League of Legends Dev Team

Welcome to @LeagueofLegends' hub for developer comms! Follow @LoLDev and our Devs in “Lists” for easy access to comments and discussions. We’re covering all sorts of gameplay topics like patch previews, champion feedback, ranked updates, and more. Glad you're here!

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.

Shyvana’s rework came out strong (57% winrate). We expect her to only get stronger as players optimize so we put together a micro patch nerf. It should be live now.

Full blog here: leagueoflegends.com/en-us/news/dev…

We just put out a dev blog on Team Voice in League. It includes our plans for team-based voice communications in League, and how we're approaching it to make sure its a feature with a very high quality bar worthy of your trust.

We will be turning on a Keybind/Input Update that will be active on EUW. We expect some players to experience settings/input/keybind issues. Please try restoring to defaults if you have issues and contact player support if you can't resolve them yourself.

Patch 26.6 Full Preview Azir - We're buffing Azir to distribute some of his power back into regular play capabilities through scaling power that Azir players hopefully will appreciate - Phreak is Xerath Lissandra - Lissandra hasn't really felt the same since her Q cooldown was nerfed in Season 9 - Times have really changed since then and her perma priority waveclear + aftershock taking days and in the vein of making champions feel better to play, we're seeing if she can sustain having this cooldown again Olaf JG - These changes are targeted at Jungle, which has been languishing a bit - Top is a little bit weak, so he will be getting buffed there a bit too Sunfire Aegis - Sunfire's build cost (1000g) has been long cited as a pretty painful experience of the item - While we think having some painful build paths is valuable for the long term value of League, we think this one is a bit too painful ---------- Ranked EUW/VN Matchmaking - We've had about a week and a half now of autofill vs autofill matchmaking being Live and we're seeing excellent results - In regions like Vietnam with a high autofill rate, we're seeing autofill vs autofill go from ~25% of games to 75% of games - In EUW, regular play was already good (90% of the time autofill vs autofill), but in high MMR we went from 30% to 85% - We will continue to roll out to more regions over the coming patches as we're seeing positive results here Apex LP - So far, so good on Apex LP fix resolving most of the issues. The fix looks to be good and is holding - >98% of players should be between 19 and 21 in terms of LP gains, calibrating up and down in small amounts (+19/-21 or +21/-19 or +20/-20) - We have one small fix coming in 26.6 to make this even more consistent

Patch Preview 26.6! Overall - Overall, the game is looking pretty healthy in terms of balance and broad satisfaction - Over the coming patches, we're going to be looking at some of the champs that have felt a bit unloved/worse for wear and would love to hear your suggestions (both champions and systems) Systems - Chempunk Chainsword has been one of the weaker Grievous items for a while. While we don't want Grievous items to become too commonplace, as it subtly degrades champion kits when too common, it is still just a bit weak for even that purpose - The support item minion penalty has been a pain point for support users and with role quests, the risk of funneling (why it was there in the first place) has been reduced pretty significantly, so we're removing that drawback Shen - Shen Jungle has really started to take off recently, which is really awesome to see! (thanks xPetu!) - That said, he is a tad strong, especially in lower levels of play Zaahen - We're really happy to see Zaahen picking up a sizeable audience in both Top and Jungle, but now that regular players, in addition to experienced players are starting to demonstrate that top end mastery performance, he's looking too strong across the board - Currently, we think his Jungle is a bit stronger than Top, so the nerfs are mostly focused there Skarner Top focus - Skarner has been out of the spotlight for a while and since we've tapped down a few of the things that were causing him to be overbearing in Top (especially W max and the E point blank kidnaps), we think he can get a bit more power there Olaf - Jungle Olaf has fallen a little behind the pack so we're adding some power back

Ojo creadores de @lol_es: ARAM: Mayhem está teniendo una tracción brutal y no parece que vaya a bajar. Está moviendo a muchísima gente (sobre todo jugadores que llevaban tiempo fuera), pero apenas hay contenido que cubra este interés. Si buscáis nuevas ideas para vuestros streams o vídeos, es el momento de lanzarse. Además, estamos abiertos a escuchar propuestas de contenido para ver cómo podemos ayudar a amplificarlas. Si planeas algo, escríbenos :)

RT @RiotPhroxzon: Pushed another fix to all regions for LP gains in Apex. This should hopefully be the last fix. Thanks to everyone for…

Mayhem enjoyers; we just fired off a Micropatch ▶️ Fixed a bug where Wee Woo Wee Woo's activates 3-Set Bonus on 2-Set Activation ▶️Fixed a bug where Devil on Your Shoulder could infinitely heal when an ally has the Wee Woo Wee Woo set active"

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.

Hi all, we wanted to let you know that a recent issue with our Match-V5 API not respecting startTime and endTime query parameters has been fixed. Thanks to everyone who reported this issue and for bearing with us while we worked to resolve it!

Shyvana PBE Update PBE has generated a lot of passionate and helpful feedback for Shyvana's VGU so we have put together some changes that we believe will help improve satisfaction and the feel of the new kit. As always on PBE things are always subject to change as we test.

Hello Arena players! Due to some issues with the augment Calculated Risk we've disabled it while we work on a fix. You might say this is a calculated risk we were willing to take. We expect to have a fix ready in 26.6, we appreciate your patience as we get this corrected!

Are you a NA @LeagueOfLegends… 💙 Watch/LAN Party Organizer 💙 Collegiate Esports Org 💙 Anime/Gaming/Cosplay Con We’re proudly launching an OFFICIAL, FREE Community Program where LoL is sending out DIGITAL & PHYSICAL SWAG to support your events! 🔗: leagueoflegends.com/en-us/news/com…

Today was my first day on the Gameplay Analysis Team at Riot! I’ll be playtesting and giving feedback for new changes coming to League. Excited to work with and learn from all the talented designers at Riot :D

.@RiotPabro and @RiotMeddler are back with another Dev Update. Today they cover: 👁️Gameplay 🥉MMR Distribution 🐲Shyvana 🥳ARAM: Mayhem 🤔Common Questions Timestamps: Intro: 0:00 S1 Gameplay: 0:09 Ranked: 1:38 Shyvana: 4:38 ARAM: Mayhem: 7:15 FAQs: 8:00 Outro: 10:54

EUW Ranked Test Thread We are looking to go Live with Matchmaking improvement for autofill vs autofill and secondary vs secondary balance at 2AM CET (~1 hour from now) There will be about 5-10m of Ranked downtime while we switch over and people will be ejected from queue (but not from game). It will only be active in Ranked Solo/Duo in EUW Please use this thread to post any weird game results. We have done as much testing as we can do, but that's ultimately still going to be very little compared to testing on Live! Things we're looking for (we don't think any of these are going to happen, but please look out for them): 1. People who are stuck in Matchmaking for a much longer time than usual 2. Really wide Ranked differences in game, eg. a silver in a Diamond game 3. Worse balanced games overall 4. Autofill balance looking off Please reply to the thread if you see anything and please post the lobbies and preferably game_id (you can black out the names if you want)!

Patch 26.5 Full Preview! Ranked EUW Test delayed for another day, we're playing it safe to land the changes without breaking anything Volibear - Voli changes are targeted at balancing out his AD builds vs his currently strong AP builds; needs a bit more time to land Lillia - We're looking to pull back on some of the previous changes and bring Lillia's power level most of the way back to where she was before Orianna - Changes are targeted at reducing the power level of her early laning phase, especially when sitting on Rank 1 Q for several levels Neeko - Neeko has been strong in Pro Play for a while while not being overly strong in regular play - We're taking some power out of her vision outputs which are better used in Pro Play without overly impacting her regular play Varus - Varus was overbuffed a while ago and so we're practically reverting the buff to his Q damage - Lethality Varus has been the strongest ADC in Pro and so we're tapping him down to not overrun the Pro meta

Patch 26.5 Preview! Ranked EUW Test - We ended up getting delayed and the new plan is to deploy around 6pm PST tomorrow (roughly 2-3AM EUW) - There will be about 5-10m of Ranked downtime, so we're doing this in off peak and monitoring that things are working correctly First Stand on 26.5 - We made a significant number of changes on 26.4 and so 26.5 is a more conservative set of changes to ensure a good Pro meta for First Stand - Ori, Azir, Neeko, Lethality Varus are some of the strongest outliers in Pro Play currently, and so we're tapping them down Items - Hubris is looking just generally underpowered - It doesn't really have an audience and also doesn't exhibit the same properties that other snowball items like Mejais have (higher winrates because being purchased when snowballing) - Bandlepipes is looking pretty strong, especially on second item. Locket is one of its primary competitors so we're giving it a buff on second item by flatting some of the shield value Patch Followups - Lillia is looking a bit worse for wear after her buffs in a previous patch were over magnitude, so we're giving her a bump back up (it may end up getting delayed to a future patch if we need more time to land on a higher quality changelist, but haven't decided) - We're looking to see what Mel looks like at a higher power level after making some of the frustration lowering changes in 26.3