[Updated] Red Post Collection: Poro Countdown to 2015, Blood Moon Elise & Thresh clarification, and more!

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Table of Contents

• Poro Countdown to 2015
• BM Elise and Thresh are NOT Lunar Revel Skins
• Darius' Apprehend Range
• Relevant Red Posts
• PBE On Hold for the Holidays
• NA Ping Discussion

Poro Countdown to 2015

With 2014 coming to a close, Riot Jynx is counting down to 2015 with a drawing from community artist TCBunny each day until the new year!

"Greetings, Summoners! 

Let’s celebrate the season and the start of a new year with seven images of giving and holiday cheer! We’re serving up a new treat from TCBunny each day. So join us in this countdown in a League of Legends way. 

*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~* 

As we count down to 2015, we’ll update this post with a new seasonal creation every day at 2pm PST.

How are you celebrating the holidays and the New Year?"

Blood Moon Elise and Thresh are NOT Lunar Revel skins

Due to some confusion surrounding the upcoming Blood Moon Elise and Blood Moon Thresh skins, Riot Whist tweeted a reminder they they are not Lunar Revel skins - Riot's annual celebration that parallels the Lunar New Year.

"Because I've seen it a few times: Blood Moon Thresh and Elise are not the lunar revel skins. BloodMoon is Japanese inspired."

As mentioned in the patch notes, these two new skins will be released sometime during patch 4.21.

Darius' Apprehend Range

In a boards thread asking why Darius' Apprehend (E) range is 540 instead of 550, Meddler replied:

"Nice question, got curious myself and had a quick look at the spell's files. The actual range is 550, though the range display indicator is indeed set to 540. At a guess during Darius' development or balancing someone decided to test out a slight range drop, realized it didn't do what they'd hoped and reverted the change, without reverting the display indicator change."

He continued:

"Quote

Can you make it so that Darius' axe actually touches all the units that are going to be pulled? 

Currently, since the pull is an actual cone but Darius' axe... is, well, an axe, people get pulled without being visually touched or even clipped by the axe. :c 

Or is that too far out of a request?

Spells like this are almost always a bit of a compromise between what looks good and an exact match for the underlying functionality. Often we'll err a bit on the side of functionality over form to ensure gameplay's clear for everybody involved. In this particular case though we felt it was clear enough what was going on, and what the intended counterplay was, that it was appropriate to go for a more natural looking animation, rather than one that precisely traced the boundaries of the targeting cone."

Relevant Red Posts

In a boards thread criticizing Rioters for posting in several of the recent general discussion topics such as "Tell Me your Story" and "What does a health potion taste like" instead of topics about sever stability or what not, Xelnath replied:

"Not all reds are made alike. 

Not all people can answer what you want to know. 

We each reach out in the ways we can contribute, in the fields we feel comfortable exploring. 

I don't know the answer to your question, but something I do when things are going poorly, I check this and see if the area is under malicious attack: 

http://map.ipviking.com/ 

Unfortunately, the internet is a very turbulent place. I know we are trying to do more, but internet architectural things aren't fast and take a long time."

Meddler also added in:

"It's not an issue of technical answers versus non technical answers, but instead of areas of expertise. If you're asking for Rioters to only post about network performance you're basically asking almost the entire company to never post. Most people don't have the familiarity with that side of things to talk about it, but will have other topics they can shed some light on or, as LoL players during the holiday period, simply want to chat about. I can understand frustration with network issues and a desire for more communication about them, not being to play smoothly (or at all) sucks. Stopping communication/chatter on other topics won't help with that though."

PBE on Hold for the Holidays

As you may have noticed, there have been no PBE updates for a little over a week! Riot Feithen briefly mentioned on twitter that this is because the PBE is on hold for the holidays!

"Indeed, we're on hold for the holidays."

For reference, the PBE also went on break around this time last year, kicking back into action after the new year.

NA Ping Discussion

Riot Ahab jumped into a large reddit thread to discuss and answer questions regarding NA's ping situation.

"Hi everyone,

I'm part of the team that's coordinating our efforts to improve the ping experience in NA. I wanted to hop in this thread, clarify a few things, and answer whatever questions I could.

We're sorry. We know that the ping disparity sucks, and we know that it's frustrating to feel like Riot isn't doing anything to make it better. For what it's worth, it's frustrating on our end too, because we see these threads and we can't talk about what's going on behind the scenes until we're able to deliver you the results you deserve.

Unfortunately, at this time, I don't have any results, concrete timelines, or silver-bullet solutions to share. This is a complex issue that we have several teams attacking from different angles and actively working on in the background as part of the NA Server Roadmap . We're making progress, but the work we've done so far has been largely foundational and hasn't yet significantly improved gameplay for players.

I just want you to know that Riot is always listening. Myself and the rest of the team almost always track NA ping threads and comments, and we meet weekly if not daily on the topic of NA ping. All of your feedback is taken into account, and we know that currently we aren't performing as fast as we want and as you need.

I'll be posting updates on the roadmap moving forward as they come, but for now I'll be here answering whatever questions I can."

He continued:

"It's tough.

Believe me, I would love to lean on you guys to talk about what's happening behind the scenes, but over-communication can be a bad thing as well. There are a lot of ups and downs, roadblocks, stumbles, false-starts (truckloads of servers).

We're trying to be more judicious with information we share, because we've shared a lot of early promises that we couldn't carry through with, which sucks almost worse than not saying anything!"

In another thread regarding the same topic and requesting an AMA from the teams involved, Riot Ahab noted:

"Hey gang,

In case the mods do consolidate this into the central thread, I wanted to hop in and point to a reply I just posted there (which may still be hovering towards the bottom: http://www.reddit.com/r/leagueo....

Odds are we won't hold an AMA about this subject until we have some concrete timelines to share. Plans are in the works (you can read more on the NA Server Roadmap - but at the moment the amount of information we have to share publicly would make for a disappointing AMA."

He continued, replying to a comment that nothing feels like it is progressing:

"The linked post the NA Server Roadmap has actually seen quite a bit of progress! Phase 1 (infrastructure upgrade) was completed in November, while Phase 2 is well underway with agreements laid out with several ISP partners.

The challenge is none of that adds up to a result east coast players can feel. Yet."

 When asked about what players might see happen once Phase 3 concludes, he noted:

"Agreed - Phase 3 has potential to carry the biggest impact, but it's also the most complex, so it's been bogged down in testing, exploration, impact projections, etc. Which means I unfortunately have no hard results to share with you, which of course makes me sound like I'm blowing smoke.

All I can tell you currently is that we have weekly if not daily meetings on the subject of NA player ping and the central server relocation. But, I understand that until that becomes a reality these check-ins don't feel very helpful or honest."

As for the lack of publicly shared timelines, Riot Ahab noted:

"We have internal timelines and dates we're shooting for, but these are subject to things like approval, contracts, logistics, etc. Often our internal timelines have to shift, which makes us at Riot super-frustrated.

Naturally, we assume that constantly shifting timelines would make you equally frustrated, so we try not to share timelines now unless we're confident we can hit them, which isn't always the case.

Which makes transparency difficult -- we are actively working towards getting players hard deadlines to expect and results, it's just we don't have them yet."