Red Post Collection: Ranked Restrictions on NA/EU, Azir Bugs, Stance on 3rd Party Apps, and more!

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• Red Post Collection: Story & Art Board Introduction, Leona Portrait, and more!
• Reborn - Part 2: FALL

• Patch 4.17 Server Maintenance Announced!

Live-testing Ranked Restrictions in NA and EU

With 4.17 headed to live soon, Riot Socrates has posted more information on the upcoming ranked restrictions that will be live testing on NA and EU as well as the information on the most negative ranked or chat restricted players being ineligible for end of season ranked rewards:

"Hey all, 

For a while now, the Competitive and Player Behavior teams have been working together to create features that foster both a fun and competitive environment in ranked play, and we recently tested a new feature on PBE. Known as Ranked Restrictions, the experiment restricted the in-game chat of negative players and prevented them from joining ranked queues until they’d completed the required number of games. With the feature proving successful on PBE, we’re rolling it out to live servers in NA and EUW in the coming days. Depending on the results of this, we’ll continue to add regions globally. 

When Ranked Restrictions go live on NA and EU, restricted players will be unable to queue up for ranked until they complete a certain number of games in Normal Draft. One thing we specifically wanted to address is that Ranked Restricted players will be Chat Restricted in other queues, and they can and should still be reported if they continue to display negative behaviors while playing through their restrictions. As with Chat Restrictions, after they finish the predetermined number of games, we’ll perform a final evaluation to make sure they've actually improved their in-game behavior. Players who haven’t shown improvement will continue to be restricted from playing ranked. Related to Ranked Restrictions, we’ve determined that Ranked Rewards should reward positive sportsmanship just as much as they reward great play, so the most negative players who are Ranked or Chat Restricted at the end of the season will be ineligible to earn ranked end of season rewards such as the loading screen borders or Victorious Morgana champion skin. While the majority of players will not be affected by this ruling, we wanted to message it well in advance so that players concerned about their behavior have more than enough time to adjust and reform before the end of the season. 

-Riot Socrates"

Socrates continued, responding to player concerns about Normal Draft seeing an influx of toxic players:

"We see that a players behavior shifts pretty dramatically based on the queue they are playing in. Since normals are less stressful and players who receive ranked restrictions will also receive chat restrictions, we don't expect to see an impact to the quality of the queue. That said, we'll be closely monitoring the health of the queue to ensure there isn't a negative impact."

If you had any doubts after seeing the teaser image last month, Victorious Morgana is the reward skin for the 2014 Ranked season for players who place gold or above.

Azir Bugs

In a thread detailing numerous bugs currently plaguing Azir after his live release, Meddler jumped in to comment on a few that are being fixed and a few that still need to be looked into:

"Thanks for the write up and agreed, Azir needs some things polished. With a couple of exceptions that are in 4.17 that'll mainly be happening in 4.18 (that timing's a result of Azir getting activated midway through a normal patch cycle, leaving us with only a day or so to get fixes in post his launch for 4.17, apologies about that). 

To touch on your specific points and give you an idea of some other stuff we're working on for Azir: 

1. Ult issues
We're working on some cases where the knockback won't calculate correctly and doesn't shift enemies noticeably. A seperate issue is that it'll sometimes fail to apply the CC effect to targets getting knocked back, allowing them to immediately cast spells while in the air. That's what's allowing dashes to sometimes go through the wall - they're being cast while someone's just been hit, and is therefore briefly immune to being knocked back again.

2. Soldiers failing to attack 

We've fixed a bug where Azir's soldiers would fail to attack or attack but do no damage after he'd cast Q under some circumstances which is one of the major culprits for why he feels unreliable at the moment. Currently digging into whether there are any other similar issues as well (details appreciated if anyone's got specific repros that don't involve the Q in particular).

3. E Useability 

Azir's E does currently do a check around the cursor to try and find the nearest soldier, I've seen feedback like yours a few times though which suggests that's either not set to check wide enough or there's something else making that feel unresponsive. Will follow up with ZenontheStoic, I'm not familiar with the exact implementation details there myself.

4. Q Smartcast 

Bit unclear on this one - is this an issue specific to smart casting Q or one that occurs with normal casts as well?


5. Attack move and soldier attacks 

Attack move should be prioritizing soldier attacks already. If that's not happening we'd love to fix it, details would be much appreciated (video, written description or whatever suits).

6. Other stuff we're also working on includes: 

Q indicator - currently extends beyond the range the soldiers will actually travel which can feel really misleading. Fix incoming. 

Tower ruin clickables being targetable by some other champion's skills (e.g. Lee Sin W). Unintended, fix inc for this too. 

Attack move onto tower ruins can accidentally trigger Azir's passive - fixing that. 

Possible balance+feel changes. Too early to be certain on details of these, we're looking at things like level one attack speed, mana regen etc though, see what we can identify that's limiting Azir unnecessarily, making him feel rougher to play.

Other misc stuff (minor bug fixes primarily)."

When asked if anything is coming in patch 4.17, Meddler noted:

"A couple of bug fixes I believe, but not much sorry. Releasing Azir mid 4.16 patch cycle meant that 4.17 was close to lock point the moment he came out."

As for how all these bugs made it out of the PBE, ZenonTheStoic explained:

"TL;DR: This is a super complicated champion and QA is hard. We were working on a lot of these things, but some were introduced toward the end of his PBE time as well. Also interest in playing a champion on the PBE falls off sharply after week 1, so you get very little coverage after that point. Sad but true."

Poppy players make yourself heard!

Fresh off the upcoming Viktor rework, Solcrushed slammed on to the forums to ask players what they think is the core of Poppy's character:

"Doing some pretty preliminary water testing here. (Inb4 Riot is reworking Poppy!) 

I would like to better understand how you, the players, perceive the core of Poppy the character to be. 

Forget mechanics, I am not interested in specific kit particularities that you like or dislike (at least not yet, so please no arguments about whether her ult is appropriate for her or not) but about what you feel Poppy, the character, is about at her core. What about Poppy the character makes her an interesting addition in the vast roster of League of Legends?"

He continued:

"Quote:

Jumped to conclusion, I'm an idiot, I'm sorry. I feel as if Poppy should be a strong charge through the frontlines fighter, a vanguard if you will, her design just screams that. Stalwart little firecracker.

So that can be said for Garen except the 'little' part. Is Poppy's whole thing that she's a little Garen? Is there something else that you can see on the character that is different from Garen? Or do you feel that a difference does not really exist currently?"

Solcrushed continued:

"Okay, so then let me pose another question to you. (And everyone else too). What qualities would make sense/ be awesome on Poppy that would differentiate her more from Garen? Are there underplayed buds here that more rich storytelling can bring out?

These are pretty vague questions obviously, and nothing concrete will probably come of it and that's fine. This is more like a food for thought exercise on how we can make a unique and distinct character and play her strengths up."

After a round of player responses, he summed up what he was seeing as:

"Lots of interesting themes going on here: 

Self-made
Iron Will
Unheralded Hero
Individual (opposed to patriotic)
Hardcore
In your face
Lawful (good)
Determined
Revenge
Tragic 

to mention just a few. Obviously a lot of them are incompatible with themselves but that's not what we care about. Keep it going please. Just popping in so you don't feel abandoned. 

Personally I am getting the vibes of a noir-ish hero from a lot of your replies, the character that is unheralded and often misunderstood, but continues to fight on for what she believes in her heart to be right, would you agree? (And no I am not a creative designer so this is not Poppy's new bio or anything)"

Stance on 3rd Party Applications

As what is and is not against Riot's position on 3rd party applications is still a hot topic, Riot tmx posted up this announcement reiterating how Riot's stance on the matter:

"We often hear questions about what types of third-party apps Riot considers acceptable, and which are ban-worthy. To help clarify our terms of service, here’s our official stance on third party applications: 

No software should interfere directly with the in-game player experience between when you press “Play” and the end of game screen. 

You shouldn’t use any applications that violate this statement, and our Player Support team may take action against your account if you do. As long as an application doesn’t touch the in-game experience between "Play" and the end-of-game screen, players should feel free to use it at their own risk. 

We’ve arrived at this policy for a few reasons:

• Our top priority is to preserve the consistency of the in-game experience.
• We strive to make League the most sportsmanlike, competitive game.
• We do want to empower the community to contribute to experiences outside of the in-game League experience.

When you download League of Legends, we want it to be the complete experience -- you shouldn't have to go digging for other apps and add-ons just to stay competitive. 

It's also important that the games you play are stable and secure, and 3rd party applications can potentially affect the stability of the core League experience. 

In addition to the above, some programs or applications can warp your interactions with other players and have a direct impact on the quality of the experience. 

Outside of the core game experience, we love all the other things that the community has created: websites that have champion guides, stats, videos, fan art -- you name it. 

This policy allows for all the cool stuff, but also enables us to disallow anything that directly integrates in-between the in-game experience and after-game stats."