This evening's red post collection features the announcement that the featured gameplay mode HEXAKILL will be enabled on Feb 20th, an update on the Ranked Leagues Pick Order changes mentioned in the 4.2 patch notes, continued discussions on the WIP Rengar Rework and Skarner Rework Follow Through, and information on the problems with EUW's recent emergency maintenance.
Recent News:
- Champion and Skin Sale 2/14 - 2/17: Heartseeker Vayne, Jack of Hearts Twisted Fate, Debonair Jayce, Katarina, Lucian, Leona
- EU LCS Spring Split Week 5
- 2014 NA and EU LCS Spring Split Summoner Icons now available!
Hexakill incoming!
If you've been itching to enjoy Hexakill since it first appeared on the PBE, your wait is almost over!Here's Brackhar with an announcement that Hexakill , our next limited duration featured gameplay mode, be will enabled on February 20th!
"For the next upcoming Featured Gameplay Mode, five to a team just wasn’t enough. We’re adding a sixth champ to each side on Summoner’s Rift. Same rules, same map, more champions.
Double junglers, roaming supports and six man wombo combos are all on the table for this new mode. Experiment with team comps and discover new metas as you seek to hear the ultimate announcement, “Hexakill.”
Hexakill begins on February 20."
Please remember that just like One for All and Showdown, Hexakill is a featured mode that will only be temporarily available!
02/13/2014 Ranked Leagues Pick Order Changes for NA
It turns out the changes to pick order that were originally mentioned in the 4.2 patch notes were not actually enabled when the patch was pushed out to the live servers. They have now been enabled on NA only ( for the time being ) .Here's what was added to the NA 4.2 patch notes today:
[ Please note the changes are ONLY FOR NA at the moment and will roll out to the regions next week. ]
"With the deploy of patch 4.2, we announced the below change to Leagues but did not enable the feature until today. We’ve since turned it on in North America only. We expect it to roll out to other regions next week.
Leagues
The below changes will be enabled today:
- All players will now have an equal (random) chance of being first pick
- For players in a duo, if either player is chosen as first pick, the team captain will be assigned first pick and the other member of the duo will get whatever position the captain received from the randomizer
Context:
In solo queue matchmaking the difference in skill from top to bottom is too small to justify a pick order difference in champ select. This change will make it more likely for all players to have an equal shot at playing their favorite role. It will also remove potential duo abuse cases; a randomized order makes it completely fair for pick order regardless of who’s queuing with whom, and reinforces our core focus on communication and collaboration at champion select."
Continued Discussion on WIP Rengar's Rework
( If you missed the initial discussions on the upcoming Rengar Rework, check out these posts: 1, 2, 3 )
"Hey all, another update on Rengar progress. So far the changes are testing well, but we noticed 2 major things that needed addressing:
-The cooldowns on Q W and E were not matching up well creating a strange pattern for building up ferocity that couldn't really be planned around or mastered
-Rengar has a great time setting himself up for a team fight, finding a backline target and ambusing, but after the fight against his target is over (win or lose) he has no way of getting out or really doing anything meaningful at that point.
So to solve those problems, we're testing 2 new changes, which seem promising:
-Standardize Q W and E cooldowns to 3 12 and 9 at all ranks creating a clear and learn-able combat pattern, the damage per skill level is adjusted to match the new cooldowns
-5 seconds after Rengar unstealths from R he will enter stealth a second time for 3 seconds and be able to leap.
The second change is really interesting: it gives Rengar a fixed window where he is trying to eliminate his target and then can decide if he should run away, try for a second target, or even use his second leap to all in the first target if he failed to kill them initially."
When asked about the changes to Bonetooth Necklace and they will be keeping the special interaction with Kha'Zix, he commented:
"We will definitely keep it!"
Continued Discussion on Skarner Rework Follow Through
Building off what was said yesterday, Riot Scruffy returned to the Skarner Rework Follow Through thread to comment on the community's feed back that Skarner's rework has changed his identity too much:"This thread is about follow up, and we are actively looking to improve the changes to make them something that Skarner players and all players are satisfied with.
The most frequent complaint I'm seeing is that a lot of the CC power that was core to Skarner's appeal is lowered, and that it's something that is core to his identity. So, with balance changes aside for the Skarner followup, this is something that we can try to bring back. His current pattern has more dueling/fighting power but less CC, but we can shift some of his power back into more impactful CC that will bring him closer to CC tank role that he had before.
Edit: if this is not a direction that you would like to see more of Skarner's power shifted into that is ok too, I'm collecting feedback."He continued:
"This is a good point, and we try to retain the core appeal of a character when they get reworked and in this case Skarner may have shifted a bit too far away from the CC tank role that he had before. Strengthening his CC seems like the right direction in the follow up to make Skarner closer to what his fans really loved about him before."
Info on the EUW emergency maintenance complications
Here's Riot tmx, the live services manager for Europe, with an update on the problems the team ran into during EUW's emergency server maintenance this morning."Hey all, this was definitely a bumpy morning for all of us. Our emergency platform maintenance took much longer than expected and here’s a rundown of what happened.
Yesterday we found some problems in our current live platform version and decided to globally roll back some of 4.2’s changes. I won’t go too much into details, the important part is that we quickly decided to go for emergency maintenance in order to avoid potential problems on live environments. As always, proper schedules are created based on local time zones, so EUW started soon after 3am GMT and was the first one in line.
We brought the platform down as planned and started to perform maintenance. Unfortunately, during this release period we were hit by a power outage in a particular region of United States that directly affected some of our services. This greatly delayed the entire schedule, as our teams had to restore the connectivity several times, and various processes had to be repeated and double checked over and over. This maintenance was remotely coordinated by various Rioters – from our US offices as well as Dublin and Sydney, but we finally sent our crew physically to the data center to complete the required work. Obviously each single platform update requires thorough quality assurance testing which also takes time.
EUW maintenance usually takes longer (compared to other environments) because of the platform size. This is not an excuse though for a 9-hour long outage and we’re currently improving our internal systems on how to avoid such problems in the future. We greatly improved our standard release times (who can recall our 10-hour long releases back in 2010?) and looking to the future, we will work towards improvements of emergency procedures as well. Overall we’re sorry that those of you trying to play games this morning ran into difficulty, that we were forced to be vague in describing the issues and we’ll continue monitoring.
GL & HF"
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