Fish

@RiotPhroxzon No ranked reset Mr. phroxzon?

Super excited for some of the features coming out in 25.9. In-Game Termination for Disruptive Behavior - Cutting games short where significantly egregious behaviors are detected that drops a team's winrate to dramatically low levels has been something that we've been wanting to add to League for a while - This has been a significant technological advancement to be able to do this, so we're really excited about further things this can unlock - To set expectations, we're not going to be catching all varieties of game ruining behavior out of the gate, but it represents a significant improvement in our ability to actually detect these and prevent further harm to players - Initially, this will function very similarly to if an AFK is detected - We plan to continue rolling this out to more and more behaviors over time Gameplay Changes - Adjusting rules for roaming/proxying for Role Quests to be more generous and forgiving - Adding 2 new starting items! We haven't added starting items for a while! - A variety of patchwork sized champion fantasy improvements - 2 beloved keystones returning to the game (Stormraider's Surge, Deathfire) - A variety of item tuning changes (look out for the Statikk Shiv changes!) WASD & Champion Specific Keybinds - Both control schemes will be receiving Champ Specific Keybinds which are super exciting and a long requested piece of functionality - Coming to SR Ranked is WASD - This has been a massive step forward from the team - We're confident that we have the balance levers in place to effectively balance the 2 control schemes, but really want to see how it plays out on Live as players get more familiar with WASD Really excited to see what y'all think about all the changes!

@RiotPhroxzon Chess is nothing like League. Magnus carlsen having a 90% winrate is natural in a 1v1 game with no RNG. The best player in the world will not have even close to that. Maybe 70% at best if they are duo abusing. Please reset ladder and add performance based gains please and ty.

Apex Ranked Followup Thank you for all your feedback about the changes last week. I wanted to give some explanations on what we're seeing and why it is how it is right now; I’m not trying to change anyone’s mind, but I hope being transparent will lead to more constructive conversations with everyone Feedback we heard 1. The ladder has less meaningful breakpoints to strive for, now that the LP gaps between Master, Grandmaster, Challenger and Rank1 are really wide in a few regions (NA, EUW, EUN mainly). The gaps between tiers can feel exhaustingly large with low feedback and satisfaction on the journey from say low masters to high masters 2. It also makes comparison to previous season benchmarks lose meaning (1k LP, 2k LP, etc.) 3. Many are calling for an Apex Ranked reset; I'd love to know more about exactly what you mean by this (more below) 4. The ladder already felt grindy, like you had to play a lot of games to get to the next tier, and now it feels even more so 5. The top players getting +30/-10 even if their MMR is high feels unfair if a new or lower account can't do that; there are feelings of “how can I catch that” 6. Depending on which patch someone played, with the same winrates, their LP outcomes can be quite different, which is frustrating On who is getting +30/-10 and who is +/-20 - There have been a lot of discussions around who is getting good gains and who is not - We agree it feels unfair right now for the top of the ladder to be getting +30 while others are getting +20; I just wanted to explain why this is - This is because the weeks many players spent eating +10/-30 from the soft cap is being repaid; essentially for every game that a player played a +10/-30LP game, they will get paid back with +30/-10LP ones and this will grow the top of the ladder (similar to how the max LP on the ladder grows early in the season) - Once the ladder stabilizes, 95+% of the ladder (including the top of the ladder and including masters entrants at the bottom) is intended to get +/-20 - This means the only way to climb the ladder is to have a >50% winrate - If you have a 50% winrate over a long period, then you’re probably in the right skill level and are not in a climbing state - I also want to state this very clearly as a response to folks saying they should roll a fresh account to fight the Challenger LP gains. There is no advantage to running a fresh account up the ladder to try and hit an Apex rank, it will always be better to start with a pre-existing Apex account - I know it didn’t work like this in Seasons past, but it does now (and has for the past season or two) and this is to further disincentivize smurfing, something many players on the ladder had mentioned as a pain point - The only way to climb from this state is to improve skill level - I can guarantee that a Challenger player will be able to climb just fine with +/-20 given enough games, because they will have a very high winrate through Master and Grandmaster, but this leads me to my next point On ladder grindiness - We hear your concerns on needing to play too many games to climb up the ladder - It is true that older accounts that played their accounts up to challenger will be advantaged in Season reset races with the way we currently do soft rank resets - We do this because we want to make camping spots less effective of a strategy, dissuade smurfing, and encourage people to play on their main accounts - If the legacy accounts are not advantaged, there is no blocker to just running many fresh accounts through the Ranked ladder to hit Challenger; I think most players would agree that would be a worse experience - Secondly, as soon as Challenger players run into negative LP gains, many will stop playing on their Challenger accounts and move to smurfing, which is bad for match quality and queue times as well - We believe the high LP values are a better alternative to negative LP gains, but they are both not ideal - Additionally, we have daily game requirements and cap the max LP gains at 30 so that players don't camp on their spots without playing so that others have more opportunities to overtake them - In a world where a new Masters account has a 75% winrate through the Apex ladder (ie. is probably a top 10 player), that is 300 games to get to 3000LP from 0LP - If you are starting from a legacy account, it will be significantly less games than this - We don't believe it should be possible to be able to get to Rank 1 from a fresh account in less than 2-300 games. That makes smurfing, running up multiple accounts and maintaining them too attractive of an option - For one of the premier competitive games, we don't believe it is too much to ask for a player to play 1-2 games a day (between 3-700 games a year for the highest skill players in the game). Genre expectations to reach the top in many other games (including other MOBA’s) can be orders of magnitude higher than this and often require full time grinding - On the flip side, we acknowledge that there's a sweet spot on how much a player needs to play to not perceive it as too grindy, many people have to study, have jobs, etc and so it needs to be achievable for them too - We want to balance all these considerations; reducing incentives to smurf, how grindy it feels to achieve/maintain a rank and how legacy accounts are treated On why the LP is so high - I saw a comment asking whether the gap between Iron and Master (2800LP) is really equivalent to the gap between Master and Rank1 Challenger (2, 3, 4000LP) - In some regions, the answer to that is yes, in others, it's not quite as large, but still close - Players have gotten significantly better each year, especially with how often the top players are boot camping, taking a shot at Pro and learning from it, and pushing each other to get better - This is one of the reasons why the LP gaps between tiers are so high and the existence of the soft caps in previous years ended up suppressing the observed top LP's by some amount, so the gap looked lower than it actually was - Factually, there is a huge gap in skill between Master and Grandmaster and again from Grandmaster to Challenger so amount of points between them has to be reasonably large - This is a very common pattern in long running games, for example in Chess, Magnus Carlsen vs any random Grandmaster has close to a 90% chance to win - As League goes on, the gap between Rank1 (say Showmaker) and Master 0 LP is going to continue to widen; there are so many things you can do to influence the team in small but meaningful ways that aren’t super noticeable individually but have a huge impact over the course of a game, like pinging, shotcalling, soaking pressure, getting vision, etc. - But there's a fine balance here, we can agree that progression between tiers can feel daunting in the current tuning and there is a lacking sense of progression. This is why we’re considering adding additional tiers to break this up and create more “checkpoints” On Matchmaking Quality - There are some expectations of being able to have full challenger lobbies, all duos balanced, all role parity (on-role vs off-role), low queue times, all equal LP, remove autofill at all times of day - I want to set an expectation that this is not possible with only 300 Challengers and 700 Grandmasters in many regions - Players need to be autofilled, especially at the top of the ladder for us to make queue times reasonable, but we can at least try to make those autofills balanced in role - If a game is unbalanced in one of the axes above, we try to balance it out in another axis, but we are sometimes going to have to grab some Masters players to fill Challengers lobbies (hopefully not during peak time) - Especially with the new role parity algorithm, we believe we are making very fair games (close to 50% chance to win) in >90% of situations, with close LP between teams, duo balance, role parity - We believe the new algorithm is already significantly better than the old one, even though there may be some rose tinted glasses about how much better Matchmaking was before, which we don't agree with. We are still improving it Why do Challengers get +30LP, even when there are 200 LP masters in the game - LP gains are given based on how fair the match is and mentioned above, over 90% of matches have 50% chance to win - The reason why the Challengers are getting +30 for these games is because of the repayment of debt in the points above; this will resolve itself soon and the players will quickly go back to +-20 - If the match itself is 50% chance for either team to win, then the performance of the various people in the game is already baked into the LP gains (ie. the 200 LP master is expected to play worse, the Challenger is expected to play better) - There will usually be something offsetting this LP imbalance (whether it’s an extra duo on one team, someone playing secondary instead of autofill, etc.) - As I mentioned above, we believe >90% of our games are fair; it can be hard to guarantee fairness in off-peak and/or in small regions Other things we're thinking about (nothing confirmed) - [Agree] Many players are calling for better feelings of progression and progress in these tiers - [Agree] Reductions of grindiness (eg. more decay game banks, increasing max LP gain past +30LP, lowering distance between tiers, adding new tiers) - [Agree] Better reasons to maintain and play on Challenger accounts, rather than Smurf - [Uncertain] Adding more Grandmaster/Challenger slots to regions that have high numbers of players (which would bring the points between tiers down) - [Uncertain] Reducing how much advantage players get on their legacy accounts from start of Season (eg. capping at +25LP at max, instead of +30LP), but this will also further incentivize smurfing and increase feelings of grindiness - [Agree] Lower the amount of resetting at start of Seasons (eg. maybe start the Season at Master 0LP) More on Apex resets - To get a better understanding of what y'all mean by ladder reset, some possibilities are detailed below, - Not committing to any particular action or if we would even do any of these, but we want to better understand your intent when some of you ask for a reset. We definitely are far out from talking about a “when” at this point - If we went forward with any of these we would only reset a few regions as the vast majority of regions have had a normal season - We will be doing some research in the affected regions to help inform a call one way or the other - We would only consider a reset if we are confident it would result in an improved overall experience Option 1: Hard Reset - Early matchmaking will be a cluster****. There would be no memory of previous season ranks in Matchmaking - This means you could have 5 exChallenger vs 5 Master peakers, and that would be considered a fair game in the system - Even if a player is Challenger, they might have a team of Masters and be unable to carry hard enough vs a pretty stacked team on the other side, making the climbing process feel very RNG - This matchmaking quality would go on for months as the ladder sorts itself out, which would contribute to a negative experience for a good amount of players - Early season this year was a bit of a taste of this as we did a bit of a harder reset, and matchmaking quality would be significantly worse than that. This would be the most extreme option - We still don't believe this is a good idea, but if y'all are still wanting to push for it given this context, then the team can continue to discuss it Option 2: Softer Resets - Soft Reset would keep some semblance of normalcy in matchmaking, but the best players will be rewarded for being high on the ladder with better position on the starting blocks so to speak. Previous challengers would get increased gains (+30/-10) well into their climbs - The softest option would be everyone keeping their relative positions in the ladder but would need to maintain their current winrate to prove they belong there and reach their previous LP value

@RiotPhroxzon Just reset ranked bro. Being able to reach fucking 4k lp sounds absolutely ridiculous

Apex LP Gains Hey everyone, We’ve had a lot of attempted changes to resolve some of the root issues with the Apex experience this year. Some have worked OK and others haven’t worked as well. We wanted to shine a light on changes that are going out (hopefully) today and how we’re going to approach it for the near term and wanted to apologize for the experience that people have been running into so far. Does every region have negative LP gains? - Less than 5 of our 16 regions are having negative LP gains in Apex right now, and they’re to varying extents - Some of those are experiencing it consistently and others, just a little bit, and most, none at all Is Aegis of Valor causing this? - We don’t see any long term impacts on LP gains caused by Aegis - Especially given that the majority of regions are functioning completely fine What’s going on then? - Masters being more achievable this Season & the best players getting stronger as the years go on is expanding the gap between the bottom of Master and the top of Challenger. - The addition of Challenger duos made it more challenging to balance some of these games - While we took pre-emptive mitigations to reduce the impact of things like Rank 1 & 2 duoing together, they weren’t powerful enough and resulted in the best players catapulting further ahead - The rollout of our improved Matchmaking and better balance to duos (this is now Live in every region); does a better job of balancing duos and balancing autofills to make Apex matches more balanced in over 90% of cases, but there is still work to be done when the very best players are duoing together - In the Live Ranked system, the max LP attainable has a soft cap to prevent LP gains from getting too high, which combined with the above issues has led to a less than ideal apex ladder experience Are you going to reset the ladder? - There are some set of people who are really vocal about resetting the ladder; we hear the concerns and are taking them seriously - At the same time, there are a lot of players who will find it very frustrating for all their progress to be reset and while some players will be happy we reset it, others will not, so we’re continuing to evaluate The changes we’re making - To reiterate, in the Live Ranked system, the max LP attainable has a soft cap to prevent LP gains from getting too high - The closer you get to the top of the ladder, you need a higher and higher winrate to climb. - ie. As a player gets closer and closer to the cap, their gains will approach +10/-30 - We’re going to remove this cap, which will unbound LP on the top end and result in the very best players being able to play and climb to pretty high LP values (+30/-10LP until they start to reach where they should be) - It will also make LP gains for the entire Apex ladder more stable, but LP cutoffs for Grandmaster and Challenger will also increase when most players no longer have negative LP gains - We expect most regions to reach peak LP’s of around 3000 and in some of the top end cases, close to 4000 - Grandmaster and Challenger are meant to be very difficult to achieve and it’s intended to be challenging to get there (in the same way that an Emerald player should look at Diamond and feel like it’s going to be difficult to achieve) - At the same time, we’ve heard your feedback that hitting these ranks feels too daunting and grindy (though there is an expectation that the peak ranks in a game are going to require more dedication to keep, we need to strike a good sweet spot here) The future - Us making climbing at apex less daunting caused us to add Grandmaster several years ago and we’re nearing some of those feels now; the skill gaps in Apex are getting too big - In some regions also, the number of Grandmaster/Challenger slots being too low for how big their region is is also contributing to the cutoffs being very high (EUW being a notable example) -> curious on thoughts on increasing this - We might also reconsider the top end of how much LP you can gain per win, but need to be considerate of how much this incentivizes smurfing - Changes to systems like these are a natural part of League being a long-lived game and having growing player skills over time Thank you for being patient with us as we fix all the things and we’ll continue to work to make the top of ladder climbing experience the best it can be.

@doaenel @hwappytobi @RiotPhroxzon I’m sorry but this is a terrible idea. Lp gains should never be negative in a game where factors are out of ur control. I would suggest that instead of gains going negative they just diminish. So if you hit chall u might start only gaining +10 and losing -10 and so on.

@hwappytobi @RiotPhroxzon Obviously it would be at a sliding scale. When you're masters, +20/-20 When you're GM, +18/-22 When you're chall, +16/-24 Top 50, LP gains go down. Top 10, they go down again. Noone will ever want to smurf again.

Some quick Ranked/Matchmaking updates: 1. We're rolling out improved Autofill vs Autofill Matchmaking in each region (should be complete in each region as of this morning). We had a small hiccup where this was accidentally reverted for 1 day in EUW on roughly the 12th March, but turned back on after that 2. We're aware of the reports of mismatched LP gains in Apex and investigating. Wanted to acknowledge these are painful experiences for folks; it's a hard space, not going to overpromise that we'll be able to fully fix it, but will convene with the team and have an update later today

really cool how the only way to climb is to duo abuse @RiotPhroxzon really great season man

@RiotPhroxzon Just reset the season bro this is literally the worst season start in the history of league. You guys didn’t even make people gain extra mmr if they win aegis of valor, just always the bare Minimum shit that doesn’t get fixed until 4 months in, fix the game.

Just pushed a change to fix the LP gains in Masters+ for all regions. 95% of people should be fixed at this point. We've fixed the last 5% as best as possible, but they won't be able to be fully fixed. Sorry for the delay, please let us know if there are any further issues.

@mordoreku @RiotPhroxzon the ratings are already imbedded into the game was the aegis of valor requirements, its no diff. there would be multiple ways the system grades ur performance not just kda

@FishlordLoL @RiotPhroxzon And what will the criteria be? Those ridiculous ratings? How do you want to introduce something like that into a team game where each role or character has a different task?

We're aware of the LP gains and sometimes odd looking lobbies (eg. 5 chall vs 5 master) in Challenger. The root causes of the issue are pretty complicated, so I'm not going to go into detail on it, but just wanted to let folks know that we know what the issue is and we're working on it. While these very lopsided games are a relatively rare occurrence and it's happening in <5 regions, we've been working on a fix now for a few months that we hope to ship in the coming patches. Once the fix is out, it won't fix things immediately, but we expect it to get LP gains back to where they should be within a few patches. Folks will have to tank negative LP gains for a while while the system corrects itself.

@1shochi @berikeggie ya but most ppl werent duoing to hit top 10 in EU at start of the season

@FishlordLoL @berikeggie can duo in euw as well

do i let my acc decay ? what did riot do lol

@1shochi @berikeggie duoq abuse mustve ruined NA ladder only explanation

@berikeggie Rank 1 EUW gets +20/-20 btw

@Ablazeolive ngl the game also doesnt feel that good to play, definitely don't see a big casual playerbase for this game(which is bad)

Hot take but Deadlock being in alpha/beta for so long is bad for the game. There's already a huge skill disparity and the game hasn't even released yet. The most enjoyable part of a games lifecycle is when everybody is shit at the game and this just kills that for people

@RiotPhroxzon Swain is dead gg

Full Patch Preview 26.4! Ryze - Ryze's resurgance in the last few months has increased visibility on R's prediction behavior. This behavior is frequently difficult to predict and often doesn't teleport champions when it feels like it should - We're removing this functionality as it leads to overall less predicatability around Ryze R behavior Dusk and Dawn, Gwen & Kayle - While we nerfed several other Dusk and Dawn users, Gwen has floated to be one of the better ones; we're tapping her done a bit as a result - Kayle also falls into a similar boat - We're overall pretty happy with the state of Dusk & Dawn; it's a popular item with a strong fantasy and after this patch, we hope it's a balanced item with an appropriately sized user base Manamune Kassadin - We're thrilled to see Kassadin finding a new fun build to play; unfortunately he's a bit too strong both with and without it, so we're tapping him down - The early game changes to let him get back to lane a bit faster has made punishing him a bit more difficult and so he'll have to work a bit harder to access those 2 and 3 item spikes he used to Rengar - Rengar's had a good number of bugs fixed on 26.2 that added quite a bit of power and consistency to him; we're pulling a bunch of that back as he's a bit too powerful for Elite players in particular ADC's & Senna - We're trying a niche for Hexoptics where it is positioned as a greedy 3rd full damage item for Crit users when they don't need LDR (or post LDR) - Jinx and Twitch are receiving durability nerfs in the mid-game to keep some of their damage fantasies intact, but create sharper tradeoffs if they misposition - Aphelios is still one of the stronger ADC's, even after a hotfix nerf in 16.1; just a generic nerf here to bring power level down - Samira's BT build is significantly worse for wear, especially after the changes to Crit; so this adjustment is intended to bring some of that build variety back - Xayah has been out of the meta for quite a while; we're trying to ease her reliance on Essence Reaver procs in order to open up a bit more build variety for her. Additionally, her damage output is just superseded by several of her contemporaries, so increasing her W uptime will help her be competitive relative to the pack - For Senna, in Support, her Enchanter builds have been on average a bit too strong relative to her AD builds and so we're trying to make that balance a little more AD skewed - We like the Enchanter build being viable, but AD should be the stronger one for her fantasy

yo @RiotPhroxzon @drewlevin there is something seriously wrong with matchmaking/lp gains. I stopped playing for 4 days and now I'm only gaining +14 -28 from +18 -22. can we please do something about this? no point of queueing up at this point

@RiotPhroxzon Yo Phroxzon when is the autofill vs autofill change coming out. autofill top/jg vs on role is insta lose

We've hotfixed changes in for Mel and Zed jungle. So far we see both changes with a larger nerf skew towards Elite play. We're not looking to overly correct this, but will let it ride and re-evaluate. Mostly looking to correct the power issues here. Mel - Health per Level: 93 ⇒ 99 - Passive Damage per Projectile: 8-25 + 3% AP ⇒ 8-30 + 4% AP - W Shield Amount: 60% AP ⇒ 70% AP - E Root Damage: 60% AP ⇒ 70% AP Zed - Passive: Damage to Monsters: 0.5x ⇒ 0.75x - Maximum Damage to Epic Monsters: 100 ⇒ 175

@RiotPhroxzon @drewlevin can we make aegis of valor give double mmr on a win and no mmr loss if u lose because these LP gains are genuinely so terrible because of this system

sona 55% wr in NA meanwhile in EU where they pick majority engage supps shes 50% game avg, almost like the champ is garbage when u one shot with nautilus hook

@Spideraxe30 Garbage change, forces her to waste gold on boots instead of her essential items(rylais, liandries etc.) delaying her powerspike when she isn't a late game champion anymore so she needs to snowball early on

Cassiopeia changes: - Movement speed increased from 328 to 340 - Also has her new passive of increasing move speed by 6 - 40%

@drewlevin @KarasMaii I think a majority of dodges come from autofill which looks like u guys have found a solution for. I still think being able to dodge at least once a day is fine in masters+ though. Especially since u guys are already reducing the time in champ select + shaving 30 secs off rift

@KarasMaii tactical dodging being a thing creates doom loops in masters where people go into the next champ select with hover/pick info, which both creates more dodges/worse games and incentivizes people to share less info with the teams because of uncertainty around whether CS will go thru

@Spideraxe30 more bot skewed buffs zz

Swain buff: - Soul fragment heal increased from 3 -6% max HP to 6% flat

@RiotPhroxzon Why do we keep buffing swains base dmg? Why do you guys hate full ap swain so much? disgusting

Patch 25.23 Full Preview! Zaahen - Chatted a bit yesterday about Zaahen starting out development as a support! - We hadn't made a support for a while and we already had a headstart on wanting Zaahen to be a Darkin with eye/all-seeing motifs - The first iconic ult Squad5 tried was swinging his Glaive to Deathmark everybody (think Deathmark meets Xin Ult) - One of the issues with this was that Zaahen had a support economy, so he'd do this and just die. It wasn't a fatal flaw, but it wasn't quite cool enough to build a kit around - Another idea tried was to embody the idea of sacrifice; Zaahen would gain stats each time he got a takedown or died (because supports die a lot) - Teammates weren't super enthusiastic about this though, even if it ended up being powerful and useful - At this point, we decided that Top lane might be a better fit, especially because some of the Xin Zhao parallels weren't quite working out from the support role Zaahen in Top Lane - We were taking a bunch of inspiration from Erlang Shen and Guan Yu throughout development - Erlang Shen has a third eye, which is often known for being all-seeing and associated with enlightment/higher levels of consciousness in Hinduism or Buddhism and some other Eastern religions - So some of the ideas were related to these motifs - Squad5 tried some ideas like Ult makes him untargetable to non-targeted abilities (think Gwen W), but this only lasted a test (was very experimental 😅) - Also tried versions where he learned about his opponents while fighting them - Another version that was interesting was dodging attacks every X seconds (but that became kinda hard to use and was already similar to old Pantheon's passive) - Kind of late in development however, we had a pretty functional kit that was working well and was satisfying, but it still felt it was missing something, and August suggested adding the revive back as max stacks on the passive - That just immediately clicked in Playtest and so we kept it - We hope you'll all enjoy Zaahen Rek'Sai - Rek'sai was erroneously listed as a buff yesterday, sorry about that - For those watching Worlds, or playing high ELO solo Q, Rek'sai has been pretty pretty powerful in Top Lane, but we're OK with her Jungle strength currently - In particular, she is sustaining too much, so we're taking those aspects down ADC Meta - ADC meta has been stale for a while, so we're looking for a bit of a shake up here - Most of the changes here are pretty self-explanatory Skarner - Skarner has been pretty heavily overnerfed, so we're restoring a bunch of power to him this patch