The new Champion Select is almost here; it will replace Team Builder and will be available for early testing for NA and TR:

TLDR: When new champ select goes live in your region, it will replace the Team Builder queue.

Since introducing the experimental Team Builder queue back in 2013, we’ve been analyzing and rethinking the best way to get into a game of League. The lessons we learned from the Team Builder queue directly impacted the development of new champ select.

We’d originally planned to adopt Team Builder across all queues, but as our first attempt at improving the experience of starting a League match, a few issues held us back. While Team Builder successfully empowered individual players to choose the champ they wanted in the role they wanted each time, it wasn’t as good at helping teams assemble a specific strategy or composition. Building a Yasuo-based knock-up comp or a classic Orianna-oriented wombo combo was damn hard when non-premade players pre-selected their champs. Long queue times made turning down champions that didn’t fit while waiting for your team’s missing piece feel even worse.

With new champ select, we’ve solved the issues we found with Team Builder. Teams get on the same page and start working together through pick intent and distributed bans right from the start. You’re guaranteed to get one of the two positions you prefer, and you can use pick intent to let your team know who you’re looking to play before bans and picks take place.

We ultimately decided to disable the Team Builder queue because we believe new champ select is a better answer to many of the problems we were trying to solve with Team Builder, and in the future we’ll introduce a version of blind pick inspired by the new design for players who are looking for the new champ select experience without bans or drafting.

New champ select goes live in NA & TR for testing in Normal Draft and Ranked on January 13, 2016. If everything goes well, we’ll continue to roll out new champ select in other territories over the following days. Thanks to everyone who gave us feedback along the way to this launch, from the original Team Builder beta to the recent PBE testing. We’re excited to take this next step into League’s future, and we can’t wait to join you in new champ select.

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Below you can find a preview of the new Champion Select:

Before you queue, you’ll be asked to pick your Primary and Secondary role. Logically, your Primary role takes priority in the matchmaking:

 

The queue interface is standard fair. The wait time is displayed at the bottom, rather than the top of the client and there are new visuals for the ticking time confirmation:

 

Inside the Champion Select, you’ll be placed on a 3D map of Summoner’s Rift, with an arrow-type indicator for your role:

 

 
I was Captain here, so I couldn’t ban. Instead, I could give a visual cue to teammates of what I wanted to play. This phase is a suggestive “I want to play this, please don’t ban it” type – if my teammates wanted to, they could’ve banned Yasuo, but I’ve shown them I want to play that Champion.

 

There’s a neat animation for bans, where the banned Champion’s portrait will disintegrate into shards. Here’s how it looks like for both allied bans and enemy bans:

Once banning is complete, picking resumes as is currently on live. The Champions picked (or hovered over) will be displayed in a circular shape. Once selected, they will play their Champ Select quote for everyone:

 

Here’s how the interface looks like if the player hasn’t picked a Champion yet, for both ally and enemy-side:

 

Once picking concludes, you can lock in your Champion or pick a different one. There’s also a new interface for your available skins:

The last part of Champion Select is a standard wait period to adjust your Masteries. Note the location of UI elements:

• Bans at the top left and right;
• 2D map with Roles and Champions picked on the bottom right;
• Summoner Spells/Masteries on the bottom.

If you have any questions, feel free to ask me at @NoL_Chefo or e-mail me at nolchefo@gmail.com.

A short teaser has been released across League Facebook walls, featuring shaking mana potions and… that’s the full extent, really. In other news, Lyte mentioned a position-based Team Builder Draft in the works; on the forums, we’ve confirmation that promo matches are being looked into and that inactivity warnings will be getting much more frequent. Also, the lore team came out of their dark and mysterious shelter to address how League’s narrative will be handled in the future.

• “Hold on to your buffs” teaser
• Lyte on Champion Select trolls
• Changes to inactivity warnings
• A day in the life of a Rioter
• Current plans for lore team
• Fan-Made Champion Select Screen

• Champion/Skin Sale: May 22nd to 25th
• Free Champion Rotation: May 19th to 26th

 

Note that this teaser is probably not alluding to Gangplank’s rework.
 

Hold on to your buffs. #leagueoflegends https://t.co/JiUogNsEVJ

— League of Legends EU (@loleu) May 24, 2015

 
Here’s a screenshot of the full table, taken from a larger version of this video posted on other League Facebook walls:

Here are links to the walls in different languages:

• [ Latin America ]
• [ Germany ]
• [ France ]

We’ve been working on Team Builder Draft, which is position-based (so you don’t have to pick a champion first), that should solve many Champion Select problems.

We’re also focused on improving skill diversity and encouraging players to still master multiple positions while maintaining the drafting/counterpicking aspects of competitive League. We’ll talk more about Team Builder Draft’s design in the future.

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Mirross: Hey everyone,
We’re testing some changes to inactivity (decay) in the upper tiers of ranked play. Previously, you’d get a one-time notification as you approached the decay threshold, but now we’re dialing up the frequency of inactivity warnings to ensure the risk of decay stays front-of-mind. We just want to make sure players don’t simply forget to maintain the ranking they worked so hard for.

CHANGES:

Players in danger of ranked decay will receive inactivity warnings every time they log in until becoming active again. Previously this notification occurred just once.

MASTER & CHALLENGER SOLO: Decay starts after 10 days of inactivity, with warnings during the final 3 days
MASTER & CHALLENGER TEAM: Decay starts after 28 days of inactivity, with warnings during the final 9 days
PLAT & DIAMOND SOLO AND TEAM: Decay starts after 28 days of inactivity, with warnings during the final 9 days

Let me know your thoughts!

-Riot Mirross

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When we first launched inactivity notifications we thought, ‘We probably shouldn’t make these too spammy’.

Then we decayed and realized we should probably make these more spammy.

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We are looking at promos as something we want to improve. We’ll likely be testing some of the described behaviors on pbe in the coming weeks.

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Sure, happy to help.

TurtleMan878 (NA) – 2 days ago

1. What are the typical hours you work?

A normal day for me tends to be something along the lines of get in between 10:00 and 10:30, stop working around 8:00 to 8:30. Those sort of hours are pretty common, though some people prefer an early start/early finish approach.

TurtleMan878 (NA) – 2 days ago

1. What are the tasks you preform each day? (doesn’t need to be super specific)

My average day looks something like this:

• Quick synch up meeting for the day with the rest of the team, where everyone runs through what they’re working on, focusing mainly on where they could do with some help, what they’d like to test and quickly covered topics relevant to the team (e.g. upcoming events, changes to the tools we work with etc)
• Playtest – full game of SR, with a focus on testing new champions and significant reworks, followed by people getting together to discuss feedback and next steps in small groups.
• Lunch, often including spillover conversation from the playtest.
• An afternoon that’s a mixture of meetings (e.g. with the artists working on new champions, with the balance team to figure out our next steps for a just released champ, with engineers working on new tech etc) and solo project work (putting new spells together to test, fixing bugs, hooking up new visual effects etc).
• Another playtest and feedback session.
• More discussion with other developers or solo work, depending on what’s of most value at the time.

TurtleMan878 (NA) – 2 days ago

1. What skills are required to preform the job you do?

Goal oriented analysis and problem solving, an understanding of what creates satisfying gameplay (mechanics especially), the ability to communicate well with people from a range of different disciplines (verbal and written), at least some thematic/creative understanding, some degree of scripting skill, at least a moderately broad game background.

TurtleMan878 (NA) – 2 days ago

1. How did you get in to the field?

I was previously working as a transportation engineer, focused particularly on computer simulations of what the transport system of a city 10-50 years in the future might look like. At the same time I was playing LoL, and spotted a forum post from Riot’s head of design, Zileas, looking for design applicants. Figured I’d throw in an application, since one of the things specified was a preference for people from analytical/engineering fields and game development was a subject I’d always been interested in.

TurtleMan878 (NA) – 2 days ago

1. Advice for people getting into the field?

Analyze games, make games, figure out what you want to do, be realistic:

• Don’t just play a couple of games/genres you know you like. Play broadly, and figure out why different types of games appeal to different people, why the elements in a game function as they do (whether you agree or disagree with the choice), what you’d do differently etc.
• Start developing skills before you try to get into the industry. You’ll learn a lot from trying to makes games/components of games that’s extremely valuable both in growing your own skills and showing you ability in an interview. Whether that’s modding, indie development, creating content using the various game making software out there, pen and paper design or whatever doing stuff makes you better at it (and gives you projects to show others).
• Figure out what sort of game development you’re interested in and focus a fair bit of your learning on that. Do you want to create concept art for new characters? Build levels for an FPS? Write the story of an RPG? Create animations for a fighting game? Do sound design for an RTS? There are a wide range of different skillsets needed, depending on what sort of career you’re after, so figuring out what appeals to you and what you’ve got the potential to be good at’s really valuable.
• Be realistic and don’t expect immediate success. Game development’s a popular industry, some parts of it especially, so there’s often a lot of competition for entry level positions. There are ways of improving your odds though if you want to take them, such as being willing to move to locations with lots of employers, putting a lot of time into personal development via your own projects, starting in a field you’re not as interested in to get a foot in the door etc.

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Strategy: keep creating enthralling Champions and accompanying stories along with various other products. At the same time we are investing in various ways to make cool things in different media (wasn’t Chronobreak spiffy?), while we level up the Narrative discipline to help make sure that happens. That leveling up includes partnerships with various other disciplines as well as a new organisational structure and hiring more talented people to learn from and grow with.

For story, as well as continuing to develop products with Champion, Champion Update, Events, and beyond, we are reassessing every single champion bio for clarity, quality of expression, and direction. This takes time, but we think we have a format that players will like. The first examples of it will be seen alongside some other products that I can’t quite give a timeline on yet.

We want to do it as we want to deliver on our promises to players, because it enriches the LoL experience, and we love to do it.

Sorry I can’t be more specific, but I hope it gives you an idea of where we are at.

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What we’re currently working on for League of Legends: five or six champions currently in various stages of production (no ship date promises), some champions up for a revisit, all voice over, a few fun promos, a story embedded event, and a bunch of other stuff that makes me tingly in my happy place (my happy place is in Liverpool, England). Each of those things is through a team of marvelous Rioters from various disciplines, and each product has a large variety of specific things that have to be created for it (we do a lot more than just the bio for a champ, for example).

As you said, I’m not going into specifics in case things don’t go to plan or, most often, because I don’t want to spoil some severely awesome things for you, the players, and for the Rioters who are helping to create them.

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Lastly, here’s a fantastic concept by Eduardo Cabrera. You can find him on Twitter @lolinflames.

Nice! You don’t have to stick with the current layout though, I’m sure there’s a better option. Is there any way to show all the champions at once so there’s no need for a scroll bar? Or would that be too crazy. Is the technology there? I don’t know. Maybe when we all have oculus rifts you’ll be standing in a crowded room and have to push champions aside while frantically searching for the one you want to play. Or they’ll be floating heads surrounding you crying out ‘Pick me! Pick me! Or teeny mouse sized in a big fish tank and you pick out the one you want like goldfish. A dark abyss stands before you and you call out the champions name then play your flute-dagger like Green Ranger and it summons them from the void?

Looks really slick UI wise. I’d love to see alternate art of champions looking sad that shows up when they get banned >:P

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If you have any questions, feel free to ask me at @NoL_Chefo or e-mail me at nolchefo@gmail.com.

On the board forums,Ghostcrawler and Sotere discussed in length the current balance issues with League – mobility creep, an overtuned jungle and a lack of champion diversity. Over on Reddit, Lyte commented on the new Tribunal and what features will carry on from the old one. Lastly, we have a confirmation that Team Builder will be available for Ranked Games, a minor buff to Urgot coming soon, a discussion on champions with ‘bad identity’ and an awesome community spotlight showing Katarina’s daggers forged in real life.

• Meta Talk
• New Tribunal
• Single Posts

• Champion/Skin Sale: February 24th to 27th
• Free Champion Rotation: February 24th to March 3rd

We want more champ diversity. A lot of the preseason changes were made with the goal of having games play out differently. Overall we are happy with the changes made to towers, objectives and the jungle, but it hasn’t yet created the space for more champs. (I should add at least within one region – if you look world-wide, diversity is preety good, but that’s largely because different champs are getting played in different parts of the world.) We knew the changes would be disruptive, meaning it might take players a few patches to explore the best strategies to use in the new environment, but things are starting to settle in now and diversity isn’t where we want it to be.

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Strategic diversity refers both to champs and to the game itself. If every game is won with a similar comp (even if the champs are different) or every games be becomes a 5 dragon stack, then the risk still exists that the third game you play feels exactly like the previous two. On the topic of champ diversity specifically, it’s not a reasonable expectation or a goal to have every champ played equally. Champs have different play styles and themes and that all factors in. But we can do better than we do today.

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Mobility is fun and useful or we wouldnt’t keep adding it to kits. The problem is that too often it comes for free just to give a champ a little extra pizzazz. Roles that need a lot of mobility, like assassins, aren’t a huge problem, but roles that already bring a lot to the table, especially mages and ADCs, can be. Even with these it doesn’t need to be an ironclad rule that they can’t dash, but they do need to pay for it elsewhere in their power budget. For these champs, we are less likely to nerf their movement mechanic and more likely to reduce their damage, survivability or control to pay for the mechanic.

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We are constantly following up on the state of the jungle. Turret shields also have changes on the docket for 5.05. Giving players time to figure out changes could be construed a number of ways. Should we not change the jungle, and leave Turret Shields exactly the way they are such that players innovate around those changes?

I frequently think about and ask others in the office: what would happen to the game if we (Riot) took our hands off the wheel for a year? Would it be a better or worse game? Undoubtedly, players would innovate and we’d see some very creative meta manifestations. Overall, though, I’m confident that we do more good than harm with our updates.

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It is fair criticism that we overly focus on the jungle and not on the champions. I would say (as someone who works more on the jungle/systems side) we believe that the jungle can be a place that caters more favorably to tanks and that is something we have not yet delivered on.

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I can understand why people feel this way: we have a lot of tools available in the game to destroy turrets quickly. Full tanks, which are pretty common, can also sit and tank a lot of turret shots. However, I’m fairly confident that turrets are just all around stronger than they were before the season swap. So much so that it might have deleterious effects on the game as a whole. This is actually the most troubling mismatch of perception to power for me in the game at the moment.

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The LCS (and pro play across the world) impacts player perception and thus play rate pretty dramatically. It is hard to imagine a world where pro play has little diversity but common play does. This makes it tricky, because pros have a lot of legitimate reasons to not add a ton of variety into their play. They often use picks to steal away high priority champions from the enemy team. Teams, imo, also get advantages by practicing with similar squads in repetition, so ‘surprise’ picks are less valuable.

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I definitely want to see more diversity. I think even if we get champion diversity to a state where it’s “okay” in our view, we’ll still see some repetition in picks. I think balance issues are the primary culprit, though there have been some cases where professional play stubbornly would not adopt certain champions and held onto others too long.

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Just wanted to touch on one point here: while they are ‘free’ in the sense that they don’t cost a resource most of the time, they are much more conditional than Kassadin. He has freedom to move any direction he wants. Yasuo can only dash into enemy targets, Kalista needs something to hit to access most of her extra mobility. To that end, they’re probably more healthy.

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I probably wouldn’t be the one to give insight to CertainlyT for her future balancing. I don’t have particularly great insights into her play. That said, Pierce is one of the things I would be least excited to see changed.

When he was in ideation he got me into a conversation about her. He asked, (paraphrasing of course) “shadow isles evil-ish marksman, what weapon do they use?” I said spear. He said he’d already settled on that but was just making sure it made sense. Then he was like, “when you think of a spear thrower, what excites you about what they do?” My response was that I really liked in movies when the character launches the spear after throwing their whole body (jumping) into it. The extra momentum really sells the use of the weapon for me. I think Pierce sells that fantasy the most for me.

In her development she also would do more damage when moving forward with her passive, which I thought made a lot of thematic sense.

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Every once in awhile, I see a thread like this and it’s a 🙁 day.

Tribunal’s been down for 9 months, and we know that’s a long time. However, player behavior in League has been at record bests due to a few different systems that were implemented while Tribunal is being re-worked.

1) The new LeaverBuster has been out for 2 months now, and has pushed leavers/AFKs to a record low in the history of League. I’m hoping to share more data around this when we wrap up analyses.

2) The machine learning system has been extremely aggressive at combating racism, homophobia, sexism and death threats. Right now, these types of behaviors show up in approximately 2% of games globally. An interesting “test” is to think about your last few games, and think about the last time you actually saw someone use the “n” word, or c*nt, or similar obscene phrases.

3) There is a new intentional feeder detection system that has been banning out intentional feeders outright. We have a record low in number of players who are actually intentionally feeding (the old days of 0-20 and 5 Zeals are gone).

But, this is not an excuse for the Tribunal’s delay. It just turns out that re-working the Tribunal required re-working several foundational pieces of League, such as the Report System’s backend, how chat logs are generated on the platform, and how websites/front-ends are created across every server. When players think of “just” re-working the Tribunal, they don’t think about all these other pieces which are each complex systems.

In addition to the above, the new Tribunal will have the ability for players to review positive behaviors and reward players with in-game bonuses, and some algorithmic upgrades to improve efficiency of the system, accuracy in detecting troll voters, and improves overall system accuracy.

I’m happy to answer some questions for a bit tonight, but apologize for the delay in the system coming back.

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We completely agree, there’s huge value in the ability for players to directly contribute to the community standards, whether it’s rewards or punishments.

Part of the re-work is actually re-working the Justice Review (the place players can visit to see their contributions to the community overall). What are some stats that players would like to see on the Justice Review?

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We agree, there will always be some amount of emergency AFKs/Leavers.

However, before LeaverBuster, there were a lot of intentional leavers as well; surprisingly, a lot of players came from FPS/MMOs/etc where leaving really had no penalty, so they just Alt-F4’d or left in League thinking there were no penalties for MOBAs either.

We had to tackle that problem first, then it becomes a question of what should we do when there is the rare 4v5 match. We have some solutions in mind already, but want to see how LeaverBuster shakes out, and what the remaining issues are with leavers/AFKs.

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We’re going to try a small mana ratio on his shield in testing soon. That was something that showed some promise when tried briefly last time we were testing possible changes for Urgot. Didn’t proceed with it at the time due to a desire to focus on other things first and see what impact those had. The last set of changes certainly didn’t overbuff him though, so we’re going to look at it again.

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I’d argue it’s definitely possible to have a champion with a core identity that isn’t worth keeping. This will be a bit hyperbolic, but imagine a champion that was built around the core idea of ‘complete randomness’, expressed through things like a passive that reads ‘When attacking champions you have a 50% change to kill yourself per auto attack and a 50% chance to kill your target’. There’s a really distinct identity there, but it’s not one that’s going to result in good gameplay.

That’s a pretty extreme example though of course, and one that assumes something went really, really wrong during a champ’s development. Being more realistic, what we tend to see are problems with how an identity is executed on, more than problems with core identity. Old Soraka was a strong example of this. Soraka’s identity has always been as the healerest healer in LoL (even if she hasn’t necessarily always putting out the most actual healing). Her old, old kit however, that allowed her to spend mana to heal an ally and then top up her own mana for free, resulted in some lanes where nothing really happened. In some match ups Soraka’s lane couldn’t kill you, but damage dealt to her or her ADC didn’t stick, resulting in low action farm fests. Our conclusion there, eventually, was that ‘dedicated healer’ was a solid identity it was appropriate to include, but that it needed to be done in a way that didn’t nullify past action as strongly. As a result Soraka’s recent rework allowed her to put out significantly more healing per second, but at the expense of her own health, avoiding stagnant lanes. Same foundational concept, pretty different execution on it basically.

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In case it’s unclear the changes aren’t necessarily ‘permanent’ but they are what’s going into patch 5.4. Locked in this context means we’ve reached the patch deadline and can no longer make changes to content going out in it. We’re confident enough in this direction for Veigar that we think it’s appropriate to put the changes out, assess how he performs and then adjust as appropriate in following patches.

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We’re working on a Team Builder version of Ranked that is just selecting positions. That system in particular should help address problems like the one you noted.

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We are locking down the final designs of Ranked Team Builder, so it’s still too early to talk about it!

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DJ Sona’s tech crew steps out from behind the curtain for a question and answer session at 12:00 PSTon February 24. If you’re looking to go backstage with DJ Sona and the rest of the skins team, swing by with your questions!

If you missed DJ Sona’s opening set, get all the details on League’s premier disc jockey here.

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Here’s some amazing blacksmith skills brought to the world of League:

If you have any questions, feel free to ask me at @NoL_Chefo or e-mail me at nolchefo@gmail.com.

Check out the latest improvements to Team Builder that shipped with Patch 4.13 !

With significant improvements coming to the Team Builder experience, we’re re-inviting you to give the new queue a try. We’ve listened to the feedback throughout the live beta test and launch, and we continue to tinker with ways to improve Team Builder. Some of the changes we’ve implemented relate to matchmaking, others combat long queue times. In at least one case, we’re making it easier to find friends to play a Team Builder match.

• “Demand Board” — A new feature showing which roles are in highest demand, allowing players to “fill” if they want
• “Enhanced Play Again” — Captains can choose from a “Recently Played” list filled with players they can one-click invite to the next game
• “Smarter Matchmaking” — The system that recognizes your familiarity with each role, position and champion, adjusting your MMR based on your experience. Smarter Matchmaking’s improved the way the system finds appropriate opponents, using this new, more accurate gauge of skill

To make sure you’re getting into game fast enough to feel these changes, we also overhauled the rules for adding solo players to teams. We’ve seen improved queue times across the board, and if you want to read more, check out my deep dive into all of the changes in this update.

 

 

With new reasons to start using Team Builder, we’ve designed a series of new summoner icon rewards for playing the queue. Because Team Builder’s champion select accounts for role, the new rewards are earned by playing your way. After you play five games as one role, tracked in-client, you’ll unlock the icon of that role instantly. And yes, if you’re more of a generalist (or a completionist), you can unlock all six icons.

So join us in the revamped Team Builder, and show off your favorite role with your new icons!

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If you have any questions, feel free to ask me at @NoL_Chefo or e-mail me at nolchefo@gmail.com.

Patch 4.8 Notes

• General
• Champions
• Minor Changes & Bug Fixes
• Twisted Treeline and Crystal Scar
• Twisted Treeline
• Team Builder
• Upcoming Skins

Relevant News

Udyr & Spiritguard Udyr Stun Indicator

Classic Udyr E Indicator

Spiritguard Udyr E Indicator

If you have any questions, feel free to ask me at @NoL_Chefo.

• PBE 25/04
• Lyte: AFK / Disconnects in Ranked
• League in Chicago for C2E2
• Single Posts

Previous PBE Updates from Patch 4.7 Cycle:

• Braum, Champion Preview
• Blade Queen Lissandra Skin
• Dragonslayer Pantheon Skin
• Dragonslayer Braum Skin
• Braum, Splash Arts, Buffs to Jarvan IV, Gragas, and Mage Fortune

New Animations for Flash, Cleanse, Exhaust and Clarity

Winter’s Bite [ Q ]

• Mana cost reduced from 60/65/70/75/80 to 55/60/65/70/75

Dragonslayer Braum Passive Icon

Check in “Single Posts” for context.

Dragonslayer Braum Passive

Lyte hopped on a popular thread on Reddit to discuss what’s being done to address unfair scenarios in Ranked.

Do you think you can better handle player disconnects / AFKs in Ranked?

 Lyte: Actually, we agree that we could do more when it comes to better feedback loops (like giving players more information about the results of their reports) or better ways to handle AFKs/DCs.

For example, we’d like to restart games if players fail to connect in the first few minutes, and we’d like to put more aggressive measures into Ranked Modes. But, it takes time to research the underlying problem space and truly understand how to improve it.

We have been working on Team Builder for awhile, and are interested in exploring a version of Team Builder for Ranked Modes–this should address a lot of the frustrations players currently experience with Ranked and do so more effectively than one-off small band-aid features. We want to improve the foundation of the experience, which is way better than giving players better ways to report one another. We want to prevent negative triggers, not just give players ways to react to negativity.

When we start advancing further into the research and prototyping for a version of Team Builder in Ranked, we’ll work on some of the smaller features that are ‘obvious’ along the way. For example, in Team Builder, we actually can do stuff like temporarily ban players from Ranked Modes, or automatically mute players after a streak of negative behaviors.

We took a lot of risks with Team Builder, and we fully plan on taking more risks when exploring the Team Builder for Ranked space. Ranked is my main mode after all, and I’ve accrued over 3000 games in the last few seasons–I’m excited to think about what we can do with this space and I hope players are too.

How was Team Builder a risky undertaking?

  Lyte“Let’s be fair, how is restarting games when a player fails to connect risky? How’s giving players more feedback about their reports risky?

Risk could be assessed in a variety of ways–how much impact a feature will actually have on a problem space (and the cost it took to implement it), the player perception of the feature (i.e = whether they support it or not, or think it’s fair or not), and the long-term engagement of a feature (i.e = is the effect of the feature robust enough to last through years? Or, will players stop using it after a few weeks?)”

Why is nothing being currently done to address these issues?

  Lyte: Well, I wouldn’t say nothing is done about it. Players who AFK/DC are actually automatically banned for X games, and they lose LP regardless of the team winning or not.

We could increase the punishment for AFK/DCs, but that doesn’t solve the real problem; the real problem is that you, as a player in the game, feel helpless because you are left playing a 4v5 and 4v5s are extremely tough to win. You feel helpless because a player can AFK/DC and basically force you into a high chance of losing LP.

This problem is actually pretty complicated, and isn’t fixed by just letting you leave games with no LP loss. For example, what about premade situations? Can 2 friends queue up, and 1 friend always leave when they have a disadvantage, allowing the 2nd friend to leave with no penalties?

Do you know how many more games would never complete and would ‘reset’ in 5 minutes, if this feature was implemented? Can you imagine the frustration of playing 5-6 games in a row, and 2 hours later getting 0 LP and completing 0 games?

Again, players that AFK/DC often are automatically banned. I agree, we could improve the experience for the remaining 4 players in the game, but that’s not actually a simple problem.

Will you add picking Champions to Team Builder?

  Lyte: We definitely wouldn’t want to incorporate Champion picking as early as standard Team Builder, because team synergy is more important in competitive League; however, there’s still a question of whether enforcing the meta is OK in Ranked Team Builder and whether that makes it extremely difficult for players to evolve the meta over time.

This weekend, for the first time ever, we’re packing up and heading to the Chicago Comic & Entertainment Expo (C2E2)! Our expo booth will feature live art demos with Riot artists, a gallery of jaw-dropping community art, and 360 degree video booths where players can digitize their C2E2 experience with Teemo. We’re also sponsoring the Crown Championships of Cosplay and the Cospitality Lounge, where cosplayers can get dressed, touch up, and chill out.

Can’t make it to C2E2 April 25 to 27? Check out our live coverage on Twitter and tumblr.

Miss the League action at PAX East? We’ve got you covered with tons of cosplay, booth, and behind-the-scenes shots on our tumblr.

C2E2 Poster

Will Warwick be the next rework?

 ZenonTheStoic: Warwick’s not next. Sion’s going to be before Warwick. Warwick is a bit smaller in scope. Sion is going to be a massive overhaul of the champion.

Will Sion be fully relaunched?

 Meddler: Yeah, full relaunch is the plan for Sion. Looking at a complete visual overhaul, mainly or entirely changed kit (focusing on the undead juggernaut part of his current kit has) and some thematic tweaks.

Follow-up: How far into Sion’s rework is the team?

 Meddler: In progress (kit and visuals), but not mostly done – while yet. Stuff so far’s looking cool though, both visually and in general.

Why was Dragonslayer Braum’s Passive Icon changed?

 RiotWrekz: This is a totally reasonable question.

Braum’s passive requires a lot of ally interaction, probably the most of any ability in our game outside of thresh lantern. Braum getting Concussive Blows on an enemy is a call to action for his allies to focus fire that target, as a result the call needs to be very clear. We evaluated these things and made the decision that changing the iconography on his skin was too different from the base for allies to be expected to follow up in the way that we wanted, so instead took an approach to make changes to the base icons color that make it feel at home on the skin while still maintaining a consistent and readable shape language/symbol.

We totally think that the dragon face icon was cool, but pushing towards our game design goal of clarity we felt in this case making the gameplay oriented decision of providing a consistent symbol was the best choice for all players experiences.

If you have any questions for me, feel free to ask me at @NoL_Chefo.

PBE Update

Officer Vi

Supports in Season 4

Single posts

• RiotSeb: PBE Switchover
• Lyte: What is Team Builder?
• Ququroon: A Warm Welcome from Relaunch!
• Super Nomegeta: PBE: Combat Text, Particles & Ceremony
• Morello: Plans for Alistar
• Grumpy Monkey: Rammus Sculpt

PBE Update

      Sivir

Ricochet ( W )

• Damage on subsequent targets reduced from 60/65/70/75/80%  to 50/55/60/65/70% of total Attack Damage

On the Hunt ( R )

• Mana cost changes increased from 0 at all ranks to 100
• Cooldown increased from 100/80/60 seconds to 120/90/60

Victorious Elise Splash

Helloween Ward Skins

Team Builder available

 Lyte: Summoners,

Team Builder’s coming to PBE today! From 1 – 5pm PST over the next three days (Oct. 25th – 27th), select PBE testers will be able to try out this new feature and give us invaluable feedback on its design and functionality.

I’m excited to get your hands on Team Builder for the first time, but we’re trying something very different with this PBE Release. Team Builder is a complete re-design of Champion Select, which means it’s complicated and there are a lot of changes. One of our goals is to collaborate with players on this feature, and collect feedback throughout the development process.

—

What does this mean for players?

• As players, you’ll be able to help us test the feature extremely early in the process, and work directly with developers to evolve the feature over time.

• PBE is a smaller server, so queue times will be longer, and gameplay experiences will not represent a Live server. Matches might be very unbalanced as players of all skill levels will appear in the same match, but our focus is on testing the feature and collecting your feedback.

• Many features will be Work-In-Progress (WIP) or not working in Team Builder, for example:

  • Currently turned off or incomplete:
    • Skin Selection
    • Role Selection
    • Currently, we’re only testing Position Selection and the “Any Role” option
    • Friend Invites from Friends List
    • Match Found Ceremony
    • Dynamic Matchmaking Adjustments
    • Estimated Wait Times
    • Anti-Abuse System

How often will there be PBE tests for Team Builder?

• We don’t have a fixed timeline, and it will depend on the feedback we collect in the tests. We’d like to host a PBE test with players once every few weeks.

How do I get involved and help make Team Builder awesome?

• VonBurgermeister has a thread here that has instructions for what types of testing we’re focused on for Team Builder this round.

• RiotDoctahWayne has a thread here that will be collecting information on bugs you’ve found in Team Builder.

• Post general comments and game design questions in this thread!

To participate in future beta testing for League of Legends, apply for beta accesshere.

Lyte

Officer Vi keeps the beatdowns coming fist-first!

 Xelnath: Hello Summoners,

I’m here today to talk about supports – those zero-CS players who devote themselves (and their income) to warding my gank paths and protecting their team without any tangible character growth in the later parts of the game. As a merciless predator who feeds on the lowly support, I’d prefer to have a low-income, no-item target to prey on in the late game, but as a player and designer…

… fine.

Your pleas have reached us. We have crafted a new world with our dark arts. Behold!

How are Supports in the present day?

First off, let’s clarify who we’re talking about. There are six roles in League of Legends: mage, assassin, tank, fighter, marksman and support. The current meta in League of Legends usually divvies up these roles into the following positions: top fighter, mid mage, jungler tank (or assassin), bottom marksman and bottom support.

However, “support” is a blanket term that covers three overlapping, but different categories:

• Player who doesn’t last hit while sharing a lane
• Dedicated ward dispenser
• Support champions

While we’ve come to accept a single player performing all three of these roles, if you look closely, you’ll see these roles fight each other:

• Players who don’t last hit but share lane have minimal gold income
• Warding costs gold and warding power increases dramatically with additional wards placed
• Warding requires you to move away from your allies constantly
• Supportive champions want to be near teammates, protecting them

From these points, we can see that 0-cs warding duo-lane support players are the poorest players with the highest consumable expenses and the lowest amount of character growth. Duo-laning support players are currently denied the second half of their growth story!

What’s changing in the preseason?

We want both players in a shared lane to experience growth, item choice and the opportunity to get a full set of items. To get there, we are:

• Increasing the gold income for players who don’t last hit
• Introducing bonus XP in jungle and lane for players who fall significantly behind their teammates
• Capping possible expenditures on wards per player
• Giving players access to free vision items, known as Trinkets (Please see Xypherous’s vision post for details!)

Additionally, new income comes in several forms:

• Masteries that grant bonus gold to players in a shared lane
• Improvements to our GP/5 items that reward effective support play
• Increased assist rewards for players who get significantly more assists than kills

Increasing income, rewarding effective support play and giving everyone access to a basic vision item encourages team cooperation, rewards supportive players and gives everyone the opportunity to participate in the vision game.

Outside of the vision changes, what’s happening to address the above?

First I’ll touch on those assist streaks. We’re making it so that players who have significantly more assists than kills will get additional income per assist. If a player does secure a kill, the extra gold from the kill will offset their temporarily decreased gold gain from extra assists.

In addition to assist streaks, we’re exploring masteries that provide additional early game income and we’ve added items that allow support players to gain additional income for supporting their allies, taking objectives and setting up team fights.

Let’s look at a few of the work-in-progress items that I’m talking about:

• Philosopher’s Stone grants gold every 10 seconds. When a nearby ally kills a minion, you earn gold.
• Executioner’s Emblem executes minions below 200 health and grants gold to both you and the nearest ally when you last hit. Your ally gains a small gold bonus on top of this. This effect can happen up to twice a minute.
• Spellthief’s Blade makes it so that your spells and basic attacks against enemy champions grant you gold. It cannot affect the same target more than once every 10 seconds and last hitting an enemy disables this effect for 10 seconds.

Access to these items will allow you to specialize your income to fit your playstyle.

How does this change my experience as a support player?

In a long game, shared lane supports should now expect to be purchasing real items alongside their boots and Sightstone. They’ll still have the biggest impact on vision, but now will have combat stats to make them feel like a more full and complete character. A balanced support champion will be splitting their time between warding, helping allies push lanes to take towers and participating in combat to save allies and kill enemies.

As a side effect of these changes, we’re also taking a close look at core supports: Janna, Sona, Nami, Soraka, Lulu, Taric, etc. Champions designed specifically as supports have historically been balanced to have negligible income so, if left alone with all that gold, they’ll either become overtuned mages or be replaced completely by non-support champions who can outscale them in damage once they hit the midgame.

Rather than wholesale nerfing these champions, we’re looking at opportunities to make their unique aspects scale with AP or other stats. For example, the bonus AD on Janna’s shield and the movement speed granted by Nami’s passive will now scale with Ability Power. Our hope is that support champions in shared lanes can select AP or CDR items they find appealing. This will, in turn, give them a more distinct identity as champions that excel at helping their teammates and being supportive rather than just dealing more damage.

Hopefully this gives all you support players some things to look forward to in preseason. We’re going to be aggressively tuning these changes but our core philosophy will remain the same: let every champion in League of Legends experience real growth throughout the game, regardless of their position or role.

We’ll also be posting this on reddit where we may pass through to clarify some questions. At the start of next week we’ll be doing a global recap to follow up with the most up-to-date information from questions around the world!

-Xelnath (Wizardlock, Right Hand of the 7th Order of Obsidian Blackfire Ebonstone Dark Witchlords)

Will there be more exciting item choices for Supports?

  Xelnath: We are hoping to make sure you have interesting items too.

Here’s one preview:

Martyr’s Call:
+300 health
+10 health regen per 5
Unique Active: Consume 20% of your current health to give 10% of your max health as a shield to target ally.

Follow-up: Won’t this item be too effective on tankier characters? (eg. Cho’gath)

  Xelnath: Tanks are exactly the character class we’re targetting with this item. We can increase the HP cost and reduce the shield if Cho’gath becomes the best peeler in the game.

Have you considered how these changes will affect Support champions’ ability to bully ADCs in lane?

  Xelnath: This just means crushing that soft and delicious support is even more important.

How will this gold flow affect my item build?

  Xelnath: You should now have enough gold to buy boots, sightstone, one of the GP/5 items, then start branching out into at least one cool, fully completed item, if not more. (Assuming you’re helping out a lot in team fights!)

Will these changes affect Supports who can be played mid? (Lux, Nami, Zilean)

  Xelnath: Yes, but you’re going to be out-supporting the mid (Strong shield, +ad ratios, move speed, etc) with your new AP gains – not just bursting people down with damage. This is a careful tuning point around the intent of the characters – they are protectors, not just murderers with heals and shields. (I’m looking at you, Lux)

Do these new GP/10 items stack in effect?

  Xelnath: The new gold income items are completely exclusive. These gold income items build in a path to a cool active effect, but the final build retains their gold income mechanic. Once you start one item, you cannot start another item’s path unless you sell the other item.

E.g. I can buy Philosopher’s Pebble, a 375 gold support starting item that gives gold when an ally kills a minion, upgrade it into Philosopher’s Stone (850g total) and finally transform it into Shurelia’s Reverie.

However, if I own Philosopher’s Pebble, I can’t buy Executioner’s Emblem or Spellthief’s Blade.

  Xelnath: These items now have their own shop category and you can only buy 1 of them.

What do you think of bot laners both picking up Executioner’s Emblem?

  Xelnath: We tried this out yesterday and found it to be a fun and teamwork driven lane, that makes both players feel better about working together. Because the stats on Executioner’s Emblem are not optimized for ADC characters, we do not expect this to become dominant – since picking Emblem too early means you will lose in head-to-head trades.

So we’re watching this optimistically as a fall-back pattern for lanes that are losing to a snowballing ADC or support.

How much of a benefit is it to last hit with this item as a Support?

  Xelnath: The ADC will receive gold equal to the kill plus 5. So they get more gold for coordinating with you.

If you upgrade to Shurelia, will you be able to get a Spellthief’s Blade?

  Xelnath: No. Once you pick up Shurelia’s Reverie (which now grants passive gp/5 and the bonus gold on minion death) you cannot start a Spellthief’s Blade.

We originally did not have this limit. Then Madlife and H4ckerv2 came to the office and broke the game by having more gold than any other champion in the game by min-maxing the support items.

Will there be recipe changes to items build out of a GP/10 (eg. Twin Shadows) ?

  Xelnath: Twin Shadows no longer builds out of Kage’s Pick. As a result it has had its price adjusted (slightly reduced I think, but I won’t promise that remains if it remains strong)

 Xelnath: Philosopher’s Stone, Kage’s Pick and Emblem of Valor have been removed as a component from all items in the game that do not grant alternate gold income. We’ve replaced those components with ones we felt was appropriate. E.g. Will of the Ancients now builds from a Blasting Wand + Hextech Revolver.

Is Executioner’s Emblem a viable choice for junglers?

 Xelnath: We think its cool if a midlaner sees the jungler show up, scare off the mid lane, then grab a couple CS and go “ooh! more gold! Thanks!!” instead of “F!#@ing Rammus pushed my lane again.”

Why can’t the GP/10 effects be labeled “UNIQUE”?

 Xelnath: If we did this, it would look WEIRD.

Philo:
+hp regen
+mana regen
UNIQUE Passive – Scavenger: Get Gold from minion deaths.

(Purchasing Philosopher’s Stone prevents Pickpocket and Lootshare items from working. The order of items purchased matters.)

That’s an unwieldy and confusing tooltip. Locking out the items is far clearer.

Besides, there are NOT GOOD GAINS from stacking these items. They all provide regen stats. Woop. Stacking those into the midgame is not a smart plan.

Instead, by making them exclusive we can make the actives significantly sexier.

Have you tested this system with kill-lanes? (eg. Leona x Jarvan)

 Socratocracy: I’m glad you brought this up, because this is something we’ve been concerned about internally as well. We’ve seen Leona experience much success with the new system, especially if she can pull ahead in a lane. One of the goals of this system change was to improve the viability of other supports. Now we’re seeing Leona and J4 see more success as supports in that they are rewarded more for generating kills early on than they currently are. This may be a bit too snowbally, and is something we’ll be watching closely.

However, one thing to keep in mind is that in order to reap the full benefits of the improved support gold generation, champions will need to invest heavily in the Utility tree, which is intended to be a check on, say, Pantheon or Rengar from being able to zone out a lane and come out of lane with a substantial amount of gold. We’re continuing to test champions and “kill lanes” like what you’ve mentioned internally and determine whether or not the new items and gold flow for supports shifts things such that you’re better off running Rengar/Pantheon than a traditional support, which hasn’t been the case in our testing so far. We want to increase the number of supports that are viable with these new systems, not invalidate the viability of traditional supports. With Trinkets assisting with more early game vision as well, it’s not as easy for “sits in a bush and kills you when you get close” champions to zone a traditional bottom lane composition.

We’ve tried things such as Annie/Brand and Zyra/Kha’Zix, and have found that the “traditional” bot lane now has the itemization options to allow them to farm aggressively and harass the “kill” lane. In other words, we haven’t found any specific “kill lanes” consistently do well internally any more so than traditional ones.

That being said, if we’re off-the-mark in our testing and find that traditional supports are falling behind, as Xelnath mentioned in the bottom part his original post, we’re currently working on having the utility of traditional supports scale with items (Janna’s shield granting more AD based on her AP being one of these explorations). This should provide additional help in case traditional supports feel like they’re being outclassed.

We’re continuing to test these kinds of “kill lanes” internally, and are definitely interested in specific lanes you’re concerned about. I’d love to hear some of your suggestions on fun, interesting, and awesome lane combinations that you guys think would thrive under the new income generation systems?

 Xelnath: I’d like to reiterate what Socratocracy just said:

We are okay with creativity and experimentation in lane, as long as it doesn’t result in an unpleasant or degenerate experience and support characters still have a place to go and be successful consistently.

 Single posts

PBE Switchover

Missed any recent updates? Check out the latest topics below!

Follow me on Twitter!

Skype: chefoslr

IGN: NoL Chefo, EUW

All credit for the awesome Irelia pic goes to deviant artist sunnyrays! If you like his work, check out his page!

 
PBE Update

Introducing Team Builder

Current state of Fighters

eCommerce AMA

PBE Update

       Ahri 

Fox Fire ( W )

• Mana cost reduced from 60 at all ranks to  50

Charm ( E )

• Mana cost decreased from 90 at all ranks to 85
• Now increases the true damage from Orb of Deception (Q)

 

Tormented Soil ( W )  

• Damage increased from 20/32.5/45/57.5/70 to 23/36/49/62/75

 

 

Tryndamere

 

Spinning Slash ( E )

• Cooldown is now reduced by 1 second whenever Tryndamere critically strikes and by 2 when crit-striking Champions.

 

New Login Screen

Updated Nocturne Splash

 

 

Introducing Team Builder

 

WoW’s dungeon-finder system now has a place in the League!

 

 

 Lyte: Hello Summoners!

Lyte here, and in this post I’m excited to talk with you about Team Builder, a new feature coming to PBE in the near future where you can queue up for a specific role, champion and position and get connected with four teammates that also preselected their preferred role. The goal is to build a balanced team where everyone’s in agreement on where they’re going and what they’re playing, and in doing so help lay the foundation for good teamwork.

How often have you logged on to League of Legends and thought, “I just want to play Renekton today.” Or maybe you want to try a new strategy but can’t find four friends to premade with. We’re always asking how we can make the League of Legends experience better, and one thing that comes up a lot is how players want to feel like they’re in control of their pre-game experience.

Good teamwork doesn’t just start when the minions spawn or at the first big teamfight. It starts in champion select. Champion select sets the tone of the game and greatly impacts whether you feel like you’re going to have a fun match. So we asked ourselves: what’s the ideal champion select? And how can we improve this process so it happens more often?

An ideal champ select is one where all five players get their preferred role and feel like they’re all on the same page for the upcoming match. The current matchmaking does a good job of matching up players of similar overall skill levels, but doesn’t have any way to know what a player’s intentions for a given game are. Sometimes things work out perfectly and everyone gets the champion and role they wanted without a hitch. But if multiple players are looking to play the same role or lane, a consensus has to be built in a relatively short period of time. That’s time that could be used to get to know each other, agree on a strategy and build confidence that it’s going to be a fun match.

Team Builder is intended to bring players together that complement each other’s expectations and intentions from the moment they enter the lobby. When everyone’s aligned on who will be going where and playing what, the only thing left to figure out is how to dominate the opposition.

Once we had a model for how Team Builder would bring players together, we started looking at matchmaking and how we could evolve it to help further enable good games. One of the most important things for a team’s enjoyment is making sure that they’re matched against similarly skilled players.

With Team Builder we’ll also be rolling out a smarter matchmaking system that can dynamically account for your experience with a given role, position or champion. First time playing Ahri? Learning how to be a solid Marksman? Venturing into the jungle for the first time? Team Builder’s matchmaking will take all of these factors into account. .

Our goal for Team Builder is to bring players together and build better teams. Because good teams win more games, make bigger plays, and most importantly, have more fun.

To us, that’s exciting, and we’re looking forward to your feedback. See you in Team Builder,

Lyte

 

 

 Lyte: I just want to take a moment to thank some of the Rioters who worked on this feature:

Robbypoo, RiotComplex, statuskwoh, RiotWorldPeace, RiotTantram, davin, btab, MissMechaZero, RiotLobster, stopthief, Exekias, Amazoe, Scezumin, VonBurgermeister, Ryedan, RiotNeuroCat, RiotJayway, Taurendur, whever, Drevarius, RoamingNumeral, RiotSeb, DoctahWayne.

If you see them around the forums or a future event, make sure to give them a fist-bump!

—

Update!

Commonly Asked Questions:

1) Won’t this enforce the meta?

a) Team Builder is all about introducing a new, cooperative Champion Select where players can agree to a strategy and team vision before entering a match. Players in Team Builder will be able to outline a strategy they are interested in playing, and the system will find teammates that share that vision. Feel like playing a double jungler strategy or want to send 5 players down the mid-lane? No problem. It might take longer to find 4 other players willing to try a crazy strategy but when you do, you’ll know the entire team is bought in and you’re going to have fun.

2) Will Team Builder replace other queues?

a) Initially, Team Builder will be an entirely separate queue. We’re looking forward to feedback from players and will use that feedback to determine whether this type of Champion Select is a good fit for modes like Ranked Mode but for now, we’re focused on improving the Champion Select experience as an independent queue experiment.

 

 

Will this solidify the current meta?

 

 davin: It actually does not enforce it–leaders of a team will be able to set whatever parameters they want. Double jungle? Five man mid? Make it happen!

But, because team collaboration is the name of the game, your teammates will need to be bought in by queuing for that position and accepting the plan beforehand. It’s built into the system to allow for flexible meta expression.

 

 davin: Just to make sure people see: You can actually set up whatever comp you want. You can definitely do 2 mid or 2 jungle. The system is meant to make it easy for players to decide to play the way they want to play. Because there’s no crazy time pressure, you’re not going to hop into a game until everyone is fine with the plan. If the captain sets up a Support Top, Marksman Top setup, for example, they’re deciding to wait a little longer to get solo players who will be happy to play the strategy they desire.

In that way, the tool is also more responsive to shifts in the “standard” meta. Should be neat to see how players collaborate with it 

 

 Lyte: Team Builder is all about introducing a new, cooperative Champion Select where players can agree to a strategy and team vision before entering a match. Players in Team Builder will be able to outline a strategy they are interested in playing, and the system will find teammates that share that vision. Feel like playing a double jungler strategy or want to send 5 players down the mid-lane? No problem. It might take longer to find 4 other players willing to try a crazy strategy but when you do, you’ll know the entire team is bought in and you’re going to have fun.

 

 Riot NeuroCat: I think my favorite comp I’m looking to run is: Marksman/Jungle, Tank/Jungle, Fighter/Top, Mage/Bottom, Support/Mid. The marksman and tank roam to lanes and help take towers – recently fought against this and its pretty scary!

So glad we finally get to share this 

 

 

Will we still be able to queue normally?

 

 Lyte: Initially, Team Builder will be an entirely separate queue. We’re looking forward to feedback from players and will use that feedback to determine whether this type of Champion Select is a good fit for modes like Ranked Mode but for now, we’re focused on improving the Champion Select experience as an independent queue.

 

 Lyte: There are two flows in Team Builder. You can opt to be a leader of a group and define strategies for your team–this is usually the recommended path if you have a few premade friends and want to find a few strangers to fill out your team according to your desired composition.

You can also opt to be a solo player, choose a champion, role and position and ask the system to look for teams who are looking for your spec.

 

 Lyte: Team Builder is a complete re-design of Champion Select that was inspired by a lot of research on social dynamics and cooperation. Because we’re going to iterate on it quite often with player feedback, we opted to create it as an independent queue first and not touch any of the existing queues. Depending on what we learn, we may adapt some or all of Team Builder into the existing queues.

 

 

Will Champions be locked in their roles?

 

 davin: Champions aren’t locked to their primary roles, when you select how you’re queuing up, you specify what role/position you want to play with the champion. I’m a support player myself, and will be excited to try out more Naut support with this–Naut is one of my favorite champs 

 

 

Can I choose what Champions I want my teammates to play?

 

 Lyte: Team Builder is pretty flexible but we had to be careful not to add too many specific options in the system that may increase queue times. What this means is that in Team Builder, you’ll be able to outline the high-level strategy you are interested in playing–this means that you’ll be able to select the roles and positions for your team, but not select the specific Champions you want on a team.

As a leader of a group in Team Builder, you’ll then be presented with players that want to play one of the roles/positions on your team, and you’ll get to see the Champion they want to play and get to accept/decline them from your group.

 

 

How will this system help me if I’m solo queuing?

 

 Lyte: As a solo player in Team Builder, you have quite a lot of flexibility as well. Let’s say you want to play Nautilus Support in the Top Lane. If you get placed into a group, this means that the leader of that group has already agreed they are interested in a Nautilus Support in the Top Lane. But, let’s say you chat with the team in the lobby and don’t like the setup the leader is trying to play–as a solo player you can simply ask the system to find a new group. It’s as simple as that.

 

 

Won’t players just stick to what’s accepted in terms of Champion roles?

 

 davin: This is something we discussed pretty extensively while building the rules of the system. We didn’t want to enforce the meta, but we also didn’t set out to try to break it. Instead, we wanted to put the tools in players’ hands.

Some of the research we did to see if this feature would have legs showed that players were actually pretty happy to play outside of the “standard” meta, as long as the composition made sense from a “what can this champion do” (not a lot of players were excited about solo-lane Sona, but Swain top was pretty accepted). There’s some players who will be pretty strict, but perceptions on that are actually pretty widely varied.

In short, it’s something we’ll be watching, and it’s definitely something we’ve considered quite a bit. Given the broad range of beliefs regarding what a viable composition is, I think there will actually be a decent amount of variance.

 

 Lyte: We’ll post a few screens of some whacky compositions we’ve been playing  Thanks for the suggestion.

 

 

 

 

Will this result in people demanding FotM picks because it’ll be easier to get them?

 

 davin: We all have our own experiences with folks who are super insistent about what champions are allowed for what roles. But there’s also folks who are pretty easy-going, as long as the champion makes sense for the role. One of the first things we did when planning this feature was to run some research to figure out whether players would generally be happy with a composition that “made sense” but wasn’t “strict omega tier 1 champ in every slot”. The levels of acceptance there were pretty encouraging (go Ziggs go!).

 

 

Is there any defense added against LoLKing griefing?

 

 davin: Until you accept someone, you don’t see their name. There’s also some further safeguards against abusive team leaders 

 

 

 Lyte: When players are suggested to team leaders, Summoner Names will be hidden to avoid some abuse with third party tools and stat look-ups. Once a player is accepted into a team, their name will be revealed but there’s a few anti-abuse systems in place to deal with team leaders who then use third party tools to look-up the name and kick the player at this point.

 

 

What if you pick a Champion unsuited for the role you wanted to play as?

 

 davin: You actually never end up in Champion Select. The team’s screen replaces it–once you’re all good, you just queue up and end up in a match.

 

 

 

 

Will this queue extend to the other maps?

 

 davin: You don’t have to tell me twice, Twisted Treeline is my favorite map. For the initial launch, we’re testing this with the most common mode/map combination, but expansion isn’t out of the question.

 

 

 

How will this system circumvent the fact that very few people will be queuing for Support role?

 

 Lyte: In our research, we were surprised that role preferences were pretty diverse. When we surveyed players and asked what their preferred role was, about 15% of players preferred playing Support, 14% of players preferred playing Jungle, and 5% of players were willing to fill any role.

We’ll be keeping a very close eye on role popularity in Team Builder, but for now, it looks like there are players that are very happy to play the perceived least popular roles if there is a system like Team Builder in place to help create teams.

 

 

How do you become a Team Leader?

 

 Lyte: Right now, it’s as simple as selecting Team Builder and selecting that you want to be a leader. We’re considering whether leaders need to invite at least 1 friend to be a leader, but this will depend on feedback and data on the ratio of players who want to be a leader versus be a solo player.

 

 

 Lyte: Right now, being a leader of a group in Team Builder is as easy as selecting Team Builder then selecting that you’d like to be a leader. We’re toying with additional requirements such as requiring leaders to invite at least 1 friend–research suggests that this may encourage players to play together with friends which we know is an awesome experience.

 

 

Will the enemy team be using the same composition as ours?

 

 Lyte: You’ll be going up against whatever strategy the opposing team queued up with.

 

 

 

 

How do we know if our Role + Champion + Position choice is something people want on their team?

 

 Lyte: When you select a champion, role and position, you are presented with an estimated wait time so you can gauge how many teams are currently looking for that spec; however, we also saw in the research that players are quite open to diverse and creative strategies. For example, Caitlyn as a Marksman-Mid is a strategy that would be very well-accepted even though it isn’t standard.

 

 davin: If you’re not setting up a team and you’re just queueing up yourself, you pick: Champion, Role, Position. So you might pick:

Nautilus / Jungle / Tank
or
Annie / Top / Mage

You’re not limited to picking what a champion is “designed for”, but the interface will let you know what a champion’s primary roles are. You’ll get an estimated wait time as well–to let you know if some combination will take longer to get.

 

 

Can the Team Leader leave a slot’s Role unspecified?

 

 Lyte: Yes, team leaders can leave roles as “Any Role,” which allows maximum flexibility if the team doesn’t really care about the role but know they want a person at a specific position.

 

 

 

Can I queue up as, say, Janna/Mid/Mage?

 

 davin: Yep, you totally can. You could even queue Janna/Mid/Marksman and pretend it’s Season 1, though you’ll have to wait to find a team that’s on-board with that.

 

 

 

How does the Team Builder queue work?

 

 davin: Since it is its own queue, there’s no bans or anything like that. Once everyone is ‘ready’ and the leader launches the game, you just end up in queue and then on a loading screen.

 

 

 

How will it work for duo queue?

 

 Lyte: In the current setup, one of you will have to be the team leader and invite the friend. Both of you can then spec a bottom combination, then fill out the rest of your team composition with whatever you want. The system will then start finding some teammates for you two!

 

 

 

What if I pick an unorthodox Champion or Role (eg. Zilean, Jungle Quinn) – do I have to suffer getting kicked time and again?

 

 Lyte: In this case, if you chose Zilean and get accepted into a group, it means the leader has already OK’d a Zilean. If you form a team and place yourself as Zilean, you may get a few solo players who enter the lobby, see Zilean and then leave, but this is not as common as players think.

davin ran quite a few studies on non-standard team compositions with unpopular champions, and it turns out that players are very willing to play with non-popular champions.

 

 Lyte: Given the number of players here that have already voiced they love playing Zilean, Quinn, and other unpopular champions, it should be no surprise that in our research many unpopular champions were well-accepted in Team Builder teams.

If I were a team leader in Team Builder, I’d be the first one to click OK to Zilean-Mage-Mid or Quinn-Jungle. From research from davin’s lab, it turns out that there are many players like me 

 

 

Can the same champion end up on both teams?

 

 davin: Yeah, the easiest way to imagine the queue is that it’s a normal game with a more collaborative, non-time-limited champion select process. This is how we might have done champion select from the start if we could use a time machine. Though Ranked obviously has different needs.

 

 

Can players queue up for an unspecified lane?

 

 Lyte: Right now, solo players have to select champion, role and position. Team leaders can create slots with “Any Role,” but they must select a position. We’re going to see how this setup works, and we’re always open to iterating.

 

 

 

Can any of the options be left unspecified?

 

 davin: Not at the start, but if it ends up being a common desire after the system launches, it’d be something we could add.

 

 

 

 

Will I be able to accept/decline people’s requests as a Team Leader?

 

 Lyte: Yes, as a Team Builder leader you will be able to accept or decline suggested players to your team. Solo players will also be able to ask the system to find them a new group. Team Builder is all about encouraging communication and cooperation and letting players take as much time as they want to find a team they will have fun with.

 

 

 

Will Team Builder make it to Live with the start of Season 4?

 

 Lyte: We really just have to see. As we head towards PBE and Live, a lot of the systems within Team Builder may change according to player feedback. We’re really focused on just redesigning Champion Select to encourage as much cooperation and sportsmanlike play as possible, which is why we’re creating an independent queue for the time being. Depending on what we learn and if it’s the right fit, an adaptation to Ranked Modes might look completely different.

 

 

What if I duo queue and we both play non-standard choices?

 

 davin: In that case, you would likely be setting up your own team and inviting your friend, then setting up slots for the others. If solo folks think your setup is weird, they’ll leave (they can’t kick you) and get put into another team.

 

 

 

What do you hope to achieve by adding this feature?

 

 davin: Making it easier for teams to be happy going into the match–which is done by players having the option to truly opt-in to the experience they’re about to have.

 

 

 

Will there be a Chat window after the queue so players can discuss the picks/environment, etc.?

 

 davin: Yes, you can chat!

 

 

 

 

How will matchmaking work with this queue?

 

 Lyte: Regarding matchmaking, the system currently assesses the team’s skill level then finds an appropriate opposing team–it doesn’t try to pair similar metas against each other. We’re able to match according to lane position skill ratings, but whether we do that or not is still up for debate.

 

 

How can Team Leaders organize the Champion composition?

 

 Lyte: We’re going to start with the “Any Role” option for team leaders to use, which means that a team leader can spec out a team composition and use “Any Role” for every team member and just choose their positions.

For positions, we’re going to collect data first and see whether “Any Position” would be valuable to add.

 

 

What happens after everyone is happy with the team setup?

 

 Lyte: In Team Builder there’s no more traditional Champion Select. Once all members have joined the lobby and readied up, the team leader sends the team straight into matchmaking and the loading screen.

 

 

 

Can players swap Champions after being accepted?

 

 Lyte: For now, there’s no option for players to switch their Champions once they are in the team building process. We’re aware of the value of adding this, but there’s also some concerns like how you would handle players who use a desired spec to get fast queues, then switch their specs in the lobby and end up being kicked–it’s not an ideal experience for anyone in that situation.

 

 

Suggestion: Let teammates vote whether a player can swap his/her Champion

 

 Lyte: This is a possibility and something we discussed; however, it’s not something we’re going to do for the initial experiments!

 

 

 

Are anti-griefing systems being considered?

 

 Lyte: There are a few anti-abuse systems in place that will prevent team leaders from declining players forever until they get the exact Champion they want. For example, if a team leader decides to decline a 10 players in a row in a short time period, the system may decide to give the team leader a 30 second cool-down before suggesting another player to them.

 

 

Do we get the queue time before or after we actually queue up?

 

 Lyte: You get an estimated queue time before you queue up; however, the initial estimates when the system launches may be a bit off. As the system collects data, the estimates will become more accurate.

 

 

 

What options are there once we’re in a team?

 

 Lyte: There’s a “Find Another Group” button for players and a “Kick” button for leaders. As we move towards PBE, we’ll be sharing more details with exactly how the system works.

 

 

How many players can Team Leaders invite?

 

 Lyte: Team leaders can invite up to a full premade team, but by that point it’s just easier to go into a Normal Blind Pick game I imagine.

 

 

 

 

Do you think this will work well for Ranked matches?

 

 Lyte: To be honest, we’ll just have to see. We’ve used a lot of research on cooperation and team dynamics to drive game design decisions on Team Builder, but now we really want players to try it out and give us feedback as we work on the feature. As we iterate on Team Builder and learn about what the best Champion Select experience is, we’ll then figure out how we want to use these lessons in other modes.

 

 

How will you prevent Team Leaders from flaming and kicking people after they’ve accepted them?

 

 Lyte: There’s a few anti-abuse systems in place that will punish a team leader that acts that way. For example, if a leader frequently accepts a player then kicks the player, they may end up being restricted from playing Team Builder for a period of time.

We can do stuff like this because accepting a player then kicking them is very different than just declining the player from the get-go–these patterns of behaviors are very easy to detect.

 

 

 

Current state of Fighters

 

A few words on how Riot plans to combat the staleness of stat bruisers.

 

 

Will you announce any planned changes to Fighters?

 

 Meddler: We’re currently working on a bunch of stuff that’s planned for release during the Pre-Season of Season 4. That includes a number of adjustments to fighters, things to improve the overall state of support and jungle play plus some other stuff we’re still finalizing. Not all of that will be released at once and the fighter stuff won’t be part of the first pre-season patch. We’ll talk details closer to the time, right now we’re really focusing on getting the core of the changes sorted out.

One thing I can mention at the moment though is that we’re looking to create more distinctive niches for fighters. Right now a number of our fighters are somewhat interchangeable in terms of the gameplay experience they offer and what they bring to a team. As a result if you’re after a figher picking whoever’s got the best chance of winning the laning phase is a common choice, which can result in a small pool of regular picks. Other roles, such as supports for example, have much more defined niches (pick Leona for an early kill lane/strong dive initiations, Janna for a really defensive peel role, Blitzcrank for a opportunistic pick comp, Zyra for an AOE/anti melee pick etc). That’s not to say support balance is perfect, or that defining clear niches for fighters will be a simple, immediate solution to fighter issues. It is however a direction we believe can do a lot to help create a situation where a sizable number of fighters are seen as attractive picks at the same time.

 

 

Off-topic: Is Miss Fortune a niche AD carry?

 

 Meddler: Miss Fortune’s niche is the ADC you pick when you want to try for some degree of AOE team comp strat (see Curse of the Sad BulletTime strats from earlier this season). She’s got some other stuff going on as well of course (strong early laner, good against healing champs, decent map movement), though those attributes are secondary and shared to some degree with a number of other ADCs.

Also important to note that, when a champion’s got a clear niche like that, there’ll be times when they’re a more common pick and times when they’re less common, based off the popular strats and team comps at the time. That’s something that’s quite healthy for the game (within limits of course, 100% or 0%, to go for the extreme example, would be a major problem).

 

 

Are you happy with where Nasus is at currently?

 

 Meddler: Yeah, Nasus is in a better spot already than a number of fighters, offering distinct strengths in each phase of the game (strong push early, carry shutdown mid+, massive Q damage really late). Don’t know if the team have any plans for him, might need some tweaks, has a lot of elements of a distinctive gameplay identity already though.

 

 

What’s your solution to fixing Fighters with incoherent kits (eg. Irelia) ?

 

 Meddler: Irelia by contrast’s going to be tougher given she’s got a bunch of standard fighter tools and some mechanics (CC reduction and sustain especially) that can be difficult to make both balanced and satisfying. Approach we’re currently investigating with kits like hers is to look at elements already on them that are distinct, though under rewarded, and experimenting to see if we can exaggerate those aspects of their character more, then compensating by removing more generic power elsewhere.

 

 

Is this the approach you took with Ziggs?

 

 Meddler: Yeah, same approach, try and identify specialize some champions a bit if there’s not a clear answer to the question ‘why bring this champ besides their damage?’.

 

 

eCommerce AMA

 
 

 Hippalus: —-We’re back – the eCommerce team will be answering questions for the next few hours.—-

Overall, eCommerce is responsible for assessing player interest in new store features, content types, etc. and working with different teams at Riot to make the best ideas happen. Most of our efforts are non-controversial (player gifting, new types of sales, flexible bundle technology, etc.) while others can be highly controversial.

We do a ton of research (surveys, focus groups, etc.) to understand player views and interests, and we all also play the game whenever we have free time (most for 3+ years). We have no input into champion balance or other gameplay issues, and little input into which champions and skins get made, so we’ll have to defer on those types of questions.

Here are some of the other projects that the eCommerce team has either driven or heavily supported over the past year or so:

• Champion/skin pricing structure and availability
• Weekly champion/skin sales
• New types of discounts (2 for 1 rune pages, extra bonus RP, boost and summoner name change sales)
• Self service refunds
• Ward skins
• Gifting RP and content
• Earnable and purchasable summoner icons
• Flexible bundle technology and new themed bundles

Looking forward, here are some of our top priorities for the rest of the year and 2014:

• Veteran rewards
• Champion/skin trials
• Improved store experience
• Purchasing on the web
• Physical merchandise
• Personalized offers
• New types of in-game customization
• Runes

We usually won’t be able to provide precise details on future efforts, but feel free to ask us questions about any of the above or anything else related to eCommerce.

 

 

Skins/Events

 

 

[Senesis] Which is the fastest-selling skin of all time?

 

  Hippalus: The ultimate skins are #1 and #2. Outside of that, Championship Thresh is setting new records every day.

 

 

  Hippalus: Assassin Master Yi is #1 in all time units sold, mostly with free RP. But just looking at the first two weeks after the skin launch, the three I mentioned make up the top 3 in both the % of players that bought them and in RP spent.

 

 

[moobeat] Can we get a list of the most popular and unpopular skins?

 

  Hippalus: That might not be a bad idea. We recently put something like this together for the Denewbification class that all new Rioters go through, so maybe it could be adapted for the public. I’ll have to check where that rates on the super secret scale.

 

 

[devotedpupa] How about SKT T1 skins?

 

  Udyr: There will definitely be skins to commemorate their victory, but as to the design, we’ll have to wait and see!

 

 

[RX_Pepper] When are you starting the sale on the October limited skins?

 

  Hippalus: All of the new and old Harrowing content is currently planned for release very close to the end of the month. I will be as sad as you if it slips into November.

 

 

[GodsFavAtheist] How do you determine the timing for such skin releases?

 

  Hippalus: Halloween is only really big in the US (EDIT: and Canada and Australia and New Zealand and probably other places) whereas the Harrowing is big throughout all of Runeterra 🙂 In other words, the teams who decide on release dates mainly focus on when they’ll be able to ensure an epic holiday, and they’re less worried about hitting any specific date.

 

 

[onetimecrime] How long will the harrowing content be available for?

 

  Udyr: The content will be available for around 2 weeks.

 

 

 

 

[ek93922] Will there be Harrowing bundles?

 

  Udyr: There will be some Harrowing bundles, but I’m not telling you whats in them 😉

 

 

 

Rewards

 

 

[xINVINCIBLEx] Can we expect rewards for the future to be something larger than just a summoner icon?

 

  Hippalus: Initially, veteran rewards will be mainly focused on summoner icons and potentially additional refund tokens. What kind of rewards are you looking for?

 

 

 

[awakeNPan] Do you still have plans to reward Lifetime RP purchasers?

 

  Hippalus: We’re looking to have something for the community by the end of the year – we haven’t forgotten about you!

 

 

 

[moobeat] Why is there only one Summoner icon to commemorate the purchase of Limited Skins, regardless of holiday event?

 

  Hippalus: We’re planning to survey all of the original limited edition skin owners (or at least those that have valid email addresses) after the Harrowing to find out what they liked most and least about our solution, and what else they’d like to see happen. Our plan is to iterate over time to ensure we recapture some of the benefits of owning those vintage skins.

 

 

[Breakwolf] Any plans for some sort of loyalty reward type thing, like playing for 2 years gives you x RP?

 

 DontHassleDaHoff: We have been looking into a plan for this and are currently working out the details.

 

 

 Store/Purchases

 

 

[xINVINCIBLEx] How do you plan on updating runes?

 

  Hippalus: On runes, the leading ecommerce-related ideas at this point are either allowing players to upgrade from one tier to the next, or eliminating tier 2 runes altogether. The gameplay dudes have other plans for runes for Season 4 that will likely happen before any of our stuff.

 

 

[NeutronRocks] Do you plan to sell any of the following? :

 

• Announcer packs
• Custom map styles
• Custom HUD styles

  Hippalus: All of those are potential focus areas although nothing is super near term and I can’t go into much detail here. Feel free to share your favorite ideas along these lines.

 

 

[Verciau] Will you expand on IP items in the Store?

 

  Udyr: We are actively looking for new content and options for IP purchases, but there aren’t any concrete plans right now.

Any ideas or feedback on this area would be greatly appreciated!

 

 

[harryjane] Have you considered selling rune bundles?

 

  Udyr: We’ve considered it, but one of the common situations is that most players don’t have significant quantities of IP lying around. So it would be a very limited subset of players that could purchase a bundle even if we introduced it.

Not to say that we won’t consider it in the future.

 

  Hippalus: We like this idea too but we’re waiting to see how the Season 4 changes shake out.

 

 

 

[Chexmate] Will you be doing multiple Champion price reductions at a time?

 

 WizardCrab: Yes. Every third champion we release, we reduce the price of two older ones. For instance, when Jinx came out, we reduced the price on both Xerath and Miss Fortune.

 

 

[3vitor] Will “Purchasing on the Web” be a worldwide feature?

 

  Udyr: It will depend on the rollout and the overall plan.

The goal with “purchasing on the web” is to make LoL content easier for people to acquire on the go, or when they aren’t logged into the client.

 

 

Season 4

 

 

[HeavenSk8] What’s in store for runes?

 

  Udyr: There will likely be some rune changes for Season 4 😉

 

 

 

 

Missed any recent updates? Check out the latest topics below!

EU West Issues

Battlecast Skins

Rotation/Sale

Heimerdinger Impressions

Sivir’s Range

QA on Heimy – Part 3

PBE: Sivir VU

Limited Skins

Why VUs are slow

PBE 3.13 Numbers

PBE 3.13 Context

Ahri’s Rework

QA on Heimy – Part 1

Texture Update for Rammus

New Zyra Kit

Rammus’ Texture Update

Context for Ahri’s Rework

Phreak: Melee vs Ranged

Heimerdinger’s Rework

Xerath’s Rework

Ahri’s Rework

 

 

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Skype: chefoslr

IGN: NoL Chefo, EUW