Red Post Collection: Upcoming PBE Application Approvals, Poacher's Knife discussion, and more!

Upcoming PBE Application Approvals

"Summoners, 

The Public Beta Environment (PBE) continues to be a great place for players to work with Riot by providing content feedback and identifying critical bugs. In order to maintain a steady flow of these contributions, in the coming weeks we'll be approving a large number of preexisting applications (subject to Player Behavior review). If you've applied previously, keep an eye out for an approval email heading your way. 

On a long-term note, we're looking to make good on some of our past ideas and implement various improvements to the PBE. A robust tester population is essential for thorough coverage, so we'll keep an eye on the PBE's numbers after the coming approval wave and take additional measures if necessary. Ensuring a positive testing environment is another priority, so expect more Player Behavior measures down the line. 

Thanks for contributing to the PBE! 

Riot Chesties"

"This current approval wave will review players that have previously applied and won't be affecting existing accounts."

[Riot API] Current Game and Featured Games AP Released

"TL;DR - Sites like OP.GG, LoLNexus, etc will behave more or less the same, but using official data from us through an approved method... and not via a janky workaround they have been using up until now that puts extra strain on the LoL servers because they are simulated hundreds to thousands of fake client sessions."

"The only thing commonly available on these sites that is not in the API (to the best of my knowledge without digging around at 11pm on a sunday, lol) is DuoQueue info, which all of the legit sites should have removed back in the fall at our request. Moving forward that info is being intentionally hidden in the API as the cons outweigh the pros. The vast majority of the sites, especially the ones who already were working with our APIs, already removed that in October, and so should not change much in the immediate future.

We also hope to give more info than was available before if possible, as we dig around under the hood and see what we can easily surface, as time goes on.

One current "hiccup" is that right now the data is not available in the API until the moment the game begins. It SHOULD be available during game load. This is just a bug though that is on target to be fixed in the next patch hopefully. In the meantime the only real impact however is that these sites won't have the data for your game available until the game finished loading. Not idea, but definitely not the end of the world. :)"

"This is one of our top requests, however due to the unique ways in which eSports secures and runs the tournament systems it makes it far more difficult than it is with the production systems. We want it, they want it, you guys all want it.. no argument there. We just need to figure out the full scope of the work needed to make it happen, keep it secure, and then slot that into all the other work we have going on as well. Definitely on our roadmap though!"

"LCS is a unique system all within it's own. The eSports team maintains all that data themselves, and has their own custom in-house solution for populating the fantasy system from their servers. Exactly how it work's I'm not entirely educated on."

Poacher's Knife Discussion

In response to a lengthy thread discussing Poacher's Knife and it's smite variant, Fearless commented:

"I agree with a lot of what you've said here - I think Poacher's and Skirmisher's both suffer from the problem of being too narrow. I'd like to solve both as soon as possible (BIG WARNING: SIGNIFICANT ITEM CHANGES CAN TAKE TIME TO DELIVER!).

The hardest thing for Poacher's is that it's not clear what the payoff for counterjungling is supposed to be - we do see counterjungling happening this season, but it's opportunistically taking a camp here or there rather than a dedicated strategy, which is rather different from counterjungling strategies we've seen in the past (e.g. Season 2 Mundo/Shyvana). It's really cool, but not something I personally saw coming.

Assuming we embrace that direction for counterjungling, information control in some form makes a lot of sense for this item. Letting you know with better clarity when there are opportunities to invade is probably the single best thing we could give you in that world. There are some good suggestions in this thread - some others would include things like flat out giving the item a ward (recharge on smiting an enemy jungle monster?), ways to update minimap icons for camps you haven't seen (smite Scuttler, update all the jungle icons on that side of the map?), and a bunch of other stuff. Not sure exactly what the details will look like, of course."

He continued:

"I'd caution that there are still some larger discussions about the role of counterjungling that really have to be settled before deciding on something like making Poacher's Knife grant vision - it's a promising direction that I'm starting to investigate but it's something that could easily turn out badly.

Glad to see discussion like this about it, though."

Scrapped Idea for Azir's E

Over in a reddit thread, ZenonTheStoic shared one of Azir's scrapped abilities from his development:

"Fun fact: during development, E used to swap the positions of Azir and one of his soldiers. The spell was called "Castle".

Bring a Mate

The updated Refer-A-Friend system is now up on the OCE servers ... and it is called Bring a Mate!

Check out the Refer-A-Friend system by visiting this page and using the navigation bar in the upper right to choose your appropriate server and language.

As a reminder, the updated RAF is currently up on NA, EUNE, EUW, BR, OCE, TR.

Behind the Scenes: Imagine Dragons at Worlds

Last up, we have a behind the scenes look at Imagine Dragons and their performance at the 2014 World Championship in Seoul, South Korea!

"Relive the excitement of the 2014 World Championship with a special behind-the-scenes look at Imagine Dragons at Worlds! From their first steps onto the field at Sangam Stadium to the pyro celebrating Samsung White, we were with the guys to document this historic partnership. Don’t miss this exclusive look at the band’s experiences getting set for the big day, playing in front of the big crowd, and throwing down with Sjokz and others Rioters on the Rift in a backstage PC Bang."

Imagine Dragons will also be stopping by Prime Time League this week, as well as performing an acoustic version of Warriors.