This morning's red post collection features Riot Boourns with an update on the recent targeting bugs, Lyte discussing what positive players in LoL look like,a reminder to revisit Riot's gamescom 2014 portal now that the event has concluded, and more!
- Red Post Collection: More on Viktor's Gameplay Update, Dino Gnar & Gnar community creations, and much more!
- This Week in eSports: Gamescom 2014 Round Up, Worlds Group Draw Info, and more
- Champion and Skin Sale 8/19 - 8/22
- Free Champion Rotation 2014 Season Week 31
Note: There was also a very small PBE update on 8/18 that contained mostly bug fixes. Rest assured if there was anything flashy or any balance changes, I would have pushed a PBE update post :)
Update on Targeting Bugs
Riot Boourns popped up on reddit to give a small update on the targeting problems ( i.e not being able to properly target something you have your cursor over or using activate items like Blade of the Ruined King ), commenting that he believes he's found a fix!"Hey guys, I think I identified what was going on with this. The BotRK post[1] from last week rang some alarm bells for me. What happened was that the pixel perfect targeting part of the code was broken so the targeting system was making decisions based only on the bounding volume around models.
How this manifests is that when you have targetable objects near each other (like Taric near a tower, or minions packed in a wave) you will get imprecise targeting even though your mouse is over the model of the thing you're trying to target.
I just checked in a fix and it's going through the QA process.
Thanks to all of you for raising awareness on this. I'd been thinking that something felt "off", but I thought I was just a baddie or had intermittent lag. Your comments helped narrow things down. This video is really helpful for providing a solid test case for us."He continued:
"Also, can you help us out by digging up any past threads on this. It's a really tricky issue to test and I want to make sure we're hitting all the right cases.
I already have g30therm's thread and the BotRK post. Please reply here with any more that you folks remember."As for an expected ETA for this fix, Boourns noted:
"Not completely sure, I don't normally do engineering or release related things (UX designer by day) so I am not familiar with our hotfix policy. It should go out with the next patch based on my current understanding."Riot Feithen also commented:
"We're getting the fix tested now and once complete, we'll let you all know when to expect the fix Live."
When asked if this fix will also fix up BotRK, Boourns noted:
"It should improve this! Although the fact that this was a problem for BotRK implies that our bounding box selection algorithm might benefit from some tweaking. Even if we broke the pixel perfect selection part, the bounding box selection should still prefer to target something that your ability would work on even if you are touching other non-targetable things.
Either way with this fix, if you are over an enemy champion it should target them with BotRK"
In response to a summoner's comment criticizing the bug fix as being made "on a wim" instead of having people dedicated to fixing it, Boourns commented:
"This is actually incredibly hurtful and not constructive. I understand that as a player, we care most about the outcome and not as much about the process. I'm a player too and I hate these kinds of bugs and I just want them to be fixed. But: you make these statements about our process like you understand from my post everything that happens inside Riot. I don't know why you feel so cynical, but I'd love to understand more about how we could regain your trust.
That being said, these kinds of statements minimize the hard work that people across the organization do to release working software and new features to you. Saying that no one was dedicated to figuring out this issue is simply incorrect. In retrospect the fix was fairly simple, but finding the right places to look in was not trivial. When you are investigating the individual reports: it's not clear that something so fundamental was involved, especially given the intermittent nature of the problem. It was also in a system that not a lot of people have a deep understanding of. A lot of people within the organization were trying to figure out the root cause of this, and I just happened to have some prior knowledge that sparked some interest. However, I had a ton of help from people around me to point me in good directions and give me insight.
To me, it sounds like you're saying that we should never release defects, and we should fix all the ones we do release right away in a timely manner. Well, no big surprise, we're all human over here and we make mistakes. You don't see the bugs that we fix before ship or that we fix even though our players don't notice them. Unfortunately we're not perfect, and things slip through the cracks. If all you focus on are the negatives, anycompany looks terribly disorganized.
I happen to be talking to you about fixing this problem, but the best part about Riot is that it could also have been anyone. And we all care enough to try even if it's "not our job".
More Splash Art Updates?
When asked why Riot didn't update any of Sivir's current skin splash art when they updated 33 older splash art to newer art from other regions earlier this year, Riot Curing commented:"Hello King Odarth! Nice to meet you, my name is RiotCuring and I'm in Splash Art department.
Before I start, I thought I'd share our primary goals with splash art. A good splash art should contain not only the mood and personality of the character in style of League of Legends, but also reflect what the players will see when played in-game --- all in the most awesome way possible.
That being said, while I'm unsure what exact reason prevented us from updating this particular skin and we currently can't promise you an update, we will definitely check again to see if this is a 'clear win' for the players.
As for concerns of stylistic difference in art, we WILL replace the old splash art if it is a clear win even if art style is a bit different. A good example of this was Red Riding Annie splash change. Even though artistic style used in Chinese version was different from our current goals/style, it was so clear that it is an upgrade from the old NA splash that we decided to use it.
If any of you guys have solid suggestions in switching current NA splash art with art from other regions, please comment and let us know! we can plan a 2nd wave of splash art updates if we have solid recommendations. Our high-level goal is to eventually make every splash art in League of Legends awesome, so please bear with us through our long journey ahead. :)
TL;DR We can't promise the change for this particular but we will review the possibility of the change. Also please let us know if you have suggestions for any other splash updates (Other region art to NA)."
Ghostcrawler on Champion Roles
In a thread discussing champion roles and alternative strategies, Ghostcrawler popped in to share this thoughts and champion role flexibility:"Quote
Having flexibility in the game - where champs can pick different roles and lanes - keeps it interesting. We need more of that, not less.
The issue is balance. Those champs have to be balanced for both solo lanes and duo lanes. IMO, this can be solved by designing all champs to be able to scale with gold, and then buffing the gold of the support role.This is actually the direction we'd prefer to go. Now not every champion will be able to fill multiple roles (though Morgana feels close at times :) ), but we'd like to see players try more exploration of these sorts of things and not feel wrist-slapped by us when they do. Historically we feel we've been a little over-reactive in this regard -- as soon as someone steps out of "their lane" or tries something different than "their build," we try to swoop in and quickly make changes. It keeps the game balanced (maybe...), but it's boring.
One of our design values is Evolution, and part of that means being okay with players using the game more as a sandbox and feeling less constrained by the Riot approved (tm) way to play. If players find different ways to play champions, as long as it doesn't squelch diversity for other champions, and as long as our other design values (such as teamplay and counterplay) are maintained, then we want to try and support it!
Melee top, Mage mid, ADC + Support bottom has proven to be a reasonably healthy state of the game, but surely there are others, and wouldn't it be nice if players discovered some of them instead of Riot engineering them all."
Lyte on what a Positive Player Looks like
Over the weekend, Lyte started up a thread to highlight positive players rather than just spending his time on the forum smiting toxic or negative players attempting to get their punishments repealed."Hey everyone,
We've recently been pretty focused on addressing extreme cases of verbal toxicity, and are going to start testing systems that also address gameplay toxicity like leavers, AFKs, and intentional feeders. However, players that engage in these behaviors really are an outcast in our community; so far, less than 1% of players have been escalated to a 14-day ban or permanent ban or even received a chat restriction.
We should spend some time highlighting the awesome behaviors in our community too. If you are a positive player in League, and are OK sharing some of your recent chat logs with the rest of the community, please post a reply here!I encourage you to browse the thread ( you can start here and move along in the red tracker ) but this thread also sparked up discussion on what other systems are being worked on, why Lyte spends his time doing, and more.
Make sure you have a verified e-mail in your account, because you might get something cool in e-mail in the near future :)
EDIT ::: Taking a break for now, 8:05 PST on 8/16/2014.
---
Review Summary!
8/16/2014Reviewed approximately 11,150 players
- 11,052 players were neutral or positive (99.1%)
- 94 were chat restricted (0.84%)
- 4 were escalated for extreme toxicity (0.04%)"
When asked why he is so active on the forums and not working on the systems he frequently mentions, Lyte replied:
"I'm usually doing forum work or addressing personal tickets and issues on my own time.
During the day, my full-time job is just the design of game systems. We recently did a lot of upgrades to Team Builder with the Summoner Icon promo, and more are on their way. There's a new LeaverBuster system that will greatly improve our systems against leaving/afk, and we're going to test intentional feeder detection systems soon.He reiterated this on a different thread, commenting:
There's entire teams working on this stuff, and I'm happy to tank all the criticism, but don't discredit their hard work getting awesome features out to the players."
"Most of this stuff is on my own time. During the day, I'm one of the game designers that manages a lot of the features/systems in development.
However, we do have pretty sophisticated tools that allow me to do this type of analysis--there's no way I could have reviewed every single line of chat logs from 11,000+ players in 1 hour."
As for why this positive player thread was only posted in NA and why it seems like he the behavior team avoids other servers, Lyte commented:
"NA isn't more important than any other territory. Part of the reason we're upgrading the Tribunal is so that every server can actually get it--many servers still have never experienced Tribunal, and it was irresponsible of us to keep it up in some territories and never launch it in others.He continued to comment on the Tribunal, explaining:
So, we decided to do some major upgrades that everyone can enjoy. In the meantime, we intend to do tests of the new ban waves and positive waves in every territory."
"One of the biggest challenges is scale. The Tribunal wasn't architect-ed in a way that could handle millions of gamers casting billions of votes in the system and churning out penalties at this scale daily. We also wanted to allow the system to review positive behaviors, which would triple the scale necessary to run the system.
For a long time we couldn't even launch Tribunal in new territories, so it stayed in NA/EU and a few other regions, but was never launched in places like Oceania or Turkey. We're a bigger studio and company now, so it's our responsibility to make sure players around the world get the same player experience, so we had to fix this problem.
About the current situation, we're testing a lot of new things and the lessons we learn will directly apply to the new Tribunal."
In response to how naturally stressful League is leading to increased toxicity, Lyte replied:
"League is stressful, but that's because it's a hardcore, competitive game where you have to rely on your teammates to succeed. FPS games don't have this issue as much because players drop and go, and really 1 bad player has no effect on your team. However, in League, 1 player having a bad game greatly disrupts your win percentages, so the emotional stakes are higher.
However, the vast majority of players don't explode in rage when they have a player having a bad game on their team. We're human. We get upset, we get frustrated, and we might get angry when we lose a match, but most of us don't instantly resort to obscenities and homophobic/racial slurs or death threats.
A % of players behaved in a pretty toxic way in online communities and games for years, and never had any consequences--they probably learned that this behavior was OK. A very small % of people in real life also have issues controlling their rage, or behaving in a socially-appropriate way. They deal with consequences their entire lives, and in many ways, we're seeing that by having some structure in League, we're able to greatly reduce toxicity. With some structure, we're seeing that the community is actually pretty awesome, and most players have a good time in a majority of their games."
[ Reminder ] gamescom 2014 portal
With gamescom wrapped up, here's a small reminder to check out some of the awesome over on Riot's gamesom 2014 portal!Here's but a few of cool things they've shared since our first look:
Just like last time, remember you can also check out the loleu flickr for a smorgasbord of photos from the event!
"What's up with the next VU?"
When asked "What's up with the next VU" as we haven't had a full fledged VU since Karthus came out in June, IronStylus replied:
"We stagger things between lower scope stuff like Karthus VU's, Skarner TU's, Sona MU's, and VGU's like Karma, what used to be called a Relaunch. So.. you can possibly assume that since that we haven't had one of the latter in a while.. well, I'll leave that up to you as to which champion we're going to bring back from the dead this time."
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