April 17th Premade Game Lobby Maintenance
Here's Riot Egglorian with the NA server status post on the upcoming maintenance aimed at fixing up lobby issues!"Summoners,Be sure to check out your specific server's maintenance thread ( as they happen at different times! ) for more info:
We'll be taking the servers offline this evening at 03:00 AM PDT to fix a bug where players were sometimes getting stuck in premade game lobbies. We anticipate this maintenance will take around 6 hours. Check this thread for updates!"
Update on DDoS Issues
Riot has prepared a small update on the recent DDoS by players stopping individual games in an attempt to avoid losing.Here's Riot Sherom with a post on EUW and Riot Gradius with the same post on NA:
"For months now, some players have been using DDoS style attacks to take down individual games, players and servers to avoid losing games. Whilst this affects a small percentage of total games, it has impacted a lot of players, and it’s something we’d like to minimize as much as possible.
Our team has identified many individuals behind such attacks, and we have begun taking actions to limit their access to League of Legends through suspensions and permanent bans.
In some cases, an individual player might be targeted – meaning your home internet service was DDoSed, not the League of Legends servers. This can only happen if your home IP address is somehow discoverable. The good news is that there are steps you can take to protect yourself. First, if you use Skype, make sure to download the latest version. If you think you’ve been compromised, talk to your ISP and ask for an IP address change. Read this knowledge-base articlefor a more in-depth explanation.
A large majority of reports we’ve investigated were likely caused by more ordinary sources of lag and disconnect, such as ISP issues and game server hiccups. But if you have evidence that a player is DDosing, please share it with us throughcontacting player support. Please include the following information:
• Title on the support ticket: DDoS/Drophack report
• Time stamp of the game
• Screenshots of game errors
• Screenshots that list out the players in your game
• Any time when a player is threatening to disrupt a game
• The game appeared in your match history
Although we may not be able to share with you further details of the reports you’ve made (e.g. whether someone ended up being banned or not), this data will help us in our investigations and ultimately it help you, our players.Riot tmx, the Live Services Manage for Europe, also weighed in on punishments for drophackers:
This is a challenge for us to tackle and we’re working hard to make things better. Thank you for your patience in this and please join us in this effort by taking steps to be safe and reporting suspicious behaviors that you see!"
"Quote:
What about the drophackers which disconnect everyone so the game deletes just when you were about to win?
Such players will be suspended and in most cases it just means permanently banned. We started to take actions last week against some top offenders -- these accounts we had hard proofs against. We already identified accounts with high percentage of recent unfinished games and suspending all of them is just a matter of few days.
We do appreciate your reports and will spend a lot of time to manually analyze all of them. The more information we have, the quicker and more efficiently we can act. However, even without external reports we can easily generate our own reports of effectively go down the list."
More on Warwick Rework Prototype
[ I HIGHLY suggest you read the original post as all of this discussion is directed at that tentative kit. ]
When asked how the new kit reflects Warwick's fantasy of "slowly losing control", he replied:
"Yeah, my hope is that the slowly building passive gets that across. You do become more and more reckless as a player with that passive, trust me ;)"
Replying to some general feedback, ZenonTheStoic commented on why Warwick's current W was scrapped and his thoughts on adding more attack speed back into the kit somewhere.
"The second an enemy cleanses out of the ult, WW is freed of the ult as well.
The E has a LOT of subtlety that doesn't come across on paper.
The W you correctly identified as invisible power, and there is no way something like that will stay on a champion.
We have been thinking about AS elsewhere on the kit. We don't want to confuse the use case of the W, but potentially on the E based on how many champions you hit by it? We'll see!"
He also confirmed the tentative E passive now picks up the scent of low health epic monsters such as Baron and Dragon:
"E passive works on all big/epic monsters, so Dragon and Baron as well, but at a reduced range. All vision is shared amongst allies in our game, so they see what you see."He continued on the E passive, noting:
"Blood Thirst will not be a toggle and enemies will see you. Yes, this is a massive nerf, but we're thinking about ways to compensate. For instance we might make it so they only see you when you get close (you reveal them from ~3500 range, they see you once you're in ~2000 range)."
As for his new E active sounding similar to Quinn's E, ZenonTheStoic commented:
"Very different. It's direction targeted, can be short cast, damages everything and slows everything it passes through, and can be combined with another skill on the kit."
When asked about making Warwick's Prototype R have a fairly low cooldown but have an increased cooldown if it's used to escape ( as it is now sort of like a Sejuani Q that stuns who it hits ) , ZenonTheStoic commented:
"Yep, that's what I'm thinking about! Might go crazy and say the CD is doubled if you don't hit a champion, but we have to be careful about not punishing near misses too much. This is WAY too designery, but if there was a way of saying "you only pay the CD penalty if your R did not move towards an enemy champion". I'll think on it some more!"
As for why Warwick's prototype R was shifted to a skill shot type targeting instead of a point and click CC, he commented:
"Currently, almost all of WW's power budget lies in his ult. Most of the rest is tied up in the W, which is invisible. We DEFINITELY had to reduce the overall amount of power in the R."
When asked to elaborate on his distaste for the suppression ( which has been shifted to a stun on the prototype R ), ZenonTheStoic commented:
"It's a design crutch. It's usually used in stuns where the kit relied entirely on that stun being 100% reliable, unreducable, and unbreakable by Cleanse (which was a common pick when suppression was made). It's basically saying "here's a stun but oh, this was has a bunch of extra rules which you can't know, like you can't use smite while suppressed! Isn't that fun!""He continued:
"That is such a dumb mechanic. It breaks nearly all principles of good design we apply to League. Eventually I'd love to get rid of all suppression skills and fix their kits otherwise."
As for improving Warwick's visuals ( as a VU has been confirmed to come along with the kit ), ZenonTheStoic commented:
"Yeah, we've not gone deep into concepting yet. IronStylus is one of the concept artists on the relaunch team and I've been talking to him. He seems to have some cool ideas and generally Mike has a track record for making awesome, so I'm not too worried."
Other
ZenonTheStoic also commented on what sort of programs designers use to script champions:
"Totally!
We use a heavily modified version of Lua to script champions. We use a tool called "blockbuilder" that hooks into certain events in the game (a button was pressed, a champion took damage, someone stopped moving, a buff expired, etc--there's about 40 different events we can hook into) and builds scripts for those events out of simple building blocks (hence us calling dashes "move blocks" internally--it's a building block called simply "move")
Designers generally don't touch C++ ever. Tech designers do, but those guys are rare unicorns. Some say they are merely legends, but Riot SubNinja exists (and he made Zac and Vel'Koz), so I guess there are unicorns after all. It's GREAT being a tech designer because us mere mortal designers have to go to full time engineers with feature requests that require tech, and those guys are usually putting out a dozen different fires. But yeah, most of us designers don't know very much C++ (I could get by, but my code would be horrific, so I don't touch the C++ codebase of league, ever).
Find a game that allows for modding is my big recommendation and then get used to the idea of scripting. If you want to practice Lua in particular and if you like 4X games, I can't recommend Civ V highly enough for its wonderful mod support. You'll learn to use Lua, SQL modification, and C++ in concert while making a Civ V mod."
When asked how he became a champion designer, he shared:
"I started out doing customer support in the gaming industry a while ago. I then transitioned to QA, led a small loca QA team for a while, transitioned to community & shoutcasting, and from there finally to design.
You'll often find weird trips like that. You can't really plan this stuff out. You do what is required at a given time and hope you're good enough that people will want to work with you more in the future.
Look at www.riotgames.com/careers for all job openings we have at the moment. There are TONS of non-programmer / artist jobs."
ZenonTheStoic also made a brief comment on Zilean's rework, saying:
"We've started ideating on the Zilean rework! This means we have a designer (20thCenturyFaux) who wrote up a paper kit. We'll put this kit into testing sometime in the future and that'll give us an idea of whether or not it goes in a good direction.
So: TL;DR: super early days, but we'll get to him eventually."
Hints on Next Champion
In a reddit thread discussing the next champion being confirmed as a support and designed by Riot Wrekz at PAX East, ZenonTheStoic left us with a tease:"All I can say is I'm a support main and even though we have handed the champion over to Core Gameplay for competitive tuning, I still jump on Wrekz' baby in design playtests (more of a wild west environment where we test way out there stuff) whenever I can. So much fun. So many plays!"RiotWrekz also signed up for reddit just to share:
"Really excited to see all the conjecture here. I absolutely can't wait to get the champion out to you and see the plays DanielZKlein was talking about in the live game. Hope you're all ready!"
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