Red Post Collection: Nemesis Draft Q&A on Feb 17th, Another set of Champions as Poros, and more!

Nemesis Draft Q&A coming 2/17

With Nemesis Draft hitting live last week, the team behind our latest featured game mode will be hosting a Q&A tomorrow, February 17th!

"We’re hosting a Nemesis Draft Q&A session at 10am on 2/17. Come along to ask the Featured Game Mode team questions about counter picks, counter picked team comps, counter counter picks, counter counter picked team comps, and more! ...please don’t do either of the last two things."

Check out this post for more information on Nemesis Draft, which is available through Feb 23rd!

IronStylus on Evelynn's Champion Updates

With the recent talk of Kassadin, Ryze, and Taric champion updates, IronStylus also answered a question on Evelynn and where her update is currently progressing along:

"Quote:

I just want to keep an open dialog with the team in regards to her progression. She has been, in the past, a black sheep and kind of feels ignored. I remember that there was a primary artist that was assigned to her. Longwingy I think. Anyways, any update would be appreciated"

"Currently she's not. We had a few update concepts back in the day but she just doesn't have any sort of story direction or explanation of what the hell she is. Until we hammer that out we probably won't be doing anything with her until then. 

I think there's some good ideas in the Shadow Isles ideas, and heck, I could see her playing into the Darkin thing if we ever build that out. There's a lot of options, so that's good. She's wide open in terms of actually making a character out of."

[Continued] Syndra Q+E Width in 5.4

As he's talked about frequently since patch 5.1's reduction to Syndra's E's stun hitbox, Meddler notedthey currently have a tentative change on the PBE to tweak the radius of Syndra's Q+E combo stun:

"Quote

Is it me or is it no longer possible to do point blank stuns on a melee champ? I used to be able to do an instant Q+E combo at face to face range and get a stun off. There seems to be a delay on her Q, making the combo clunkier at close range. The combo seems a lot slower to pull off.

The patch that reduced the width of Syndra's Q+E stun also significantly reduced the radius of the initial check around a sphere that's been hit to see if there's a unit there that should be stunned before the sphere starts moving. We've got a change on the PBE at present that increases both that radius and the Q+E width as it travels. Assuming that change goes live I believe that will probably help out with the problem you're seeing - as far as I'm aware Q timing hasn't been changed at all."

Lyte on the idea of a Skin Workshop from Community

In a recent reddit thread discussing the idea of a "skin workshop" - a place similar to  Dota 2 & the Steam Workshop where community artists could submit their fully modeled and animated skins to eventually be implemented in the game - following the results from the recent Polycount contest, Riot Lyte stepped in to comment on the idea of CGC as someone who has worked at both companies (Riot and Valve) :

"This is a really interesting discussion; however, the majority of talking points are pretty far off the mark. I've had the honor of working at both studios at different points in my life, and understand both companies and their strategies a little.

Misconceptions

1) The reasons for doing "community generated content (CGC)" are not driven by eCommerce. It's not about making more money or about royalties for either studio. Frankly, both models of content are profitable and both can be scaled to be wildly successful.

2) CGC is not about community engagement. A lot of players think community generated content and Workshops are awesome because they allow players to contribute content to the game; however, realistically this isn't true. Just like many other content contribution pipelines, the top X% (usually 1-5%) of contributors generate the vast majority of accepted content and reap the majority of the profits. In the games industry, CGC that meets the acceptable quality bars are usually created by professional developers who have a full-time job at another studio.

So why does a company choose to do CGC, or not?

1) One of the distinctions between companies that choose CGC and those that don't depends on how they view mentoring and development of their own staff. Valve is a very mature studio, and on average, their employees have many years of experience in various industries; however, they want to remain a small studio. Because of this, they simply do not have the manpower to create content pipelines for all of their titles even if they wanted to use all of their in-house staff to do so. Therefore for Valve, CGC is a large upfront cost, but a method to generate sustainable content pipelines for all of their titles without building a large team.

Riot has a mix of young talent and seasoned veterans, and a focus of the studio is mentoring the next generation of developers while expanding beyond games--this is why you see things like a League album, and the New Dawn cinematic. Riot is interested in more curated experiences because there is a desire to expand on the League IP into other mediums and they want to build teams capable of building these experiences in-house to prepare for the future.

2) As mentioned before, Riot prefers more curated experiences, which means that content will vary a lot over time. If you look at skins in League over time, they have varied a lot in terms of actual features--some have new VOs, new animations, recall animations, evolutions (Pulsefire Ezreal), stances (DJ Sona), etc. One of the things about CGC is that you need guidelines and principles that content creators need to follow; so, in a CGC economy you will see a lot of diverse themes to each content piece, but content creators aren't able to push the actual feature sets in the content. If Valve wants to do new features on their content they still have to build it in-house.

Anyways, hopefully this sheds some light on the decision-making behind community-generated content. It's not about money or greed, community engagement, or any of those things. To put it simply, it's about what the overall strategy of a studio is, the types of products they want to create in the future, and their philosophical approach to creating content."

He continued:

"Quite a few skins have been community-inspired. For example, Surprise Party Fiddlesticks, Popstar Ahri, Astronautilus, Bunnysuit Riven, etc. Whether CGC will ever happen at Riot is an open question, just wanted to share some context on the intricacies behind CGC."

More Poros as Champions from Fiesta De Máscaras // Semana da Folia

Last up, we have another set of poros dressed up as champions from the LAN/LAS's "Fiesta De Máscaras" and BR's "Semana da Folia"

Here are the twelve poros dressed as champions from February 15th and twelve more from February 16th!