[Updated] Red Post Collection: Let's talk about Urgot, Face of the Mountain Change, EU Service Update, and lots more!

Update: Meddler is looking for feedback on Urgot! Added it to the top of the post.

Tonight's red post collection features a peek at an upcoming change to Face of the Mountain, an update on the EU service problems, an update on the ranked border bugs, a note on the addition of a cast range to the Sweeping Lens trinket, and several more tidbits!
Continue reading for more information!

Recent News

First off, here's a couple of links to some of the other news stories that came out today!

• Sultan Gangplank now available
• 11/13 PBE Update: Updated Nasus splash, New Icons, more tentative balance changes

Let's Talk Urgot

Meddler is currently looking for feedback on Urgot!

"Hey all, 

Urgot's a champion we haven't talked much about recently and one who's fallen out of sight after we reduced his power a while back. That's something we'd like to look at - reanimated undead monstrosity with powerful, heavy weapons and a mighty hatred's a cool concept that we're not doing justice at the moment. As a result we'll be doing some work on Urgot's kit next year, experimenting to find out what we need to do to preserve (or enhance) the cool aspects about him, while fixing the problems that lead us to nerfing him heavily in the past. That'll take a while, as a starting point though I thought it'd be great to get a bunch of thoughts from people on Urgot, both what he currently is and what he's got the potential to be. 

If you play Urgot, what is it that appeals to you about him, both in terms of theme and gameplay? Which of his abilities define what it's like to play Urgot for you? If you don't play Urgot, are there particular reasons you're not interested in doing so?

When playing as Urgot are there things that feel unnecessarily difficult to do or ineffective? When playing against Urgot are there things that feel unfair?

General thoughts/comments also extremely welcome. One disclaimer though - at the moment at least we're only looking to work on Urgot's gameplay, not do a full overhaul of him, so while we'll assummedly give Urgot a visual upgrade at some point it'll be a separate, later project."

Be sure to leave your feedback over on NA, EUW, or OCE

When asked why they don't just undo some of the Urgot nerfs, he noted:

"We nerfed Urgot because his current kit's pretty unhealthy for the game when it's strong. What we're aiming to do as a result is adjust some of his gameplay to remove those problems so that we can then happily put some strength back into his kit where needed."

Upcoming Change to Face of the Mountain on PBE

"Reducing the Health from 400 to 300
Adding 10% Cooldown Reduction 

No cost adjustments. Feel free to share your thoughts on this change."

European Service Update November 2013

Errigal posted an update on the ongoing EU service problems and solutions.

"Summoners, 

Now that S3 is over and rewards have been delivered (I hope you reached your goals for the season!), I wanted to update you on some of the things we talked about in last months thread. 

Service Stability - The strike team resolved the chat and platform instabilities by upgrading crucial parts of the network infrastructure. More recently some of you also experienced issues that were tied to our network provider. As a fix, they performed a series of bandwidth capacity maintenances – the most recent one was last night. TMX has been keeping you informed about it in this thread. 

Patch Deploy - 3.13 was relatively smooth, apart from some store downtime related to getting the Harrowing store content and Mystery Gifting set up. Everything was ok after a hotfix. 

Upcoming Maintenance - Our next maintenance is a big one and will be the largest this year. It's another important step towards supporting the parts of EUW that are affected by traffic. We’re preparing carefully and aiming to do the work in early December. Our goal is ensuring you all have smooth gameplay over the Christmas period. 

Amsterdam Datacentre Update - This is a huge project and when completed will be Riot’s largest and most advanced data centre to date. We have a team onsite right now installing hardware and cabling and they're making great progress. We're targeting Amsterdam being live in the first quarter of 2014. The scale of this project is truly massive, so this is an ambitious target. To give one example: some of our new hardware is custom made for Riot so it's taking extra time and attention to get manufactured and installed. Regarding RiotDirect, negotiations are on-going with bandwidth providers and it's looking great so far.

I'm personally excited about the progress I've seen on these tech issues and for the future of the European platforms. With this and the recent announcement that Europe will be hosting next season's All Stars, it looks like 2014 will be an exciting year for Europe."

Cast Range on Sweeping Lens

Xypherous commented agreeing with a summoner's suggestion to a have a cast range on Sweeping Lens and its upgrade paths instead of it only being able to be cast right on top of your champion.

"It turns out this is a pretty good idea for a number of other reasons (unified trinket use cases for one) and turning the idea over, we'll probably ship with some limited cast range (400/600) on these. 

It'll be a good tuning point other than making the AoE gigantic. We're going to start small for now so it probably won't fix the issues you describe with the cast range - but it'll be a good step towards incremental buffs until it's in a good spot. 

Hopefully this'll make it into the next build and you can play around with it."

This change is actually already up on the PBE for testing as of the 11/13 PBE update.

Update To S3 Ranked Rewards - Ranked Border Bug

A new post from Riot NOC has went up on EUW and EUNE regarding the ranked border bugs.

"Hey all, 

Another update to this thread here – we wanted to roll out these ranked border fixes with minimal disruption and discovered there was an easier (and more painless way) to do it without messing with your ranked games, so we’ll be doing that. The one downside is that this border hotfix will take place within about a week’s time rather than right now. 

Additionally, there’s been some visibility where your ranked queue borders have been reflecting the highest rank achieved in any queue (so 3v3 Diamond borders appearing in 5v5 solo queue games). That’s a larger bug in the code that we’ll be addressing with patch 3.14. We’ll keep you updated on that but we just wanted to reiterate how the system works: 

- Ranked solo / duo queue, ranked 5v5, normal 5v5, and co-op vs. AI 5s should show the highest of your ranked 5v5 or ranked solo / duo queue achievement in Season 3 (whichever is highest)
- Ranked 3s, normal 3s, and co-op vs. AI 3s should show your ranked 3s border.
- Dominion, custom games, and Howling Abyss games should show the highest of any of the ranked queues you earned rewards in.

Thanks for your patience!"

Communicating Ward Caps

On the PBE community, Xypherous clarified  the "0/3 - 3/3" PBE indicator that shows the player how many total Stealth wards they have on the map.

"I completely understand the confusion. It's a common one - I think we're looking into trying to figure out better ways to communicate your ward caps on a per map basis. 

The Trinket, Sightstone and Regular wards all share a same common limit - 3 Stealth Wards on the map per player at any time. 

So when it says 1/3 - all it means it that you've used one out of 3 Stealth Wards but the Yellow Trinket itself can never put you over the cap unless you drop other wards as well. You can place Stealth Wards via the Yellow Trinket, the Sightstone line of items, Wriggle's Lantern and regular Stealth Wards consumable items and they all have the X/3 displays in their item."

Item Sets "eventually" stored on Server

In a discussion about a summoner's custom item sets being deleted with each patch,
Vaurnbarn, a Platform Engineer, noted that eventually Riot hopes to store custom item sets on the server!

"Items sets are stored locally for the time being, in your preferences file. Eventually we want to put them on the server. Patches are not supposed to wipe your local preferences, so this is definitely not intended behavior. Are you reinstalling or repairing often? If not, maybe there's something else going on.."

Comments on Rune Combiner

Vaurnbarn, a Platform Engineer, made some comments regarding the runes and the rune combiner allowing you to obtain a rune that exceeds the maximum number you can use ( i.e a 4th quint or a 10th mark ).

"This system is maybe not our best.. system. In this case, you can recombine that rune into something of the same tier that hopefully is valuable to you, but to be honest I think we'd rather redesign the way that runes work in general, before spending too much effort polishing rune combiner."

More SR Art Feedback

RiotForScience, a Senior Environment Artist, dropped off some more comments on summoner feedback regarding SR's art style, commenting specifcally on creeps:

"These are great ideas. When it comes to the creep-camps I would prefer to move them in the monstrous direction rather than into the humanoid space, just so that is more clear from a player perspective that these guys operate with different rules than champions or shopkeepers. I love the idea of stronger and deeper themes for there camps though. I would love it if the wolf are felt like wolves lived there rather than looking like an abandoned miniature opera house. Either way the campfires really need to be looked at."