Red Post Collection: Braum Q&A on 5/6, Team Builder Wins, Future Double IP Weekends, Nidalee Talk, and more!

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Recent News

• 5/3 PBE Update: Braum's Champion Select Quote
• Champion and Skin Sale 5/6 -5/9
• Free Champion Rotation 2014 Season Week 17
• SKT T1 Championship Skins Now Available!

Braum Q&A on May 6th 

Rather than an AMA on reddit, looks like Rioters will be taking to the community beta to talk more about our next champion, Braum, on Tuesday, May 6th!

"While Braum’s busy warming up for his arrival on the Rift, the team behind his creation is gathering for a Q&A session on May 6 from 11am until 6pm PDT. If you’re looking for info regarding his concept or just want tips on bench-pressing half a herd of goats, come along and ask away! 

Learn more about Braum here:

• Trials of the Poro
• Braum, the Heart of the Freljord, Revealed"

Team Builder Wins

Riot Blackrook popped in on reddit to share that Team Builder wins being added into the normal wins total won't be fixed for 4.7 but should be in 4.8

"This is not on PBE and won't be in 4.7 

We have a fix now but it was too late for 4.7. It will definitely be in 4.8 barring any serious catastrophe. The good news is the fix retroactively adds in past Team Builder wins since our original live beta."

More on future Nidalee Rework

As you may remember, Riot Repertoir is currently working on a Nidalee rework.

While he doesn't give out much hard info, here's him answering a few brief questions on what makes Nidalee frustrating:

"Hi guys, 

Unfortunately, we're not ready to disclose exact details on the rework, but I wanted to drop in and let you know that I've read this and comment on a few things.

her current hitbox/visual ratio cannot stand, because it frustrates players when they are visually certain they've dodged the spear, but they haven't.

It's absolutely frustrating when skillshots that appear to have been dodged hit, and we're looking into making this better. Reasons that include missile width, missile height, terrain height differences, and particle representation combine to cause some issues here.

Her non-Javelin Toss abilities could use a look

Agreed. Though the abilities themselves are very similar in the working kit we have slated to rework, I can tell you that we've looked into the mechanics and/or numbers on all her abilities.

In combat, the majority of what Nidalee does is in human form

If the rework stays on track (which it currently is), this will not be the case following its release.

I got killed by a Javelin Toss, not by Javelin Toss/Takedown

Death Recap will is properly differentiating between human and cougar abilities in the rework. This required a bit of a character rewrite, which is why it hasn't been shipped to Live yet.

That aspect of the spears has a lot of ridiculousness attached to it.

It may seem this way, but point-blanking a skill shot for huge damage is a far worse variant of gameplay. Spears will likely continue to gain damage from range, and I can assure you the damage of the version of Javelin Toss we're playing internally is much more tolerable to the enemy.

Give her transform at level 1

This is something we've given quite a bit of thought to, but haven't come to a firm decision on yet.

Envision her using her full combo

That is a large part of what this rework is all about, and it's very important to me that it flows well and feels awesome. I think we're just about there. 

Sorry I can't talk exact specifics at the moment. As soon as we are at the point where we're sufficiently confident, I'll come back and have a more details-oriented discussion. I really appreciate all the thoughts you guys have here. Great discussion!"

More Double IP Weekends in the future.

While we just wrapped up a double IP weekend not to long ago, Udyr commented on when we might expect to see another one:

"I can't commit to a cadence on Double IP weekends, but we definitely plan on doing more of them in the future. 

For example, we are tentatively planning another Double IP weekend towards the end of June or early July (subject to change based on a bunch of different factors including server stability, events, etc). 

There are a lot of factors to running these, and as long as we don't see negative effects starting to creep in, I'd like to increase the cadence as much as possible. 

I know this comes across as a "maybe, probably, hopefully" type of post but I dont want to get people's hopes up on a specific number of these weekends per year."

Lyte on LL TB Experiement & Tribunal

As for  the recent low level Team Builder Experiment, Lyte explained what it is like for a new player to be thrown into Team Builder:

"It's actually interesting that you point this out, because this is the perspective of a player who already plays League of Legends. 

We've done a lot of testing on brand new players who have never played MOBAs before, and their thought process is completely different. They try out a mode like Team Builder and say, "Interesting, I can set positions for my team. Guess I'll put some people in each position... oh I have 1 extra position, maybe I'll put them here." 

What you end up seeing is that low level players don't really care about the meta (because they don't know one exists), and Team Builder actually is the easiest to understand experience. You should see the research when these new players enter a Normal Blind Pick game as their first game :) It's scary when other players start saying things like "Hey, we need a jungler" and the new player is thinking, "What's a jungler?" 

So if you actually think about Team Builder from a brand new player's perspective, it's a much better experience because they don't care about the meta, just choose random positions, and take all the time they need to read Champion descriptions and choose somebody they can play for sure. 

If you think about Team Builder from a veteran player's perspective, it doesn't make much sense at all why we would do this."

He continued:

"We're actively looking at queue times, and for most brand new players, it's not that different than any other queue times. 

We are seeing issues when veteran players invite new players into Team Builder, or when "new players" actually are smurfs in Team Builder... 

We'll keep re-evaluating every 24 hours and seeing if we need to end the experiment early."

Lyte also touched on the Tribunal and the perception that just because the Tribunal is out that toxic players aren't being punished:

"We'll have more details soon, but report data is saved, and there will be consequences."

He continued:

"The Tribunals have been going through some instability for awhile; however, they are not necessary for punishments in League of Legends. 

Reports are completely independent of Tribunal, and we've been doing some preparation and final data collection to start some aggressive Restricted Chat Ban experiments and potentially adjustments to Leaver/AFK penalties while the Tribunal is offline. This is a great opportunity for us to experiment with other solutions that should be much quicker than Tribunal typically was, and will offer us insight on how we should re-work some aspects of the Tribunal. 

The Player Behavior team will post more about this in the near future (weeks, not months), but we need to nail down some final details of the experiments. Please do keep reporting for now, as our experiments will all use some aspect of the Report systems."

and

"Actually, the Tribunals have been facing instability for awhile, and we are actively working on some really neat experiments that might have a huge impact on behaviors in the game. We expect to have some more news in the near future (weeks, not months, as I mentioned earlier). 

We're just about finished doing some final data collection and research on the designs of these experiments, but one of the key principles we're focusing on is being able to apply a penalty as quickly as possible. Speed was something the Tribunal was not great at, and we hope to see that really quick, fast consequences can have a huge impact on behaviors--especially in a place like Ranked Mode. Data from these experiments will help us figure out where we need to re-work some aspects of the Tribunal to improve on its main weakness of speed."

Harbinger Kassadin's Blade

ChaosEidolon replied to a thread asking for a fix to the longtime discrepancy between Harbinger Kassadin's Splash art and in-game model - his blade is facing the wrong direction!

"Wow...I always thought Harbinger Kassadin's blade looked derp, I can't believe I never noticed that. I think you're right Proximus D. I'm gonna see what I can do to get that fixed. Nice catch, thanks for pointing it out! 

Kassadin is very high up the list of worst offenders in the visuals department. As JxE mentioned, he's definitely slated for a rework. I am particularly invested in his update, as he's been my favorite champ since beta.

I can't discuss timelines unfortunately, but I would actually love to talk to you guys about what you'd expect from his base visual update and all of his skins. In what ways do they work for you, and in what ways do they not hit the mark?"

 He continued:

"Awesome guys, great feedback so far. 

This type of conversation is really valuable for us to get a sense of how people perceive a champ. It's top priority for me that we keep the essence of Kassadin in tact, so getting the hive-mind read on him is really important :) Please keep it coming! The more points of view we have, the better.

So, I am curious. Seems like a lot of people perceive Kassadin as being from the Shurima desert. May I ask where you guys are drawing that conclusion from?"