Zach

@_GrayFrog @RiotPhroxzon The main benefit of ADC quest is the bonus gold + extra slot for components, not having a 7th completed item.

Patch 26.7 Preview Thank you to the team for handling the Patch while I was at First Stand! Many of the folks who went hadn't been to Brazil before, including me and the players there were just so passionate, we had a lot of listening sessions with the community, Q&A's, and the event itself was great It was overall an amazing, though short time (only 2 days), but alas, lots of exciting work to be done back home! First Stand - Congrats to BLG and the LPL for winning their first international title in about 3 years! - The First Stand meta ended up being quite good; there was significant diversity in every role between classes - One notable gap was AP junglers and AD mids (related) and so we'll see what we can do to enable some more of those picks heading into the Season - Was especially happy with the Bot meta; Lethality Varus had a 14% winrate and there was a good mix of Casters, Hypercarries and Utility as well as many fringe picks like Zeri, Kog, etc. - Ranged Supports are really starting to get away from the rest of the pack now with laning being a much larger focus due to role quests - Not necessarily a bad thing though, given that we've been in Melee supp meta for many years - Game pacing overall felt good (or at least I thought so) and the lack of lane swaps really allowed each role to shine, with GigaBin showcasing the power of an unleashed Top lane role - It really did seem like every lane could carry and balance of objectives vs splitting felt pretty appropriate Shyvana - Shyvana definitely initially landed a bit strong and her hotfix put her in a decent spot after that - Shyvana has a bit of an unintended interaction with Sylas that we will be micropatching out tomorrow; essentially he benefits double from her auto attacks passive (with Sylas's passive) that makes his attacks do pretty eye popping values - We're still taking our time to evaluate role viability for Top Shyvana and whether it's reasonably supportable without destroying Jungle role satisfaction - We've also been working on some changes to increase satisfaction of Passive, reduce MMR skew, increase counterplay and satisfaction of E Support Quest - A few patches ago, we talked about reducing the negative impact of the support quest to reduce complexity - We're going to pull this all the way this patch. This may result in some farming support shenanigans, but then you're also denying your bot carry their quest progression; we're giving it a go to see if anything breaks More on champions tomorrow

@zac_gaming__ with LP cap you were artificially closer to rank 1 than you should've been. The MMR gap implied a huge LP gap, but because LP was capped at the top end, the top players could only go so high. Now that they've uncapped LP players are just moving towards where their actual MMR is.

imagine being a master player with these gains and seeing a rank 1 player on +30/-10 unserious season

@GriffinHQ_ I mean its literally a choice between role select + autofill or neither, Riot have already said this.

@mpGragon @GriffinHQ_ The ladder doesn't exist for your personal comfort and enjoyment. You're not entitled to GM. Yes, it would take a ton of time and improvement to get there. That's the entire point. The skill gap is that big.

@GriffinHQ_ I'm currently E3/E2 player sitting on 52/3% winrate with +19/-21, demoted from D4, while GM is 1125 LP? How many games, time and improvement would that take for an average League player? This shit is insane, how someone can see this and be like "yeah, I'm motivated".

Never said this before and I have been playing since season 1 but Season 16 is genuinely THE WORST season I have ever played How is it possible that Challenger players are getting +30 no matter MMR and master players are getting +25 or +22 It should be the opposite LMAO So now the ladder is set and if you wanted to hit a higher rank it is too late as they get more lp per win than you. I dont mind having the lp cap increased but at least fix the matchmaking and LP gains before you do this... its insane how incompetent this entire season has been. Even aside from LP gains there are a million issues Matchmaking Autofill FF system Grief detection Bounty system

@drewlevin Its probably just a send a new rank between masters and GM angle

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

@Bossman_Blur @drewlevin @CardSharkRoam The problem is that the MMR gap is actually that high. Others have basically deserved 2000 LP for years, but have been kept lower than that artificially.

@drewlevin @CardSharkRoam It’s not that people don’t want to prove they deserve higher ranks, they don’t want to have to climb 2000 LP which is going to take 1000’s of games. I have a job and a life besides league

@calebpetty123 @drewlevin @doaenel @RiotPhroxzon Totally makes me question my assumption I had that at the highest level, you would just have people that are machines who love the game and play to improve and so don't need any kind of validation from the system anymore. Based on the reaction of challenger players, clearly not.

@calebpetty123 @drewlevin @doaenel @RiotPhroxzon I think the idea was Masters used to have a level of skill required where in theory that was meant for people who didn't need milestones provided by the system anymore. But I am reading even GM / challenger players say they still need it. It's quite interesting.

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.

@drewlevin @doaenel @RiotPhroxzon When I hit Masters for the first time I knew I had no shot of hitting GM I accepted it. But for a lot of people that means they just don't keep grinding. Masters (and higher, reading responses) still need the artificial progress that visual ranks provide but it effectively stops.

@doaenel @RiotPhroxzon Do Masters players want to climb or do they want to feel like they’re making progress? Smurfing, if I understand your argument, is about seeking out denser progress satisfaction. Two distinct problems with very different solutions.

@RiotPhroxzon I'm d1 / master 0lp adc main, last year I played 824 games and was off-role 17 times. I'm only at 176 games and I'm at 16 off-role games. How is this possible? If you guys changed this can you please revert it its very noticeable and feels horrible

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

@drewlevin if some guy spam pings my head when I die and then flashes in place in masters is this not obviously hinting m

ranked league players: should we treat flashing for fun (in the way that people do in aram) as a piece of evidence that someone is inting?

@AerialLiz don't think any streamer has beat an ADC challenge basically ever

Last time we had this type of thing was Dante getting stuck in d4-e1, no? 🤔

@4froboi well no for the same reason magnus carlsen doesn't get 50 elo for stomping timmy

But can riot just do +20 -20 for Masters+ Fuck mmr Its not Witchcraft

@redvsbluniverse infinite mileage out of this video i swear

@drewlevin Also there's no world this doesn't come at the cost of either matchmaking or queue times, and neither is a price worth paying for a largely non problem.

@drewlevin I put bad, not because I don't think it's necessarily bad but because for me the second order effects would be bad. For me dealing with this friction is part of League and Riot accounting for this in matchmaking is them putting their hands on the scale.

question I am curious about (follow-up poll in the reply is even spicier): if we matchmade games of league NORMS where - keeping skill and role preferences as they are - we tried to put people who share FF preferences on the same team, that would be:

@RiotPhroxzon Sounds good, explains in full the inflation we've been seeing.

Dev Update is out and there was a chunky section there about Ranks leagueoflegends.com/en-us/news/dev… Upcoming things going out: 1. Autofill Balance: - Our initial deployment in EUW to improve autofill Matchmaking has gone quite well (it is now fully Live and chugging along) - So far, we are seeing a dramatic reduction autofill vs primary mismatches, eg. Autofill JG vs Main JG in high MMR (Master+) go from 35% >>> 5%. ie. Players should expect >90% of games to have role assignment balance - Outside of high MMR, this was already happening, so not much is changing. - We're looking to roll this out in more regions. 2. Master+ LP gains - This problem is a bit hairy, but we've gotten to the bottom of it and know what the causes are and how to fix it - We hope to have a solve here soon that we can deploy as early as 26.5 (no promises, but this is our current target we're tracking towards) 3. Mastery Scores: - We've heard a bunch of discussion around Mastery scores seeming wrong and we agree - In particular short games are where this shows up the most - We're planning some adjustments to resolve this issue, still TBD on when they go out ------------------------------------- Rank Distribution (going to snip out some stuff we wrote in the dev update) - At the core, we want players of all ranks to have a similar spread of demonstrated skills and understanding across them—this means that players in Gold IV through Gold I should have a baseline understanding that when a jungler is seen top-side, they should push lane to get priority to take dragon, for example. - We adjusted the vast majority of Ranks to make this true across the ladder - This included putting players at the higher end of Diamond into Master (These players were likely historically already playing in games with Master players, and maybe were Master at some point) - This left a large LP gap between the bottom of Masters and Grandmaster/Challenger however. We know this is an issue and pain point and so we want to change it in the future

@Steve_Michael_ @RiotPhroxzon # of ranks has completely nothing to do with the grind; they can always tune the speed at which you reach your intended rank

@RiotPhroxzon If we ever increase the number of ranks in the game, aren’t we slowly reaching a point where ranked feels too grindy to get to your supposed elo than it being a climb from your supposed elo to improving to reach higher?

European diplomats when war breaks out outside of standard 9-5 working hours:

@jisuunaa ah okay so I roll L9 member as my jungler and I can't talk to him? sick I love being at a competitive disadvantage bc I rng got toxic jungler who can't speak to me while enemy team can talk to theirs

I think one thing that could be a good idea for riot is that voice chat could be implemented for honor 4-5 players? Maybe this could help prevent some sort of toxicity from the honor 0 draven/kassadin mains for example. Just a suggestion.