8/29 PBE Update: Team Based Competitive Mode - "Clash", Esports Summoner Icons & More

[UPDATE: Added deeper look at "Clash" mode!]

The PBE has been updated! As we continue the 7.18 PBE cycle, this patch includes a huge batch of Esports summoner icons, a look at assets for a team based competitive mode that will be testing on the Vietnam server, and more tentative balance changes!
Continue reading for more information!

Table of Contents

• Team Based Competitive Mode - "Clash"
• Esports Summoner Icons
• Miscellaneous
• Balance Changes
• Context & Notes

Team Based Competitive Mode - "Clash"

New files were added to the PBE referencing a new mode called "Clash". Nothing is enabled on the PBE, but there are many related image assets added in today's update.

While information is still limited, check out this post from Riot Draggles on the new mode:

"Hey all, 

You might see some new visual assets floating around the PBE (brackets, icons, some UI elements). 

We’re on PBE soon for an upcoming feature test in Vietnam for a new team-based competitive mode. Anything you see will be a work in progress and subject to change! We don’t have anything to share on this front yet outside of the VN server, but we’ll definitely let you know what’s going down when we’re closer to a global release."

Here are some example assets from the PBE:
These seem to be repeating assets in a multitude of colors. Here is an Imgur album of the full assets:

[ALBUM HERE]

8/30 Update: Reddit user molenzwiebel was able to force these assets into the client and provided some pictures of what the tournament mode may look like. Keep in mind, THIS MODE IS NOT ENABLED ON THE PBE, and things may look completely different when and if it is enabled. These pictures are VERY WIP!

Here are molenzweibel's notes on the pictures:

"Background: This is the implementation for https://boards.pbe.leagueoflegends.com/en/c/general-pbe-feedback/ELwjNdvb-team-based-competitive-mode-vietnam-playtest-soon, which was deployed on the PBE yesterday (it's not enabled yet). 

Picture 1: First you choose which tournament to participate in. If there's only one, it immediately drops you into this screen, where you get some general information and the ability to create a roster. 

Picture 2: For reference, this is the FAQ hidden behind the question mark in the previous image. 

Picture 3: Create a new roster and you get dropped in your manage view, where you can presumably manage your roster. 

Picture 4: A whole range of cute icons, including chromas. All chromas seem to be unlocked whenever you have access to the icon. 

Picture 5: Looking through the code it seems that you can unlock icons like these from winning tournaments. 

Picture 6: This is how the roster looks with some members. The ticket icon seems to work like a kind of buy-in system, but I have absolutely no clue how it works. 

Picture 7: Another close-up at the buy-in system, along with the invite button to add members to your roster. 

Picture 8: You can also be invited to teams, which show up in the usual invite tray over in the right. The numbers below the invite seem to be the start and end date of the tournament.

Picture 9: There also seems to be a scouting-like system for finding interesting teams. They show both ranked KDAs/stats and champion mastery. I'm assuming history is for previous games with the roster.

GIF: A gif of the bracket scrolling. 

Usual Disclaimer: All of this is not yet enabled, and everything in this album was created from looking around the code and emulating the League server side. That means that although the UI will probably not change much, some things are obviously not included here. Notable things I've seen but couldn't figure out: 

- Unlockable themes.
- Details around rewards.
- Roster buyouts, bidding wars.
- Your tournament history.
- How stuff looks in the different stages of the tournaments."

Remember, THIS INFORMATION IS VERY TENTATIVE. This mode is not enabled on the PBE. Keep an eye out for further coverage when and if it is made available!

Esports Summoner Icons

A whopping 56 new esports summoner icons were added to the PBE, including one Summoner's Cup themed icon, and 55 team icons. These are World Championship summoner icons and, as we've seen in the past, typically only the qualified team icons are made available. Stay tuned for more information.

Miscellaneous 

• Worlds 2017 Summoner's Rift Banner has been added.

Cassiopeia
[Context]

• Twin Fang (E) 
• bonus magic damage lowered from 15/40/65/90/115 to 10/30/50/70/90
• AP ratio increased from 40% to 50%

Ornn
[Context]

• Living Forge (P) masterwork upgrades now become available once Ornn reaches level 13.

Context & Notes

I don't see nothing wrong with a little context and WIP.

1) Here's Meddler with his Quick Gameplay Thoughts for 8/29, covering Inspiration Keystones, Ornn, and Spectator Cleanup:

"Morning all, 

Usual Disclaimers 

These posts will often contain talk about future work we're doing, or planning to do, that isn't yet guaranteed to ship. The nature of the work could change or, depending on what we discover, projects mentioned may get put delayed or even stopped.
If you'd like to see a Tweet whenever a new one of these posts goes up: https://twitter.com/RiotMeddler 

Inspiration Keystones 

Guess most of you have seen them already, for anyone that hasn't we put out some details this week about a couple of the more unusual keystones from the new runes system. Mentioning this again since we're still hunting for the third keystone from that tree (Inspiration) and ideas would be much appreciated. 

https://boards.na.leagueoflegends.com/en/c/developer-corner/4KAg8Y1F-runes-corner-summoner-specialist-and-hextech-freezeray 

Traits of inspiration: 

• Non direct damage or tankiness
• Allows some degree of rule breaking, more so than other trees
• Can include kiss/curse effects
• Tends to offer adaptability more than raw power

Traits of keystones:

• The most powerful runes
• Tactically relevant - they'll have some impact on how you play moment to moment and can be optimized more than other runes. You're rewarded for continuing to think about them a fair bit post champ select. Some other runes by contrast are more an optimization choice in champ select you don't need to put though into much once the game's started.
• They can modify a champion's playstyle somewhat, they shouldn't dictate it however.
• They should be applicable to at least a moderate number of champions (not too niche), while at the same time not be extremely attractive to everyone.
• You only get one, so there's a really high opportunity cost to them. That means they can have some very game influencing stuff, like being able to swap Summoner Spells, because you've giving up a lot of other power for them. Being able to go from Exhaust/Ignite early to Flash/TP late's strong, giving up the equivalent of Fervor or Thunderlord's however's a pretty meaningful price in combat power to pay.

Ornn 

Note: I'm writing this Friday morning, so by the time this post goes up it's possible some of this is out of date, in particular if we hotfix between now and then. 

Ornn's currently struggling quite a bit, and we're looking at what circumstances he performs well in and which poorly. At the same time we do expect him to have a pretty significant learning curve and want to try and avoid buffing him too much early on if that'll cause problems down the line (as we overbuffed Ivern in retrospect for example, who also had a pretty sizeable learning curve). We also suspect that Ornn's teams's performance is being dragged down a bit by people rushing the upgraded items he makes available in the wrong circumstances (e.g. going Triforce when it's not the right choice for your champ, or rushing the upgraded Abyssal Mask too early). At the same time Ornn's also got some lower than usual base stats, so it's possible we might want to bump those up a bit at some point, whether in a hotfix or a regular patch. 

Tuesday morning update: Adding a bit extra here, rather than just editing the original post, to try and keep things a bit simpler for some of the other regions translating this stuff. We did indeed conclude Ornn was too weak last Friday and gave him a range of base stat buffs and an ult CD buff. He's performing better, though still looks on the weak side. Next step's going to be looking at his passive, in particular ways it's baiting at least some people into poor item choices. Should see some changes on the PBE shortly looking to change that (upgraded items not available until Ornn's a certain level being the starting point). We'll then be assessing how his performance is going over the course of the week, see if we need to make other changes in the next patch or before. 

More Spectator Cleanup 

Now that the changes to various team indicators have been out in spectator for a while we'll be taking a pass at another round of spectator clean up sometime moderately soon. Goal there is to make it as easy as possible to pick out the important information, in particular in busy team fights that can be really hard to follow. Our next targets are likely to be hiding small amounts of gold income from spectator (e.g. the +1 or +3 from Bandit don't communicate anything meaningful) and hiding some crit text from spectator (no one needs to see spells critting minions for small amounts of magic damage for example). 

Other suggestions here most welcomed. Asked about this a while back and got some good suggestions that we got into the 7.16 patch, hoping to find a few more things again, either that are shown in spectator and don't need to be or aren't shown and would be valuable enough to add to justify making it harder to see other stuff."

2) Riot Asyrite with context on Cassiopeia changes in today's update:

"We're currently playing around with base damage and ap ratio changes to give her a weaker early game, but comparable/stronger late game."