Red Post Collection: Ask Riot, Ascension in RGMQ, Year of Rooster Icon for IP, Ghostcrawler Q&A VOD, and more!

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Table of Contents

• Ask Riot: Banished to Prisoner Island 
• Lunar Revel 2017 - Year of the Rooster Icon Available for 1500 IP
• January Ghostcrawler Q&A Livestream
• RGMQ: Ascension this weekend
• Meddler Grab Bag - Kha'zix, Defensive Dragons, & Rift Herald
• Kindlejack on Dreadnova GP
• Quick Hits: Team ICE IP Boost & Snowdown Icons
• REMINDERS

Ask Riot: Banished to Prisoner Island 

The weekly Ask Riot is up, this time fielding questions on on low-priority queue, a different take on how  Teemo's Blind works vs Lee Sin, and localizing the board game Mechs vs Minions:

"Welcome to Ask Riot! 

Up next on Ask Riot, we’re talking low-prio queue, Lee Sin vs. Teemo, and localizing Mechs vs. Minions. 

Why doesn’t Riot queue negative players with negative players? What’s wrong with the “prisoners island” concept?

First, let’s define “prisoner’s island” designs for the folks who aren’t familiar. A prisoner’s island approach says that any players who cross the line into unsportsmanlike conduct should be separated from the broader playerbase and only matchmade together. At face value, it’s an emotionally satisfying fix that basically deports assholes to an island and theoretically makes everyone else’s games better as a result — but it runs counter to our value of reform. 

Prisoner’s island design doesn’t work for League for two major reasons: 

Reason One: We believe in a real shot at reform for unsportsmanlike players 

We know that most negativity in game comes from a misstep, not a commitment to ruining games for people. That fact is the core reason why a shot at reform is central to many of our designs. So as long as reform is a core value for us (spoiler: it will always be a core value for us), we can’t stick 10 (even occasionally) unsportsmanlike players into what would be even more unsportsmanlike games and expect them to learn and turn things around. 

Instead, we owe these players frank feedback about unsportsmanlike conduct, and a chance at gaining some self-awareness and growing as players and part of the community. This is actually something today’s Instant Feedback system isn’t great at. With info from your reports, we shoot penalized players a reform card explaining why other players think they should be penalized, but not an idea of how to change and grow. That gap is important for us to fill. 

We get that this can read as a bit naive. That’s why we keep the banhammer handy for players who just aren’t interested in being relatively sportsmanlike and playing the dang game. Still, because the prisoner’s island system gives up on these players by default, we can’t subscribe to it as a solution for unsportsmanlike conduct. 

Reason Two: Prisoner’s island is a truly awful experience for the “prisoners” in more ways than one 

If we ship unsportsmanlike players to their own queue, they’d face a swath of issues that basically make League miserable by default. The queue would face higher rates of negativity in game, sure — but the diminished pool of players would also result in terrible queue times and lopsided matchmaking. It’d be emotionally satisfying to say they deserve it, but it’s squarely against our values of putting player experience first. 

Beyond that, building and operating a service for a prisoner’s island would suck Rioters and resources from efforts we truly believe in, like improving Instant Feedback, intentional feeding detection, and reworking legacy systems like Honor. 

RIOT GROMP, Comms Toad, Player Behavior and SIMURGH, Game Designer, Player Behavior 

Why does Teemo’s Blinding Dart work on Lee Sin?

For those with sight, Teemo’s darts are blinding, plunging his victims into an abyss of instant night. But little known fact, for those without sight, his darts actually have the opposite effect! As his dart sinks beneath the skin, a world of color, shape and distance swirls before Lee Sin’s eyes. Everything Lee Sin had only ever imagined – the myriad shades of autumn leaves, the nuance of a smile trying to be kept under wraps, the stars blinking their soft twinkle above – dance together in perfect harmony. And then… it’s gone. The nothingness of black envelopes his irises, and once again, the joy of sight is snuffed out. 

For as we know, Teemo is the devil. And only a devil would restore sight, ever so briefly to a blind man, then take it away again. 

RIOT TIGER LILY, Editor, Worldbuilding Team 

Will you be releasing Mechs vs. Minions in languages other than English?

We would absolutely love to get MvM into other languages. Our goal from the get-go was to get as many people as possible to experience the game we made, and we’re still committed to making that happen. 

Here’s an update with where we’re at, and some context on the challenges we’re facing: 

At launch, we published MvM in two languages, Simplified Chinese and English. But in addition to that, while we were developing the game, we also worked to translate MvM into every Riot-supported language — I believe that’s 19 languages in total. And to be clear, the amount of text found in this boardgame is enormous compared to the number of words that are translated for a League patch or a dev blog. And as we continue making revisions to the English rulebooks based on player feedback, the team continues to patch up our additional languages to allow us to manufacture new languages with relatively short notice. 

But that does lead me to our biggest hurdle: Manufacturing a physical product takes a long time (for a product the size and scope of MvM it takes close six months). And, obviously, when you make a physical product, you have to be concerned about things like stock vs. demand — things that we don’t have to worry about with stuff like skins or icons. So we have to determine how many units we think a region can support or risk having a ton of stock that can’t be moved elsewhere; people in Italy don’t have much need for a Korean version — those can only really be sold in Korea. 

But with all that said, we are planning to move MvM into German this summer and I’ve been working with our Merch team this week to bring the game to the following languages by (hopefully) this fall: French, Italian, Korean, Czech, and Spanish (Spain Spanish; not LATAM Spanish, which is different). These regions were picked based on a lot of factors, like active boardgame communities and the local strength of our IP. But it’s my sincere hope that – eventually – we’ll be able to get MvM to every region that would like it. Let us know if you have any thoughts or concerns on this approach or if there’s any further context you’d like. 

KADES, Product Manager, Mechs vs Minions

Have a question? Head over to Ask Riot and sign into your League account. Check out the Dos and Don’ts, then ask away. 

We promise to read every question, but we can’t guarantee they’ll all get answers. Some questions may already be answered elsewhere, and some won’t be right for Ask Riot. This isn’t the best place to announce new features, for example, and we might skip conversations on issues we’ve talked about in depth before (though we can clarify individual points). 

We are listening, though, so keep asking. We’ll make sure your questions are heard by the Rioters working on the stuff you’re curious about."

Lunar Revel 2017 - Year of the Rooster Icon Available for 1500 IP

Over on reddit, Jalapeno Jeff commented that it mistakenly was not available 1500 IP at the start of the event and confirmed anyone who purchased the icon with RP will be getting a refund. He also shared a little background on scrapped Lunar Revel event plans, confirmed the Lunar Revel crafting chest extras all have the same drop rate, and noted the personal shop will return in future events:

"Hey All,

My name’s Jeff and I’m one of the Rioters that worked on Lunar Revel this year.

First order of business – Due to a slip up on my end, I missed putting the Year of the Rooster icon on sale for IP. Fixing that up right now and will be working with the teams to issue refunds to anyone that purchased the icon for RP. 100% my bad, it was always supposed to be for IP.

Wanted to start off by saying I personally agree that this Lunar Revel didn’t really have an event feel to it. There wasn’t a special game mode, no exclusive content that made you really feel like you were part of the action, no IP icon…just a bunch of sick skins and standard bundles/crafting.

What I originally wanted to make was this Conquest Mode where you’d start off by picking one of three factions to side with. You’d get a unique icon that designated you as a lowly private and by completing various missions, you could earn points for your side and chip away at territory held by competing factions. Contributing points to the war effort would allow you to climb the ranks all the way up to General status, with your icon upgrading throughout and rewards to celebrate your well-deserved promotions. There’d be various ways to help win the war whether you wanted to just throw yourself at it by fighting battles and collecting gold from minions, playing with a questing fellowship, running solo spy missions, crafting together supplies to help arm the troops, etc – something for everyone.

There were a bunch of other fun mechanics I had in mind and I’m just as bummed out as you all - I saw this “event” as my little baby and it really killed me to see it get watered down to what we have right now. I didn’t write this post to make excuses or get sympathy votes, but rather to open up a conversation with you guys. I’ve read through a ton of your comments and there are a bunch of great ideas in there. Please keep sending them in to give us a better sense of what types of events you’d like to see in the future and ways that you would like to personally participate in them.

Some additional PSAs

• A lot of people have been talking about the Personalized Shop, like the one we had last Lunar Revel and at Harrowing. We’re currently working on getting that into LCU, so we weren’t able to run it this time around. Soontm strikes again 

• The drop rates for the Ancient Relics in the Revel Red Envelope are exactly 1/3 each so you can acquire them at a reasonably predictable rate. I know some peeps hate RNG so I tried to make that portion as fair as possible and give people the option to roll into chests and keys to clear out mismatched relics or get rid of some relics if they didn’t like the associated rewards. It was all supposed to be in a FAQ article…but I goofed again…

If anyone has any other questions about Lunar Revel, suggestions for future events, or just want to flame me for my mistakes (I can take the heat, I’m a Jalapeno), continue to leave comments or hop into a custom ARAM with me on NA - I’ll be on til ~6pm PT.

Name: NoIPIcon4LunarRevel???

PW: ritopls"

Speaking of free icons, the above icon is in addition to the free Mark of the Fortune icon available by redeeming on your region's Lunar Revel page:

You can find more on Lunar Revel 2017 on the official page or in our coverage.

January Ghostcrawler Q&A Livestream

RGMQ: Ascension this weekend

Ascension returns to the RGMQ for the second week in a row, up from January 20th - January 23rd! For more information on this gamemode, check out [this post].
As a reminder, the RGMQ schedule will now be included in the patch notes - look for the next schedule to be announced with the 7.2 patch notes next week!

Meddler Grab Bag - Kha'zix, Defensive Dragons, & Rift Herald

When asked if they had any immediate plans for Kha'Zix balance changes, Meddler noted:

"No immediate plans, we've been predicting for a couple of weeks we'd likely need to do work on him soon though. Wouldn't surprise if he was a candidate for a power reduction in 7.4 if current trends continue (for context, we've just started work on 7.3., so that mean we'd start looking at him in a couple of weeks if so)."

When asked about adding a dragon kill buff that is defensive in nature, Meddler noted:

"We spent a while kicking around ideas for defensive focused dragon buffs. Main problems we kept running into were difficulty making one that didn't overlap with Infernal in terms of strategy supported (direct champion conflict) and the risk of pushing tankiness for many champs past some critical points (tankiness often being harder to respond to than higher damage, given CC and kill's a response to damage at least). 

Not opposed to a dragon buff that offers something directly defensive in theory and it's something we'd look into again if considering adding additional dragon buffs. That's something we're interested in investigating someday, though would want to make sure we were adding another buff because it promoted interesting gameplay and was meaningfully different to the existing ones, not just because it had a cool theme."

As for thoughts on Rift Herald, Meddler noted:

"It's safe to say we don't think Rift Herald's hitting the mark in its current form yeah. It's not really causing problems, but it's not offering much either alas. Suspect we're more likely to do work on RH before looking at possible alternate dragon types too. 

In terms of making it specifically a 'you didn't get dragons' benefit we tend to be pretty cautious about those sort of mechanics because they can lead to low interaction objective trade situations (they take A, we take B instead of contesting A). That can lead to dull games. Wouldn't be so bad in the version you propose given dragon's assumedly clearly better, especially as the game goes on. Would be inclined to start by looking at things that make RH really exciting in its own right when looking at it though, then look at fallback effects like that later if nothing that stands on its own more could be found."

More on Rift Herald and much more in the most recent State of Game post. 

Kindlejack on Dreadnova GP

Kindlejack sailed on to the boards to talk a bit about the recently released DREADNOVA GANGPLANK skin, what inspired the team, the idea of expanding the line, and spaceships:

"I do actually have some insights because I was part of the group that worked on GP! This past year Skins Team has been much more strategic about what we decide to make - you've probably noticed that skins come out in themed bunches now with promo materials, merch tie-ins etc. and that hasn't happened by accident. The cost has been there's was a lot less opportunity to explore new ideas in 2016 (but we're addressing this in 2017). Knowing this we were given the chance to create a one off skin that could have any theme the team was excited about and could be for one of a list of champions. Basically we hadn't got the opportunity to come up with a skin as a team for a while and this was our chance.

We had an open ideation meeting where everyone was free to pitch ideas new and old for a list of champions, and in the end the whole room was so excited about 'Space Pirate GP' that the product owners supported us in going ahead with that theme. The first obstacle we then faced was figuring out what that would look like as everyone had ideas from Space Dandy to Captain Harlock, Treasure Planet, Boba Fett, and even Dr Grordbort. For a long time we tried out some variations that were more retro, mercenary or scrappy but the more 'Mengsk' look felt more in line with Gangplank's personality.