fatalism

My will is captive to existence. Must shrug one off to advance the other, and the bonds between are writhing slugs, not shackles. Imbibe the sludge or fetter self and fate - what remains is I.

@fullslol Yes bro let me collect my barrels full of cash before cash becomes as worthless as toilet paper

At 2000+ LP, NA has 23 players. EUW has 115 players. We just can't be serious. Lock tf in NA. I mean we're literally hosting worlds this year.

@CatCovenantDude and it would remain an offmeta strat, but having that possibility in the game is weird bc riot would most likely be pressured hard by the community to change it back if we ever see it adopted. It's gamebreaking imo to have support quest give you everything with 0 downsides

@CatCovenantDude My concern is comp play not soloq. If this no penalty sup gains gold faster, that is an advantage to a team prepped for that outcome even if they drop one player to be a 0 econ sup. There's also a good chance it's too narrow of playstyle for a team to pick it up ...

Patch 26.7 Full Preview! Shyvana - We're still working on a larger set of changes for Shyvana, but they haven't been finalized yet (I mentioned the direction of some of the changes yesterday) - For this patch, just a change to make Ultimate Haste interactions and also the Sylas interaction nerf from previously Cassiopeia - Buffs to 2 areas that Cassiopeia thrives in; her initial mana pool for early all-ins when she tags with Q - Her maxed E, to reinforce her sustained DPS identity Kalista - Kalista has fallen off significantly in priority in Pro Play, which means we can buff her for regular play! - We're focusing the power in the core area where people play her; her E damage Rell - Similarly, Rell has fallen off pretty significantly as well - Her initial Ult damage will increase her threat in early all-ins, while her E will allow her to fulfil more of her mobile horse identity Veigar - Veigar is in a slightly strong spot for regular play midlane, but is really rocking the bot lane a bit too hard, especially in regular play - The nerfs are targeted at R which sits at Rank 1 in bot lane for quite a lot longer than in solo lanes Singed - Singed is looking a bit too strong in especially normal play - While this nerf looks like a bit of a meme, we expect it matters more than expected on paper just due to the number of stats impacted when ult is active Ornn - Ornn is just a little bit strong, especially given that he has a relatively steep mastery curve

@GreatScott2k16 @emiliacosplay But this post is referring to a woman that wasn't picked solely on the basis of gender? You're wrong if you think the largest or first barrier for women is simply skill because it would be very easy to look at teams with lower level players than the GM player in question

@emiliacosplay I think if there was a woman good enough to be in those div 2/3 tourneys teams would be chomping at the bit to get them. The marketability would literally be insane and they'd get retarded press.

this type of narrative pisses me off. do you think Caps reached his level of play by NOT first playing in lower tier teams and gaining experience? when women are turned down and overlooked at lower tiers, they lose the opportunity to develop their skills in a competitive environment and continue improving to reach the level of a tier 1 pro. check the leaguepedia of 99% of pros, they all competed at lower levels first. soloq straight to tier 1 is INCREDIBLY rare. i dont know why this concept is terribly difficult for people to grasp.

@emerrin_lol defect is so cool this was such good sts gameplay

play slay the spire and slay the spire 2

@xXgokufan300Xx @guimedeirus @Tungdil6171 @RiotPhroxzon Read the support item that generates 800g flat and 9g/5s and tell me that a farming support won't be up gold the entire game on a farming arc

@guimedeirus @Tungdil6171 @RiotPhroxzon I think idea is that quests will stop most of the cheese. if you let support farm they don't get extra gold from adc quest so probably won't be viable

@RiotPhroxzon Little early for the April's fools joke, we need an explanation on the support farm reduction or we're about to see the worst balance change of the year.

@RiotPhroxzon People want an end to this arbitrary system where the only metric that determines if you will climb is completely hidden behind the scenes. There is no sense in the current system inflating players ~500-800 lp when they're just going 50% wr. Just show everyone's mmr in apex tier.

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

@ShuffleFM it's actually a pretty dope design when you take into account sly making it better than outmaneuver in a good amount of cases in spire2. A common that is always the pick and always your upgrade isn't where people should want balance to be.

This patch looks healthy for the game so I'm surprised at all the pushback. Prepared is the only real one I'm disagreeing with. My buddy sent me the perfect image.

@slime_machine It's the population most influenced by propaganda and least interested in logic

why are low elo wageslave republicans so against the idea of global warming? like i get it if the higher ups want fossil fuels and the apocalypse and shit but i feel like theres no logic to the pig people in oklahoma or whatever being so touchy about it

@emiliacosplay Emilia mama should've smacked him

me after arriving in china: ugh im all ugly after my 17 hour flight my uncle: dont worry you were already ugly HSHDHSKAK OK???

@drewlevin There's a huge difference between skill and LP because the LP system has been broken for 3 months and rewards spamming games on certain patches/only playing decay on others. Annoying as fuck to try to hit chal thru game skill when the real trick is to game your shitty LP system.

is this just what’s going on rn for masters players or am I missing an important part of the conversation/picture?

@RiotPhroxzon Riot should straight up apologize for ruining the apex+ experience this season. We get this wishy washy bs about being patient and trusting it will get fixed; meanwhile the experience of +10/-30 or +30/-10 are both dogshit and completely ruining the ladder's integrity.

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.

@RiotPhroxzon thanks for "fixing" lp gains every single patch and it amounting to nothing! i'm sure it's all small hiccups though and not something that's persisted 3 whole months

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

@mwsMTG_ hard to say if that's more broken than all the cards they gave Madness cost 0

slay the spire has 0 mana faithless looting and u guys are saying there are more broken cards?

@DeputyARUUU Complete loser trying to police you

does this actually bother men or is this guy just a loser??? Be honest

@FlareIsGone Building a deck by adding a bunch of attacks has always gotten heavily punished in high asc spire, unless you can properly balance it by removing base strikes or the attacks you add go draw positive like pommel+

I'm a really big fan of Osty builds in Slay the Spire 2, but I'm unsure of how good they are. On one hand summoning a lot of HP for Osty feels very strong, but actually running a lot of his attacks doesn't. What do you guys think, I'm probably just doing it wrong.

@AlphaBoby1 > greentexting in the big '26

>never called him a bad player >never told him he got benched for being a bad player >called him out on behaving bad and said "I see why he got benched" >apologized for assuming >him flipping the narrative so it looks like I'm just hating

(slay the spire 2 spoilers?) im so proud of him

small creators should remember this: nasty comments mean you have reached the idiots. You've reached outside of your circle. Embrace the reach.