RMLWG7

@zac_gaming__ @RiotMeddler this is not meeting the objectives of adding a new and balanced alternative control scheme

i was flamed for saying WASD would be broken as fuck on mages btw

@ttwisted35 Boooring. God forbid you have some edginess. They’re siphoning all the personality from the lore. Thank god I don’t follow it properly anymore 🙂

Vayne Lore Update 🧵 Riot updated Vayne's lore on Universe, the goals seems to have been to make her less remorseless, cold or apathetic. Shoutout to the wiki folks for noticing! Full changes below ⬇️

@Spideraxe30 Damn did Yasuo lose his place as the most popular champion?

@drewlevin Bravo Riot 👏🏻 Now let us rework the reward ecosystem and improve on the rewards themselves AND their visuals. @drewlevin

hard reset

@RiotPhroxzon I am really liking this emphasis on injecting strategic and identity variance into the game. Every touchpoint should be approached in a manner; whether being champions, roles, items, runes, classes, etc… @RiotPhroxzon

Patch 26.9, Season 2 Preview! Patch 26.9 is coming soon; a lot of systems changes and with it, a few champion changes. Some of the more significant ones, I'll go in more depth tomorrow and also in the Patch Rundown. Overall - When approaching 26.9, we were thinking a lot about systems and champion spaces that needed satisfaction, strategic distinction and also opportunities to create surface area for excitement and dreaming of what's possible - The first place we were looking was in enabling certain types of systemic gameplay patterns where they were a little under the mark Starting Items - It's been a long time since adding new starting items to the game! - Doran's Bow is an option in greedy lanes where you trade off health (and are more susceptible to burst), but if you have high uptime on an opponent - Doran's Helm is intended to be a situational choice (though some might be hardbound) for champions who don't need the sustain from Doran's Shield in lane - We're hoping that these changes allow players to eek out even more advantages in certain lanes and add a little more depth to laning interactions Statikk Shiv - AD On-Hits have been languishing for a while and Statikk Shiv presented an opportunity to take an item that not many champions used and add some spice to it (the lightning applying on-hits) - Since some of the more eye-popping examples, we've made some changes to remove Staikk Shiv's on-hit lightning also impacting the primary target (so it will only apply off th einitial attack - While it's possible this may not be sustainable in the long term, pushing the frontier of innovation also carries some risk, so we want to see where it goes - We're excited to see some interesting cooking and new builds! Deathfire Touch, Stormraiders and Comet - This philosophy also presented an opportunity within the keystone mastery system - Comet has been overloaded for a while, serving the DoT mage class, albeit poorly and it also tries to compete with Aery on this axis - We saw an opportunity to bring back an old favorite in Deathfire Touch and this archetype of poke champion is no longer so oppressive in the modern game - This allowed us to make a change to Comet to make it more about long range poke, while also opening up Deathfire Touch as a more sustained option - We hope this differentiation allows the Keystones to play a more differentiated role - At the same time, Phase Rush has been hard to balance, especially for Control Mages who often use a few low damage spell instances to run away and play a spacing game - We felt that the Design of Stormraider's Surge was just superior to Phase Rush and represented the right level of commitment to allow the Movespeed to be powerful - Historically, we had to overly nerf Phase Rush to the point of being unsatisfying for the majority of the roster, while still being too good on the champs that could proc it too freely

@zac_gaming__ If it is better at anything, then it does not meet the main objective of introducing an alternate control scheme. @RiotMeddler

@CestDommage Just wanted drop a message here and hope that thematically and visually, the client overhaul will still look like League. You’ve had a tendency to really strip aura away from art - cc ranked borders, level borders, and mastery icon (before it was changed). @CestDommage

Well I guess the cat is out of the bag on this one now. I am the design lead on the new client. Send me your hopes and dreams. Obviously I cannot talk about things I cannot talk about, but I can listen and discuss generalities. Also, happy holidays all!

@RiotAugust @Spideraxe30 Champion identity based changes will be one of the best changes or directional philosophies implemented to League in recent times @RiotPhroxzon @RiotAugust Hoping for this ethos to apply to roles and classes as well 🙏🏼

Zeri changes should be on PBE. Here are the goals: -Restore some of her old identity by increasing ⚡️SPEED ⚡️ -Increase power in lane -Lower Burst Damage and late game DPS to compensate

@faeriefountain @AithusaHere Skin quality has improved so much, especially battle pass skins. One request though, please decouple the Ruby chroma from the bundle, it feels like crap to have to buy the bundle for one chroma (which is usually the best)…

it's always such a joy to chat with @AithusaHere !!!!

@RiotPhroxzon We are spoiled with Riot and the League team in general. The cadence of updates, transparent two-way communication, and simply the WILLINGNESS to seem like you give a shit are all industry leading quantities. Thanks for all that you do. League is the 🐐 Bring back 5s ranked

Was fun to chat with Armand again! On League's Many Audiences Wanted to provide more context about rate of change 1. The vocal minority on Reddit, Twitter, Bilibili, Inven, etc. are a very specific (but important!) part of the player base. 2. The energy/investment required to even post at all is too high for most people. This leaves a non-vocal majority that is often not posting on these platforms. 3. We try to get the opinions of these players with surveys and other methods. What we've found is that players who play a lot (streamers, Pros, social media users, etc.) will almost always want more change. They typically often play majority of Ranked SR and play hundreds if not thousands of hours a Season. The majority of our player base are average players that have a higher chance of finding it difficult to keep up with too many large updates (this is not all, but a significant portion). They may have lifestyle commitments like School, Work or Kids. These players might play more normal SR, play more Modes like ARAM and might not be Ranked grinders. As a result, even if the entire vocal minority on social media is saying the same thing (we want more change!), our average players could be saying something completely different (and in this case they are) If we change the game too much, even if the changes are good, they can lead to a significant amount of players feeling like "League changes too much to keep up" and alienating some of that longtime audience. At the same time, if we don't make changes that make the game exciting, fresh and interesting, then the game can become stale. So, we think Season Start is a good time to be making changes that feel exciting, fresh and interesting, but our inclination to do that in the middle of the year has gone down a decent amount as a result of these studies, though maybe that will change in the future On making good changes We also need to make a distinction between: 1. Large changes that are good 2. Large changes that aren't so good It's a fair critique to say if the size of changes are large, but the changes aren't good, then it's not the size of changes that's the problem, it's the quality of the changes. Given League's longevity, the "low hanging fruit" of good changes gets smaller and smaller every year. The ability to both "go big" and "have that be good" becomes harder and harder even with a lot of investment. eg. Look at movies, AAA games, TV shows, etc. At the same time, our job is to find those spaces that are awesome and are surprising even when they're hard to find. But it does mean that if we can't find something, we think it's better to make smaller changes that we think are good than go larger with changes that might be frustrating to players.

@RiotPhroxzon Enhancing and doubling-down on champion identity is a very very welcomed and needed change for the game. Avoiding homogenisation is pivotal to maintain league’s identity long-term. I hope to see this RPG element apply to roles, classes, and items too. @RiotPhroxzon

Patch 26.8 Full Preview! Viego - There's some notable discrepancies for specifically Viego's data in our internal data that led us to want to initially buff him - Looking at external data however seems to be notably different - Going to double check this data tomorrow and validate the data pipelines before determining whether or not to proceed with the buff Hwei - In line with the fantasy fulfilment I was talking about yesterday, Hwei changes are leaning into his identity as a combo mage - It is a cool pattern and in particular, this set of changes skews him more towards being effective in mid lane compared to bot lane with the level scaling - We're not opposed to him being viable in bot lane, but pushing him towards midlane - We think this makes Hwei more uniquely satisfying compared to say having his damage come from predominantly single QQ, QW or QE casts Lillia - Lillia's power clearing and movement speed are some of her most defining aspects - We're restoring some of that clear speed to better fulfil her fantasy there Lucian - Lucian in bot lane doesn't have a strong differentiation from Corki as a similarly early game dominant ability focused caster - These changes are trying to put more of Lucian's power into his early mobility and giving him more casts of it - We're going to monitor Lucian in solo lanes Mel - We separated some of Mel's damage output in 26.3 by creating a separation between her first initial hit and the subsequent hits - We're reducing how much value she gets from this initial Q landing and backloading the damage more to give her damage more counterplay - We still think we need to do more work to Mel long term - (ARAM) Another note here is that we've been investigating some ARAM specific changes to Mel, since her reflect can be harder to play against in that mode, given the narrowness of the play area Mundo - Mundo rates very highly on our frustration metrics and our changes here are targeted at average play Jungle - Not much to say here, we think top is in a more reasonable spot

@HonestPillow @Spideraxe30 All the April Fools stuff really should not be in Normal Draft imo. I felt like everything is so fast paced, even quest completion. Always worrying that you guys will do unannounced changes of that nature to the game 😝

Hey folks, we have removed the Karthus Ultimate mechanic from the April fools package

@RiotPhroxzon @RiotPhreak Awesome good luck. I’ve always seen this position as the “defence against the dark arts” position at Riot. Keep true to the League design pillars and all will be fine. @RiotPhroxzon

Live SR Design Update Yesterday, @RiotPhreak announced that he will be stepping away from Live Balance for the foreseeable future to work on some other exciting projects within League! Want to thank him for all his work and I think we can agree that PhreakSzn has been a really great time to be a League player! I will be re-assuming overseeing the day to day Live work more directly, (which I'm also pretty excited about!), but not expecting too much to change in terms of how we approach patches. I will also be taking over Patch Rundowns starting on 26.8 to help keep that line of communication with the community open as well as continuing on Patch Previews. (More on this soon)

@RiotPhroxzon @RiotPhroxzon I really hope the team is not trying to homogenise carry potential across all the roles. It is healthy for the game if not every role has equal amounts of agency and not every role effects the game the same way.

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

@EnzoNayshun @jaraaxz @loltyler1

@jaraaxz Whatever is necessary to cover the forehead and hairline he’s had receding since like 2016

Still rocking this trim in his 30s is insane

@Sheep_Esports @ArmandLuque The dream is to continuously fail upwards in the corporate world just like @IAmGrza

📰 Global Head of LoL Esports: "We hear from teams that they want more competition and more games, and we know fans are hungry for more competitive." "The rise of the third-party ecosystem has actually been really interesting" by @ArmandLuque ⬇️ sheepesports.com/en/all/article…

@ttwisted35 I don’t like how the lore is losing its soul. League lore was special because it felt like it eas raw. Hard tk articulate myself to be honest, but if stories get that point, it means that you have something rooted, gritty. @RiotMeddler don’t ruin the lore please 🙏🏼

I like the changes to Jarvan's bio, him being inexperienced at the start of his military career makes more sense! Xin's death not being mentioned is crazy tho Shyvana's changes are weird, Yvva is no longer after her in specific, now they just *randomly* meet three times lol

@CestDommage @Spideraxe30 It’s about time… yall really were doing some insane mental gymnastics to avoid the inevitable. Toxicity is everywhere, man up and implement it. Eagerly waiting for it.

Some thoughts on Team Voice Chat in League. I cannot answer many questions but I am certainly interested in what folks think. :)

@Manenkos @RiotPhroxzon @drewlevin You can’t do that in modern League and that is what is missing in the game. The team made it swing too much into team play and forgot how good solo carrying is for the game.

Back when solo carrying with mechanics was a thing

@Spideraxe30 Should only be in Swiftplay and not Normal Draft please 🙏🏼 @RiotMeddler

Last Hit Assistance is finally going live in 26.5