If you pick a 'deck', then everyone just picks the 'deck' that has all of the poke or sustain champs and we're back to where we started. Make ARAM actually random. Pull from the entire pool. We have rerolls; if someone gets a champ they hate, they can reroll. And if they can't, they deal with it.

November 16, 2015

I suppose another approach is that there is a "ARAM rotation" similar to the free champ rotation, so that players can't stack the deck with Nidalees. Then you could at least get an idea of which champs you might end up with.

I agree the reroll is best used for champs you hate, not champs you have no freaking clue how to play.

Liked by: Aselja

What's the worst theorycrafting you've ever heard?

November 16, 2015

There are two categories of bad theorycrafting. The first is when someone just says something very uninformed or intentionally trolly and nobody pays much attention. The more interesting case is when a sizable segment of the population believes for something to be true, when it is not the case. This could be because the mechanic in question is really convoluted (old WoW armor pen comes to mind) or because a math error gets introduced somewhere along the way and everyone else misses it.

I can't narrow down the "worst" that I've ever head, though it's a great question. I'll think about it. I remember there being a lot of concern about how long WoW healers could keep someone alive who was taking an amount of damage that we intended to kill them. They were evaluating a worst case scenario where they had essentially already lost the encounter. It's hard to tell if they knew that was the case (i.e. they were using a specious argument just to argue for buffs) or if they really believed their particular class was too weak.

Where can we get those League of Legends credit cards? They were available around season 4 of worlds. Were they temporary?

November 16, 2015

I didn't know this one off the top of my head, so I asked, and unfortunately they are no longer available. Sorry. :(

Liked by: Aselja

KHAZIX BUFFS WHERE?!!?

November 16, 2015

I think next patch.

So, was there some kind of unexpected complication with the attack range changes? Quite a few of them have been reverted entirely.

November 16, 2015

AFAIK, there are some melee attack range changes slated for patch 5.23. It is mostly a consistency pass.

Just wanted to say that as someone who has been playing since early season 3, I've recently lost a lot of the joy I had for this game. Yesterday I played on the new patch for the first time and, win or lose, I had the most fun playing league than I've had in years. Thank you.

November 16, 2015

I appreciate the thoughts, but all of the credit goes to the teams working on the changes. I know things are a bit rocky right now, which we understood would likely be the case with the number of changes we implemented. It will stabilize.

Liked by: Aselja

Hi, this isnt about League of legends, and i hope you will answer me. I am soon to graduate from university where my major is Games Programming. What kind of suggestion would you have for a newly graduated student in Games Programming?

Can Aydin

November 16, 2015

I don't have a great answer for this, but I have a lot of friends who are engineers, so I am going to tweet this comment and see if you get any response. (My twitter account is @OccupyGStreet.)

I'll edit this answer if I get good responses.

What's your personal opinion on the current state of Rageblade? It seems to be incredibly strong and somewhat undercosted.

November 16, 2015

Consensus here is that it is probably too strong.

Liked by: Aselja

There is no keystone mastery i want to use on zilean... Which one should i take? (support)

November 16, 2015

Our plan is to continue to add keystones over time for champions who can't find anything that really fits them, especially for their second tree.

Liked by: Aselja

I mean this in all seriousness - why does it matter if people end up with champs they are inexperienced with in ARAM? It's ARAM. Playing random champs is the point. Playing out if a deck of 20-30 champs isn't the point of the mode.

November 16, 2015

I think it's a question of degrees. We have, what, 127 champions now? Let's say you are comfortable with 10 of those, and can struggle through another 10. That still means you are overwhelmingly likely to get a champion you've never played before. Most of the games will be with champions you've never played. I feel like the spirit of ARAM is you never know who you're going to get, not that you're thrust into a situation in which you have zero idea what is going on.

Liked by: Jason Viers Aselja

ARAM: Chosing between 20-30 champions wouldn't remove the random fact?

November 16, 2015

If I understand your question, I meant it the opposite way. You signal to the game the 30 champions that you want the game to randomly pull from for the next game. It's just a random idea and I haven't beat it up at all. It may have problems.

Liked by: Thiago Lages

About ARAM: How about the combined champion pool of all players? Negates the advantage of ARAM accounts, gives people still an incentive to buy champions they want to play more, and the tech should be there (OFA MM at least had that iirc).

November 16, 2015

That's an interesting idea. It still creates the potential problem that you might frequently end up playing with champions that you've never ever played with before. Now don't get me wrong -- I think some aspect of that is part of the ARAM experience. But you also want to think that you had some role in whether your side win or lost and not just up to the initial random roll of who ended up with which champion.

Liked by: Aselja

What are some of the differences between champion.gg and your internal statistics?

November 16, 2015

Champion.gg only looks at platinum plus games, and I believe only a subset of those games. They also only sample on certain days, but day to day volatility is quite high after a patch of this size. Finally, I believe they define positions using a different system than we do.

The site is a useful source of information, and they do a great job given that they don't have access to the tools that we have.

Liked by: Aselja

Re: minion "winning" Q. If a team CAN'T close out with a lead, why should they get extra ways to win? (They should already have/getting Baron/5 Dragon) If they cant push and win from there, then they don't deserve the win. (& buffs to Baron/Dragon seem like a simpler way to tune winning objectives)

November 16, 2015

Prior to this season, they could close out with a lead because they probably had more gold from controlling the map. This season, we wanted the losing team to have a bit more gold so they could stay in the game as protection against snowballs.

In other words, we weren't trying to make it harder for the "winning" team to close out, but that would have been the impact of giving more gold to the "losing" team. If games are too snowbally, we can tone down minions or tone up losing gold. If games aren't snowbally enough, we can tone up minions or tonw down losing gold.

Asking a winning team to hang around until baron respawns or they can get 5 dragon stacks can lead to boring games where the outcome is already determined and everyone is just running down the clock.

Regarding the ARAM answer: why, specifically, isn't the solution to randomly assign a champion from the entire pool? I can't seem to find a downside and wonder what the actual discussion is about? If you don't know the answer personally, is there somewhere better to ask?

November 16, 2015

Giving someone a random champion from 127ish is going to lead to a lot of terrible ARAM matches, as few players are experienced with every one of them. A better design might be something like you pick a "deck" of 20-30 champions from the entire pool and ARAM draws from one of them. There may be technical challenges that make that more difficult than it sounds.

Liked by: DwarvenGiant Jason Viers nothingxs

Will melee carries ever get a focused update? It seems like every other class has gotten updates at some point. Tanks, marksmen, mages, juggernaughts, assassins... we are beginning to repeat the cycle, but melee carries have never been looked at closely as a role. There are so few too... why not?

Critkeeper

November 16, 2015

Yes, they need it. We feel that by understanding how juggernauts and marksmen work, we'll have good endpoints and can then figure out how melee carries land in the middle (though closer in role to the marksmen), since they need some aspects of each.

Liked by: Critkeeper

Hey Greg. I know this is a question, that goes back to your prevoius life, but there was an intresting thred at MMO-C and I just kinda had to come and ask your pov and your insight: Why does it take so long to make raids, and what is the most time consuming aspect when making new boss fights.

November 16, 2015

When I was there, it was the raid art (the architecture part) hands down. Since they have grown the team so dramatically, that may no longer be the case. It is difficult to start boss encounter design until you have a room, since testing relies so heavily on fixed locations. To some extent, the design can be pushed shorter or longer depending on how art resources are coming along.

How can we play late game champions now that the game has clearly shifted to 20-25 minutes long games?

November 16, 2015

It won't stay as 20-25 min games. I expect players are still getting comfortable with the changes, which probably means more stomps than normal. If game time doesn't pick up soon, we will step in and make some changes.

Do you have to go to college to become a game designer? Where is the best place to start researching if it is for me?

November 16, 2015

You do not need a college degree, but I would still recommend one, for all sorts of reasons. It's one of the few times in your life when it's acceptable to just focus nearly 100% on learning. You will probably learn a lot that is applicable to your career, no matter what career that is, and much of that may be the stuff outside of books -- for example, college is a great time to become introduced to different world views that you may not have been exposed to before.

There are no right or wrong degrees for game design, but I would keep in mind that it can be a surprisingly technical career choice and that the most important skill is communication.

In terms of research, I would try to understand what the day to day life of a designer is really like. Read interviews and blogs and articles on Gamasutra. The biggest misperception is that game design is all about coming up with cool ideas -- that's a very small part of the gig and you spend much more time socializing your ideas, implementing them, iterating on them and bug-fixing them.

Starting by designing a card or board game, where you can't rely on or be distracted by the digital elements of design, can help you figure out whether you have the passionate to do it as a career.

Best of luck if you decide to go that route!

Liked by: Fernando Andres Medina

As a developer, how do you handle design "issues" that the community calls out as problems, but are still good designs? (Three-hit mechanics, every champion has a minigame etc)?

CraftyTurnip

November 16, 2015

The best thing you can do as a developer is provide context. If even some players understand your logic, then they can explain it to other players, and maybe you won't see the same comments over and over again.

On the other hand, if players can offer good arguments for why your designs are in fact problematic, then you should really listen to them, keeping in mind that "players" are not some kind of homogenous entity that is always going to speak with some kind of unified voice. (Players themselves forget this with some frequency.)

Liked by: CraftyTurnip

Why was the minion "winning" stats added? Doesn't this just make the game even more snowbally and less interactive when you are behind? (ie all you can do is farm and wait for the enemy team to win)

November 13, 2015

We messed with gold a lot this preseason. It started with making some of the items less of a no-brainer decision since they aren't quite so gold dependent.

But we didn't want players to feel poorer overall and we added ambient gold and more for tower kills and so on.

Part of this change means that it could potentially be easier for a defending team to fight their way back into the game rather than bein too gold starved to itemize effectively. This is a good thing, provided that it doesn't happen every game.

So with that in mind, we tuned up late game minion waves to make sure that a dominant team did have a way to press their advantage. This is a safety valve to prevent defender gold from seining outcomes too much.

These are all dials we can adjust. If the minion waves are having too much impact, we can back off of them. As I said we just don't want to get to the point where it's too hard to close out a game either.

Liked by: Jason Viers

Just a suggestion but could ARAM actually be all random for everyone. It is kinda frustrating having people with aram only accounts resulting in Lux, Nidalee,Jayce or other really strong aram champs to be in basically every other game.

November 13, 2015

Yeah, we agree that it defeats the purpose of all random when you stack the deck so hard. Not sure of the exact solution yet, but we agree with the problem.

Liked by: Sascha Bay Jason Viers Dominik Schenker

I really don't know how you guys are gonna balance all this stuff. Some champions are completely broken right now and i don't see them being nerfed unless you completely remove the new Keystones.

November 13, 2015

We knew this patch was going to be disruptive and it will likely take a couple of patches before it settles down. Our intent isn't change for the sake of change, but to add depth to systems that are shallow and solved (like AD items and masteries).

Liked by: Jason Viers

As someone, who enjoyed the last season very much: I don't like the changes. Incredible fast games, snowballheavy (one lane gets a high advantage, game is more or less over), no real teamfight cause Minionchanges, Rift Herald and new Vision changes.

Bob

November 13, 2015

I don't anticipate games staying short. I think players are still getting used to the changes. While I wouldn't complain if games got a little shorter overall, we definitely don't want them to be more snowbally.

Liked by: Tsume Tsume

If YOU were to choose which "sub-class"/"sub-role-group" to tackle next (ex. Enchanters, Catchers, Light Fighters), what will choose and which champions would you include in it (the update) and why? And I want YOUR personal opinion/desires of course. :)

DwarvenGiant

November 13, 2015

If it was entirely up to me, assassins. Tanks are also a good possibility.

Liked by: DwarvenGiant

Greg Street

Nothing here yet