Surrender at 20: Red Post Collection: NA Stability update, Lyte on LeaverBuster & AFK reports, Quarterfinals MVP Bundle, and more!

Tonight's red post collection features Riot Natural20 with a heads up on the upcoming stability update for North America, Lyte discussing the impact of AFK reports and briefly mentioning the updated LeaverBuster system, a new Worlds MVP bundle for the Quarterfinals, and more!

Continue reading for more information.

Red Post collection: Experimental Preseason 2015 Changes Hitting PBE over the next few days

Stability Update and Migration for NA Servers

Riot Natural20 posted a heads up that the NA will be migrated to new infrastructure sometime in early November in an effort to improve connectivity and service while also minimizing future downtimes.

"Hi NA players!

I’m Riot Natural20, a Senior Release Manager at Riot Games, and I’m a part of the team that’s rebuilding League’s server infrastructure and migrating players to this new environment. Earlier this year, our team performed the EUW migration to the Amsterdam datacenter, and now we’re ready to tackle NA. While this is a slightly different type of migration, we’re taking learnings from Amsterdam to deliver on the core advantages of the EUW migration: more stable connectivity, minimized downtimes, and improved service.

So, why are we doing this? Over the evolution of League’s growth, we’ve renovated the existing environment quite a bit. To accommodate this expansion, improve security, and upgrade our hardware and software, we’re starting from a blank slate and building everything from the ground up. This means an all-new, state of the art network and server infrastructure for NA!

Our number one goal with this migration is increasing server stability: allowing you to play the game whenever you want and with minimal service interruption. This new environment will also give us more tools to prevent malicious attacks, which means even more stability.

This migration is just one part of our commitment to get you the service you deserve, starting with increased stability. Latency is definitely on our radar, though ping isn’t what we should address right now. Instead, we’re tackling stability first because ping is sort of a moot point without a stable game foundation—low ping doesn’t really help if you’re experiencing disconnects or can’t even log in.

We’re in the last phases of our build out and migration testing period, so we’re tentatively scheduling the migration for early November. We’ll post another announcement on Boards about two weeks before migration day, and we’ll make a final announcement the day before migration.

As a heads up, during the migration, you won’t be able to log into the client or play League for about 12 hours. Don’t worry—we’re planning maintenance for the middle of the night, like we do for patch releases, so we’ll minimize the impact of our downtime. For NA, game time is typically at its lowest between 2:00-3:00am PST, which means we’d start migrating around 12:01am PST. We’ll give you a more specific date and time in our final announcement.

I’m sure you guys have a ton of questions. Fire away and I’ll do my best. I can answer most stuff, though I can’t divulge certain tech details and specs because that could jeopardize the stability we’re aiming for with this new environment.

—Riot Natural20"

When asked if this will change ping for many users, Natural20 replied:

"I cannot tell you what your exact ping will be, since some of that is dependent on your local ISP. I can tell you that the new game servers are in the same location as the current ones, so I would expect similar ping times."

When asked if this would include moving servers to players other than the West Cost, he replied:

"No, there are no changes to ping in this update, as the game servers will still be on the West Coast. We have people looking at the ping issue as well, though I do not know the status of that project."

In response to East Coast players bummed this update does not include more servers or a way to mitigate their increased pin, Natural20 replied:

"Having high ping times sucks, and we know that, so we are looking into ways to improve that as part of a parallel project. I don't have any ETA to share though."

When asked for answers regarding the East Coast ping situation, he replied:

"Chatted with the guy heading up the ping project and he wants to share some info. He is in training all day today, so we will work on getting some info up asap, hopefully tomorrow."

At the mention of replays and if this had anything to do with them, he briefly noted:

"Seriously though, moving to our new datacenter is one of the steps to getting replays running. My team is not the one driving on that part, so I am afraid I don't know any more about replays."

Azir Bugfixes in 4.18

Riot Velocity swooped into a reddit thread concerning Azir all of his not so delicious bugs to comment that several bugfixes are planned for 4.18!

"Hey there, first of all I just want to say that we hear you. I'm one of the resident Azir guys at Riot and I know exactly how painful many of these points you've made really are. But there is hope on the horizon! We've identified and fixed many of the bugs with Azir and will be getting them in with the next patch.

Azir is by far and away my favorite champion right now and I just hope that you can hold with us for a little longer and then give the emperor a second chance. :)"

Velocity continued:

"I'm not sure if I can speak to exactly which bugs were fixed, however the majority of the fixes are aimed at his Q, his Soldier Auto-Attacks and his Ultimate.

:)"

Counterplay Items and Knock Ups

ZenonTheStoic also jumped on reddit to share his thoughts on a set of recent posts asking for an item that can clear knock ups, explaining what counterplay is where knock ups weigh in:

"A button that says "I remove this effect" is not counterplay. A button on an item you have to buy that says I remove this effect is even worse. Look at any time Malzahar/Warwick/Skarner are strong in the meta--you now have to buy a QSS if you're a squishy on the enemy team. This is not counterplay, this is just forcing people to buy a suboptimal item.

Counterplay is Morgana's Dark Binding hitting minions and traveling slowly and having a cast time. You can stand behind minions, dodge it, or worst case situation flash away from it. Counterplay is Gnar's big form having bad mobility, forcing Gnar to hop/crunch in for the GNAR! when his rage is almost full--talk about a well telegraphed engage. You can see it coming, you can spread up, you can slow him down, you can kite back etc.

Knock-ups are no less or worse in terms of counterplay than stuns or roots. That they're unaffected by tenacity and can't really be cleansed (they CAN be cleansed, at least the part that makes you unable to cast/attack. You're still considered "in a move block", so you can't move by right-clicking, but you can, for instance, cleanse an Alistar knockup and Lucian-dash away from it while you're still in mid air) (but this is academical and besides the point) is an artifact of implementation that was later embraced as intentional. We could totally make the choice that tenacity shortens these effects or that cleanse drops you to the ground instantly, but it's not entirely obvious if that would be a net positive.

TL;DR: Counterplay happens before you are hit by an effect."

Lyte on AFK reports and upcoming LeaverBuster Upgrades

In a reddit thread discussing the frustration of feeling AFK player reports are useless as AFK punishments are handled largely by the LeaverBuster system, Lyte stepped in to comment:

"This is partially true. AFKs/Leavers are handled by LeaverBuster, which is going to be upgraded soon to be more aggressive and have a more effective punishment.

However, AFK/Leaver reports do help us configure the systems and identify misses (leaves/afks that the system doesn't detect) and confirm positive hits (leaves/afks that the system punishes)."

When asked what happens if an ally falsely reports their teammates as being afk due to rage or something else, Lyte noted:

"Nothing. The system wouldn't detect the player as being AFK if he wasn't, so the reporters just lose weight in their reports."

As for what the future holds for the upgraded LeaverBuster system, Lyte noted:

"The new LeaverBuster does not use game bans as a penalty, and uses a penalty that forces players to go through it and cannot be removed by playing on smurfs."

Lyte also noted they would like to overhaul the report system, saying:

"Re-vamping the reports system is something we want to do eventually. I agree with having a checklist so players don't have to choose the one most important offense instead of highlighting the range of behaviors a player did."