Red Post Collection: Update on EU+NA server problems, 3.14 Soraka Discussion, HAND TURKEYS, and more!

[Update]: Added in a few more posts about Soraka!

Tonight's red post collection features a reminder that Yasuo information will be made available when the team is ready, a few comments on the upcoming changes to Soraka's kit, CertainlyT commenting on champions having multiple animations for one spell, a note on improving PBE communications, updates on both server troubles both NA and EU have been experiencing lately, and some awesome LoL hand turkeys!
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Ya-soon.

When asked for some more hints about the upcoming champion Yasuo, CertainlyT remarked:

"Patience. Not going to spoil things too much. The whole team worked put their heart and soul into the champ; we'll unveil him together soon."

3.14 Soraka Changes

As you may have noticed, Soraka has serveral preseason updates currently testing on the PBE - including a new passive, altered Q, and a few other little tweaks to her kit.

Here's Meddler with a few comments on these changes:

"We're not trying to nerf Soraka, instead aiming to adjust her play style to fit with the preseason changes and have a healthier pattern (in combat saves and action over staying back and topping off her team). As with all the core supports we've made some adjustments to if this does turns out to be a giant nerf we'll put some power back into them in the follow up patch. Similarly if our assessments been wrong in the other direction, and some supports end up too strong following the preseason patch, we'll tone their power down. 

TLDR: Let's talk a week or two after the patch goes out once things have been experimented with and settle down a bit and we'll then adjust power as needed."

He continued, responding to someone who feels Soraka's core issue as a dedicated healer will NOT be addressed properly with these changes:

"That's still a concern, and something we may have to address with bigger kit changes (not just number adjustments) at a later date. These changes are intended to shift her towards a more interesting and healthy playstyle though, with healing that cools down quicker in combat, is most effective on those in real need, a mana cost on the mana battery play of infuse but not the silence and a solid chunk of Armor once you've got some AP that allows a lot of short duration mitigation. If she turns out to be too weak we'll likely buff some of those strengths a bit more.

Also worth bearing in mind that her healing output hasn't been equally problematic through out the course of a game - it's most unhealthy during the laning phase, late game there are a number of other healers with similar (or sometimes higher) healing output. In previous years when Soraka was a really dominant choice bot lane Lifesteal quints/early vamp sceptors also weren't regular choices, so the difference between a sustain lane and not was much starker. On top of that jungle play's also become much more experienced (choice of gank paths and timings in particular), which is harder for a low CC/mobility support like Soraka to compensate for some times. As a result of all that while I suspect we'll see some issues crop up again their context's changed so they may present in different forms/to different degrees."

As for the preseason utility AP scaling, he commented:

"Our goal is to have supports scale utility more with items and non supports scale damage more with items, with both of those types being attractive choices to put in a duo lane as a non farming champion. If the utility scaling that's currently present isn't enough to compensate for the lack of damage versus say, AP mages, then we'll buff that utility. What we don't want to do is just turn supports into utility mages (some utility, high damage) - they're a different class that offers a distinct experience and we'd like to enhance that, not homogenize that."

He continued:

"As above we'd like supports to be strong choices, picked for their utility in particular. If it turns out after this patch goes out that we've overestimated how strong they'll be (could well happen) we'll buff, likely in the next patch.

R.E. current core supports not dominating in solo lanes a lot of their power in lane is underutilized if it's not augmenting an ally as well as the support in question (Sona's auras, 2nd heal on an ally for example). There's also some team comp impact (you're either not giving your ADC a support or running a two support team for example) which may or may no be desired." 

Multiple Animations for one spell

When asked if we will ever get multiple animations for a single spell - particularly for champions like Karthus who chain cast, CertainlyT commented:

"That's a cool idea -- Lay Waste is one of the truest basic attack replacements we have in the game (fun fact: Karthus did the least physical damage of any champion over the course of the last three months).

I'm confident our animators could come up with 2-3 animations that both conveyed that he was casting Lay Waste while still making his animations feel less monotone."

Improving PBE Communications

RiotSeb dropped a few comments on the PBE feedback system, noting Riot's continued work to improve the PBE community site and how testers can interact:

"I agree that our ability to communicate to PBE testers about bugs isn't great or consistent-- whether we've seen them, verified them, fixed them, or even delivered the fixes. In this case of the platform error originally reported, we're planning to deliver the fix for this issue on the next PBE deploy. 

My team and I are working on some changes to the PBE community site, since testers deserve to know that their feedback is being heard and acted on. Our approach to collecting and communicating about bugs on the community will probably be a bit different for version 3.15, and we'll be working to improve more over time. 

That said, it should be expected that the PBE is a test area where things might be broken, even for several days as issues go through the process. In this case, a subset of players were affected by a bug, and our dev teams reacted within a couple of working days. It's not a good experience for those testers, but instability should be understood as part of playing on the beta server."

11/17 - 11/18 NA Problems

Here's Riot Hawknet, an Assistant Producer, with an update on the problems plaguing the NA servers over the past two days

"Hey everyone,
I wanted to give you all an update on the issues we’ve been experiencing on NA over the last couple days. We’ve had two separate incidents occur that have resulted in a pretty terrible experience for you all, so I’d like to shed some light on what happened and what we’ve done to resolve these issues. 

First off, 11/17’s incident. This incident was traced back to live network maintenance work being implemented incorrectly, which had the unfortunate result of dropping everyone off of NA. We removed the work that was implemented, but ultimately needed to perform a complete restart in order to bring service back up as quickly as possible for you all. We’ve identified what went wrong with this maintenance, and will revise our steps to ensure that a similar incident doesn’t happen again. 

Second off, tonight’s incident. A primary database for NA suffered from an issue that resulted in players in game getting dropped, as well as the inability to re-log into the game. We’re still investigating what exactly happened – but power cycling the database resulted in all of you being able to log back into the game, as well as start games again. Investigation is ongoing as to why issues arose on this database in the first place.

I hope that this sheds some light on the problems that NA has been facing over the last 48 hours. We’re working on figuring out the precise root cause of this latest incident, and are monitoring things very closely. As of now though, you should be able to log into NA and get back to playing League."

EU Post-Incident Messaging for November 18th & LP Problems