Recent News
More on Rengar Rework
Riot Scruffy again returned to the forums to deliver another update on the work-in-progress Rengar rework that's currently in internal testing:
"Ok Rengars, big awesome update:
So far the direction of starting a fight with 0 ferocity but building up reliably to a finisher is working out, but with the current design we haven't really committed to it 100% and allowed Rengar to have a really reliable and contained way to get to full stacks. So here's the new hotness that we are trying out.
(anything not mentioned is the same as the previous changes)
-Rengar's max ferocity is lowered to 4 from 5
-Q cooldown lowered dramatically to 4/3.75/3.5/3.25/3s
-Q attack speed buff lowered to 15/20/25/30/35%
-Ferocity Q grants 2 ferocity after use instead of 3
-Also trinket cooldown is lowered so that he can have 2 traps in the world at a time
The real linchpin of this new rotation is Q. With Q on a 3 second cooldown he can come in to a fight with 0 ferocity Q->W->E->3s cooldown->Q and hit the new max stacks of 4 for a finisher.
These numbers aren't final but what we have the potential to do here is really understand and balance the buildup to finisher rotation. I'll let you know how this works out in testing (crosses fingers).
-Scruffy"
He continued, elaborating on Rengar's role:
"Even with the changes Rengar's teamfight role is still all about finding squishy targets that are separated from their team and blowing them up. With the changes we want to allow the opponent a (very short) window in which they can react to Rengar leaping out of stealth onto them.
PS - The leap on to target after E idea is really cool and it sounds like a lot of fun. To make that happen, we would probably have to remove the slow from E, which would really hurt his utility."
In response to a few players suggestion on adding layer to Rengar's Bola, Scruffy reminded:
"That may be a feasible solution, but I think there is a lot of value to not overloading Rengar with too many mechanics (he already has a lot as is)."
EUW/EUNE In-game Lag. What’s going on?
Riot tmx has returned to the EU forums to shed some light on recent problems and offer a bit of an update:"Hey guys,
Errigal plans to give you another monthly update and reveal some great news about Amsterdam data center (we’re ready to announce the live date, yay!), but before that update I want to shed some light on our recent latency problems in EUW and EUNE. We know that at some parts of the day you guys are experiencing lag. We’ve read your posts and we understand how painful it is, because we are in the game at the same time and so get the same experience. I hear you ask: “Why are we recently observing increased lag periods? Why are your games disturbed? Why always Europe and why always League of Legends?”
Well, it’s not always Europe and not only LoL. But the general answer is relatively simple – we were being attacked.
Malicious attacks, such as DDoS, are a global problem and affects many online services and Riot Games is no exception here. Similarly to all major online games, our servers are being flooded daily with huge amounts of malicious traffic, which sometimes lead to instabilities. This is nothing new, we’ve been fighting this problem for years. However, recently the sheer amount of attacks and volume of malicious data transmitted towards our servers has been significantly greater than we've seen before. Additionally, this does not only affect Europe as we have seen similar malicious traffic in BR, NA and OC.
With that said we know that the ball is in our court and we’re constantly working towards better protection. I want to emphasize that our servers are not a cause of the lag. We’re managing thousands of them globally and EUW/EUNE are on the same level as KR, NA or any other Riot’s environment. “Fix your servers” can feel like a logical statement, but in truth the European platforms have been stable for last 4 months. We haven’t performed a restart since last October (we did have some serious problems in December, but they were again part of our provider’s network infrastructure) and our platforms are very reliable nowadays.
Beside these attacks we’ve also uncovered some 3rd party problems, which take us longer to resolve. Although this has been improved recently, we still notice some hiccups related to ISP performance, routing re-convergence and sub-optimal routing. These kind of problems (eg. resulting in game reconnects) are not something we directly control, but we’ve been (and are) working hard on getting this resolved. This is what we have currently completed:
Amsterdam Data Centre will improve a lot of things, but external attacks will always be there. That’s why we’re investing our time and use worldwide resources to establish best practices and ways of protections. Some things are beyond our control, but we’re on top of everything else, and our goal is still the same: deliver you a smooth gameplay experience. Thanks a lot for all your passion and gl hf.
- RiotDirect: We’re happy to announce that this project was launched back in January. We currently have about 50% of our game servers running on our direct links connected to several major ISP providers in Europe (the remaining 50% are still on our old partner’s lines) and Riot network engineers are personally responsible for ensuring best possible routes for the game traffic. We’re planning on moving 100% to RiotDirect, and this will be completed within next few weeks. As of today, this solution gives us a bit of diversification and any live issue does not impact the entire player base.
- We purchased additional bandwidth from our previous provider.
- Loss Forgiven is being applied much faster. We streamlined our procedures, and our NOC technicians are now empowered to enable this mode as soon as the problem is diagnosed. We’re aware that there are always some games that were not forgiven, but we’re doing our best to minimize this impact.
- We’re constantly tweaking and upgrading rules and filters on our firewalls.
- Stabilized EUW platform: no major failures related to our infrastructure. EUNE has been always stable.
tmx"
Frustrations with "Overpowered" Champions
Zileas, the VP of Game Design, popped in a thread discussing "overpowered" champions and the frustration the community feels with them, sharing his thoughts on the matter:"In the case of Kassadin, being OP or not is not what really drives his frustration level, it's more than in a lot of situations, he will just execute his thing, and either succeed or fail entirely on his execution and stats -- not based on enemy reaction. In other words -- no potential for rich counterplay.
Champions like that tend to feel snowballey and aren't fun to play against.
We do need to deal with these situations, and intend to gradually do so.He continued, addressing a question about the plans for Kassadin specifically:
I agree that the existence of a lane counter is not 'enough'. We want all likely match-ups to be interesting, and much prefer 'soft' counters to hard ones."
"I actually don't know the specifics on that as I don't manage the core gameplay team day-to-day, but we would want to do something to him at some point to keep him awesome to play, but with better counterplay.
It's a question of priorities, and we spent a lot of energy on the 2014 season changes which were intended to, among other things, resolve some general snowballing and counterplay problems broadly (and thus make the game more fun broadly). We'd rather focus effort on resolving broad sets of these problems due to the bang for the buck, but we will get to outlier champions eventually as well, and always have some effort going on towards them (as evidenced by the ongoing remakes and reworks).
In other news, we would love to pick up a few more experienced game designers who really, really know LoL and find these types of problems fascinating. Feel free to apply if you are reading this and match that profile..."
As for the trends with Yasuo and other new champions being considered extremely powerful, he commented:
"Pretty much the same as my data, and that kind of number is in the range of normal champion variance week-to-week, or according to meta trends, or even rate of learning in enemy responses. Keep in mind that newly released champions are VERY carefully and continually watched by the design team, and will be adjusted if needed. +/- a few % of 50 is very common this soon after a launch, ESPECIALLY when we do something fairly experimental (which Yasuo is).
Champions like Yasuo are a little tough for us because it's not possible to balance them 100% internally -- the skill mastery and iteration the community puts them through live is just so much more complete than what is possible on PBE or internally."
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