So the changes to counter lane swaps. Is it healthy for the game for Riot to impose additional systems to shake up the player developed meta? It seems heavy handed and may affect champion diversity at the pro level, which is already poor. Also, lane swaps don't happen in non pro play.

July 20, 2016

It is a little heavy-handed. No argument there. On the other hand, all of our attempts so far to create alternative strategies to lane swaps haven't worked and we've been hearing from viewers (and some pros) that they are getting a little tired of it. It felt like time to step in.

Totally agree that this probably rarely manifests outside of pro, but you're also unlikely to really feel these changes much outside of pro.

We're aware of the concerns about champions diversity, but I think the jury is still out on that. It's also possible the probability of lane swaps also drives certain champion picks. And, while champion diversity is desirable, an exciting esports season is desirable too and we don't want one goal to just completely trump the other.

I noticed that you don't usually entertain questions pertaining to balance changes on the PBE. Stuff like "why change X?" or "What problem are you trying to solve?" Is it because these questions usually get answered anyway in the patch notes?

July 19, 2016

It is generally because I lack the context. That design space moves really fast, since the design team makes changes every two weeks. Some conversations I just happen to be in, so I know the context, but it would also be really easy for you guys to stump me by just asking something like "Did the team consider X instead?" I would have to say "I don't know. Let me try and find the time to ask them." Sometimes I find that time, but I usually still feel like I am just a messenger conveying messages back and forth.

Are there any plans to go further than mastery level 7? Just want to know whether or not to save my Lissandra shard, or if I can use it to get my last 5 champs without feeling bad in a few month.

Felix Aldag

July 19, 2016

If we do it all, it won't be any time soon.

There is an inherent tension between asking players to focus so much on a single champion while the game is also asking you to be versatile with lots of champions. So we don't want to ever get to champ mastery level 12+, at least not with the current design.

Before you guys ruin my favorite champion with yet another rework, where can I go, as a player who mains the champion and actually knows how to play them, to give suggestions about rework ideas?

July 19, 2016

The PBE forum is the best place at the moment. We realize not everyone has access to that forum, but it's also weird to discuss changes that may or may not happen in the live forums. We're open to alternative ideas on this.

If you could end smurf accounts once and for all, would you do it?

July 19, 2016

Personally, yes. I recognize there a lot of reasons players make smurfs, from wanting to play with friends, to having long queue times at high elos, to real or perceived elo hell, to just being bored and wanting something else to do. But I think they do more harm than good overall.

Liked by: Daniel Watt Carnicore

Do you think the tutorial is even worth updating? People usually just want to learn the small basics and complete it ASAP so they can play the real game. Wouldn't it be it better to improve or create other systems to help learning instead of something few actually care about?

July 19, 2016

Totally agree. I think new players need to experience what it is that so many of us love about League pretty quickly. For me, I remember clearly a moment early on when an AI bot ran away from me, and my ult was on cooldown, and I caught it before it ran off. I then finished taking out my tower. I remember thinking "I get it now. I get why people play so many hours of this game."

If we can promise a moment like that for every new player, I really believe, they will be motivated to learn everything they need to know to play, even if we don't spoon feed it in some kind of well-meaning but ultimately tiresome tutorial experience.

Liked by: DwarvenGiant

You're an amazing dude, I will never forget what you've done for me. I was the disabled french guy we met at the MOP launch in Paris. Thanks so much for signing all my previous Collector Edition boxes and for the promised "blink" glyph for mages that came in patch x.2. You were the kindest dev. <3

François L.

July 19, 2016

Hey! It's so nice to hear from you again. That was a great launch event, and Paris is one of my favorite towns.

I will admit that one of the things I miss from working on a live game with constant releases is getting those big events from dropping a huge content milestone. So much of my motivation comes from seeing players having fun, and there is no better way to do that than seeing people in person celebrating a big milestone for a game we all love. :)

Liked by: Jkh Khalil Al-Bcherrany 420 Enrico Boccardi

Is it fair to believe Riot puts too much stock in those player surveys? Seems as though you guys are hung up on the "More fun with friends" thing and let it change a big part of your philosophy, despite the game having thrived and done just fine previously.

July 19, 2016

I want to answer this in a few ways.

First, surveys are a useful tool for us, but like any tool, they have limitations. For example, they can't always answer why a player prefers X to Y, or how much more they prefer X to Y. We combine the data we get from surveys with data we get from what players actually do (such as games played, games lost, that sort of thing), player feedback from things like social media, and our own experiences and intuition as developers.

The second point I want to hit though as why not to leave good enough alone? We believe strongly in League as an evolving game. The continual curation, whether it's fixing a balance problem or updating outdated visuals, is core to the vision of League. When we think we can do something better for players, we try to do it.

Now why do we think this particular direction could make things better for players? "More fun with friends" is a philosophy borne out of a lot of evidence. We hear from players all the time that they wish League, as a team game, was more amenable to friends. We know most players learn League because a friend teaches them, so having friends is a great onboarding tool. We know that players who play with friends stick with League longer, and when players leave, they often do so when their friends leave. We also get the benefit of seeing the teamwork of pros up close and personal, and we even compete in internal Riot tournaments, where we get to experience how rewarding it is to have your team practicing together, getting better together, and celebrating a victory together.

I'm not saying DQ delivers on all of those promises (far from it), but our goal was to give players the opportunity to experience more of that.

Are champions more fun when they're overpowered?

July 19, 2016

Yes. At least for you, and at least for awhile. Eventually playing in god mode gets boring. :)

Liked by: SquishyGengar

"Ghostcrawler made decisions that didn’t work for me - but when I came to see why, he was in here, answering. And on twitter, answering. I think he must have worked 16 hour days." From a post on the WoW forums a while back. How true would you say this is?

July 19, 2016

I tend to spend non-working hours talking to players and answering questions. I also write very quickly, which helps with it not taking too many hours, but also gets me in trouble sometimes. :)

I don't think it's possible to make design decisions that almost every player will like most of the time. It's an impossible goal. But I figure if I can talk to players about our intentions, then a few cool things can happen:

-- They can learn our intentions, so maybe if they were worried about a direction they won't be worried any longer (even if they don't like the individual change).
-- They can differentiate between whether it's the goals they don't like or whether they just think the tactics we're using to hit those goals aren't good ones.
-- Similarly, maybe they can mention small changes that provide big payoffs.
-- I can learn a lot about what players are thinking. All the data collection in the world sometimes isn't worth as much as one player saying "The reason I do X is because of Y."
-- If nothing else, maybe players will learn to understand that I care, so even when we get something wrong (which happens all the time), we can earn the trust that we will eventually get it right.

You aren't going to be able to make support attractive enough that it has pick parity with the rest of the roles without making the game subjectively worse for everyone but supports. Players don't like to be denied and would rather kill or be killed trying than just deny someone else a kill.

Critkeeper

July 19, 2016

I agree it's probably not possible to hit parity, but if we can improve the proportion even a little, it will help with queue times and not having to use autofill as much.

What if you had a separate mmr & ladder per role? Your account ranking is the highest per-role ranking. I'd love to be able to play Jungle in ranked without getting my ass handed to me.

Hyrum Graff

July 19, 2016

We talk about this idea a lot. It has merit if it can't somehow be exploited.

Do you sometimes pass your questions to "Ask Riot"?

July 19, 2016

Yes.

Why not make Jhin the new tutorial champion? Since his IP is expensive it will give new players a goal. It will show complex game mechanics and lastly you can create a sense of map awareness with him. yay or nay?

July 19, 2016

I'm not sure he's a great poster boy for the game. He's a cool champion, but is he that aspirational for a new player? Do a lot of players really like the appeal of a cold-blooded murderer?

But weren't you guys going to make it so it looked harder for your primary before it went straight to your secondary? Don't tell me you guys are backing out on that.

July 15, 2016

Correct. The system now looks harder for your primary position before giving up and going secondary.

Liked by: Dennis Caporale

Am I now able to queue as support secondary without almost always getting it? I haven't kept up or played recently and I know you guys were working on it. Just curious if I can start playing again with my desired roles

July 15, 2016

Support is still the least desired position. Instead of about 20% of players wanting to play support, it's like 12% or something (don't quote me on those). So if you queue support, the game is likely to find a group waiting on a support player and stick you into that game.

We are looking at some things we can do to make support more attractive, but mathematically there will probably always be one position in less demand than the others.

But why do queueing premades need incentives if it is already fun to do so, and has a strategic benefit?

July 15, 2016

Because it takes longer. League's matchmaking is usually so good that you can generally be in a game within a few minutes of clicking the icon. Forming a premade involves agreeing with folks about when to play League, curating a friends list so you have a lot of potential folks available, chatting with people in game asking when they will finish and if they want to play another game when they do.

That's why I describe it as a nudge. These are players that enjoy premades, but usually don't spend the effort. The incentive might make them think twice about just queuing solo. But it has to stay as a nudge and not a hammer. If the rewards are too massive, then everyone feels like premades are mandatory, and that's not the intention.

Liked by: Daniel Watt

I thought you were specially not saying that "you can solo or premade but it would be nice if you went premade"...... Cause then we are back to you telling us that we are playing the game wrong by going solo. There's no broad benefit to everyone when people all go premade

July 15, 2016

No, if you look at my answers on the topic, we consider three types of players:

1) I only ever want to solo
2) I usually solo but I enjoy premades when I spend the effort
3) I tend to only play premades

We're targeting the #2 with these incentives. Group #3 doesn't need the incentives, and group #1 either won't change their behavior or will change their behavior, but will resent it and may not enjoy the game, so the incentives don't serve the right purpose regardless.

Imagine we did something that was total overkill like giving a chest or 1000 RP whenever you form a premade. In that case, we think we would be hitting too many players in group 1, which isn't the intent. So it is important the rewards be modest. But if they are too modest, they won't actually change behavior of group 2.

Liked by: Daniel Watt

Don't pretend like this is the same thing as carpooling. Allowing premades don't benefit everyone in the game like carpooling helps pollution, premade and solo. It just benefits premades and just hurts solos. Don't ask us to just happily accept making the game objectively worse for solo players.

July 15, 2016

You can break most analogies if you poke on them hard enough, but I still think there are a lot of examples of this type of behavior. An airline company offers a frequent flier program where you get bonuses if you use their airline. They are trying to change your behavior by getting you to tend to use their airline rather than just fly on whoever offers the cheaper or more convenient flight.

Liked by: Enrico Boccardi DwarvenGiant

I was pretty disappointed with the ask Riot skins/bugs question. I thought we were going to get some cool factoids about code architecture. Instead we got "It might seem simple but it's actually complicated. We catch most bugs on PBE!" (1/2)

Hyrum Graff

July 15, 2016

I'll pass along the feedback. Maybe there is an opportunity in the future to a real tech-heavy deep-dive.

A lot of the bugs we get are some form of the following: the normal champion does X. For purposes of the skin we want it to Y. (Maybe Y is that the skin throws several different projectiles instead of the default one that X does.) There is a script that tells the champion how to animate and what art to use. To use multiple projectiles, the script now needs a bunch of if-then statements, so it is now a lot more complicated than the basic script. Champions with a lot of skins, and especially newer more complicated skins, have a bigger chance to break in this way somehow.

There is one flaw in your carpool analogy. For carpools, everyone benefits from carpooling, even those who don't carpool. However, only premade players get anything out of the being in a premade. Solo players get nothing from premades and in some cases have a worse experience. Thoughts?

July 15, 2016

Analogies are rarely perfect if you poke at them hard enough. I still think the basic idea stands that sometimes people want to do something that is inconvenient for them, so a slight nudge in the form of an incentive, can make it easier for them to commit.

TBH we haven't been focused a lot on whether solo players feel disenfranchized because premades get rewards (the rewards I believe are CP, chests, key frags and sometimes IP). I have heard a lot more about it from players in the last few days and we're looking into it.

What do you think about giving every player in a game with premades the same rewards? Only premades are guaranteed the extra, but solo players still get compensation when they have to play with premades. It may even get more solo players to queue premade once they get a taste of the incentives.

July 15, 2016

I think there is something to the idea of giving solo players who end up on a team with a partial premade some kind of reward. We'd have to be careful to just give them the same incentives though. The intention behind the incentives of things like extra CP and S chests is to encourage players to form premades. If anyone could earn those rewards, it that encouragement might end because you'd have a chance of just getting them anyway.

You, personally, continue to send the message that solo players aren't wanted every time you go on and on about how we don't need incentives to play. That is taking us for granted and is quite rude. We deserve the same rewards for playing just as much as anyone else, despite what you continue to say

July 15, 2016

The explanation I used recently was HOV lanes. "Look, we know carpooling with a bunch of friends or coworkers is a huge pain in the ass, but it's actually good for our infrastructure and the environment. So tell you what? If you go through the pain, we'll compensate you by letting you drive in a lane that will probably have a lot less traffic."

In this case we're saying "Look, we know that forming a premade with compatible and roughly similarly skilled players who play different positions is a huge pain in the ass, but it's much easier to talk strategy and communicate, and many of you have more fun when you form premades, so we'll compensate you by giving you some IP and other rewards."

Maybe it's possible the incentive rewards aren't doing that much now that you can just queue ranked with a premade and we wouldn't change behavior much if we removed them. We can look into that.

But maybe you'd agree that if we just gave out rewards to everyone (in this case said "Look, you can ride in the HOV lane in a carpool or not but it would be nice if you still carpooled") that it won't work as an incentive.

Liked by: Enrico Boccardi

Are you sure that the people asking for replays/sandbox mode will actually use them? Or are they just asking because it's expected for mobas to have them?

July 14, 2016

I don't know. :)

If players would really use them, we are all for adding them. If they are just expected out of some kind of feature parity, then we are less excited about adding them.

What is the most common problem that is your job to solve?

July 14, 2016

The most common is probably some form of: X doesn't understand why we prioritized one feature or change over another. X could be players, pros, Rioters, Tryndamere, my boss, etc.

Greg Street

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