrob. For other skins, it might not fit the story to have champions switching back and forth between forms. We’ll always do our best to create skins that do as much justice as possible to the champion and thematic, but I hope this helps clear up why we don’t always offer a toggle!

Riot Eggo McLego, Skins Producer

Why do aspects need hosts? And what do they look like in their pure form? Like floaty balls of light?

“Why couldn’t the Aspect go to the Runeterra party? Because he had no-body to go with! Hur hur hur.”

In short, that’s the answer. Aspects, as entities of the celestial realm, do not have physical forms, and so require mortal hosts if they want to come down to our world and make things happen. Though they are undeniably powerful in their own way, they don’t seem able to actually create very much—in fact, Aurelion Sol’s lore refers to them as “dispassionate and incurious things, contributing little to existence.” Sick burn.

As to their pure form… disappointingly, no one from Runeterra really knows. There have been countless legends about the Aspects among the people of Targon, over the centuries, but they can never seem to agree on the details. Some might believe they are literally the stars and constellations in the sky, which would likely make A-Sol pretty mad. Some might envisage them as god-like avatars striding across the heavens, which would probably cause Nagakabouros to laugh out loud. And some might dare to whisper that they are beings from another world altogether, which would almost certainly confuse the heck out of all the yordles, who are still trying to figure this one out.

All we know for certain is that the Aspects are unusually focused on Runeterra, and have been for millennia. But they and their motivations aren’t “human,” so they’re unlikely to come down and grace us with a full explanation any time soon.

Riot Scathlocke, Narrative Editorial Director

Have a question? Head here, drop your question in the box, and ask away."

Miscellaneous

Riot Scruffy commented on recent High MMR matchmaking issues:

"We just pushed another tightening pass on high MMR matchmaking. This should be the strictest we've ever had matchmaking tuned in terms of favoring match quality over queue times. There may still be a little more room, but we have to see the data before we tune it again. (1/3)

Overall we think the tradeoff is worth it for the highest competitive tier of the game. We get the feedback from high MMR players that they would prefer longer waits for better matches pretty consistently. (2/3)

Outlier games can and will always exist when there are too few players in the queue, or when playing with a fresh account that is climbing fast.

We aim to minimize these cases, but in any matchmaking system there will be the best case and worst case outcomes. (3/3)"

Other Games

VALORANT

Breathing Life into Elderflame

"Hi, VALORANT community! Preeti Khanolkar (Producer) and Sean Marino (Art Lead) are back! Last time, we talked to you about the design for the base arsenal and how our team develops skin fantasies within the bounds of competitive integrity. Today, we’re ready to delve into the details of how the Premium Content team built our most ambitious skin yet: Elderflame."

Ask VALORANT #3

"This is Ask VALORANT. Our investigative reporters collect your questions and choose a few to answer every other week. This loop takes on a potential in-game replay system, the rough number of Radiant-tier players in the world and esports plans for the observer client."