Surrender at 20: Red Post Collection: Champion Design and Music Panels from PAX East, new /ALL CHAT, and more!

This evening's red post collection includes VODs for Riot's champion design and music panels from PAX East 2015, Lyte on the Honor system, information on tickets for the Mid-Season Invitational, and more!

Continue reading for more information!

"A Look (and Listen) Behind the League of Legends Music" PAX Panel

Over the weekend, Riot attended PAX East 2015 in Boston, Massachusetts! While there, they hosted the "A Look (and Listen) Behind the League of Legends Music" panel, which includes live performances of several tracks from the Music of League of Legends Volume 1! .

Check out the Twitch.tv VOD here: [http://www.twitch.tv/pax/c/6273640]

"Ahri There Yet? The Journey of Champion Design For League of Legends" PAX Panel

Pax East 2015 was also host to the "Ahri There Yet? The Journey of Champion Design for League of Legends" panel. This one includes Meddler, Morello, CertainlyT, Wrekz, and Gypsylord discussed the process of champion design and shared a ton of concept art from various champion's development:

Check out the Twitch.tv VOD here: [ http://www.twitch.tv/pax2/c/6270822]

In case you missed them during the stream, here's a bunch of the concept art: the female engineer that was eventually worked into Braum, Jinx, "Ivan, the mad Bomber" who eventually became Ziggs and Nautilus, Draven, and more!

IronStylus also tweeted out a higher quality version of Braum's "female engineer" concept art:

" here's a more clear, high-rez version from the depths of my hard drive :) http://imgur.com/U5qEXN9 "

Lyte on Honor System

In a reddit thread asking about the Honor system, Lyte stepped in to clarify a few points on the system, share what sort of players have the most ribbons, and speak a little bit about it's future:

There's a few issues with the Honor system today, but also a few things worth clarifying.

About 20% of players on every server actually have Honor ribbons. However, right now most of those ribbons are in Co-op vs Bot Mode, or ARAM Mode.

The Reddit population is actually not representative of the general League playerbase, and are a bit more heavily slanted towards Ranked players; unfortunately, there are almost 0 ribbons in Ranked Mode today so every once in awhile we'll see Redditors say they've rarely seen a ribbon but forget to mention that they usually are in Ranked Mode.

In a recent analysis by an independent party, a finding was that there are currently 250% more Honors given than Reports. Most Redditors probably see that number and don't believe it, and most people we talk to believe that there are more Reports than Honors but it's an interesting insight nevertheless.

To get a ribbon right now, you have to be in the top 20% of your server in terms of honors received per game from strangers. It's pretty straight-forward, but you can see why a system like this tends to benefit Co-op vs Bots and ARAM players where games are generally lower stakes and friendlier on average.

In the future, we'd like to re-design the system a bit and give the feedback loops a bit more presence (so players are more aware of the importance of Honor, and remember to give it), and make giving Honors a bit more meaningful.

When asked to confirm of Honor from team mates is worth anything, Lyte continued:

"You can, Honors from teammates are just worth a bit less. Still valuable though."

Turrets Changes in 5.5

As seen on the PBE, Inner turrets are getting a few changes in the next patch - HP up, shield down. In a reddit thread discussing the upcoming changes, Scarizard popped in to share a bit more context:

"Inner Tower's HP is increased, but the shield is decreased dramatically (200 -> 30) - this is actually a buff to splitpushing, as 'sticking' damage onto Tier 2 Turrets becomes much, muuuuuuuuuuuuuuuch easier than before.

Furthermore, diving these Turrets becomes much easier as Champions beneath them don't receive the shield if the Turret's shield is depleted - thus, for a 30 DMG investment, can knock out an entire team's siege/dive defense for 30 seconds.

Add all this in the Mid tower having the shield removed entirely, and these changes are in the interest of increasing the ability for teams to press their advantage beyond the 2nd Tower line where things can gestate for a bit until Dragons/Barons/Item Thresholds hit break-points that can make closing a game feel a little sluggish."

Plans for Urgot & Shen

With a few buffs currently testing on the PBE, Meddler reiterated their current plans for Urgot:

"Long term we'll rework him. Short term we're giving him some buffs so he's in a better state in the meantime."

When asked how short was "short term", Meddler noted:

"Probably next patch or two."

When asked about Shen and if they team has any balance changes planned for him, Meddler noted:

"Planning to hit up a couple of people about Shen this week. Will get back to you once I've got something useful to pass on."

Scruffy on Sion's R

In a reddit thread purposing that Sion should keeping going if he manages to kill someone while running with his ultimate (the Sion train having "no brakes"), Riot Scruffy commented:

"This could be really cool, might take some work to get it in the game but its worth looking into.

:) no promises of course.

EDIT: got this working...there are anniebot corpses everywhere in my test games. I think you guys will like.

EDIT 2: The teemos "

"On My Way" Ping Discussion

In a reddit thread discussing the "On My Way" ping, Riot Boourns dropped in to comment:

"Love the discussion here. We're not actively looking to make any changes to the smart pings system, but I thought it would be worth giving some background on how we got to what we released and how we would think about changes to the system.

This is a tough balancing act. OMW is one of the most useful pings, but also has a lot of contextual information that is hard to capture. We ended making the arrow that shows you the direction they are coming from and puts a path between the person and their ping on your minimap. We experimented with a bunch of stuff to add more context to OMW, but we opted to keep the game space representation simple.

OMW is used in many different situations and we tried to strike the right balance between communicating a lot and potentially mis-interpreting what a player meant to convey. We set our balance more towards giving you information to infer intent yourself. The challenge is that different people take OMW to mean different things.

Some design critique on the idea of having the the OMW ping be different sizes. We probably wouldn't do it quite like this, because it would be hard to know what "size" the OMW ping is without a solid frame of reference (i.e. is the jungler really close or just "kiiiinda close"?). We might come up with some kind of indicator of near, in the area, far.

If we were going to look into the smart pings system again, I'd do a bunch of research on how it was used and what players think each ping means. For example, what are people's ping patterns when they are going to gank? Differences at various skill levels? Differences between junglers and mid who is ganking? I guarantee that there will be several different groups for what OMW means in a particular situation. What we found there would probably inform any changes to the ping system. Below, I like the idea of "go in, I'm ganking now" as a ping. I can see that being common enough to want to smart ping and more specific that a generic attack ping. If you have that I think you don't need to have a distance indicator on the OMW ping."

New Episode of /ALL CHAT

A new episode of /ALL CHAT, Riot's community content showcase, has been released! Check out what the crew is up to as they share a batch of DJ Sona fan art, cosplay, and more!

"On this episode of /ALL Chat, we’ve got DJ Sona creations, genderbend Ziggs cosplay, an interview with Lunity, and a discussion about prepping for your first ranked games."

The 2015 Mid-Season Invitational Tickets on sale soon

With week seven of the LCS wrapping up, Riot has posted details on tickets for the upcoming Mid-Season invitational.

Here's the full announcement via LoL eSports:

"Which region will triumph when the top team from each league around the globe meets on the Rift? Don’t miss a chance to reserve your seat and cheer on your region in-person at the 2015 Mid-Season Invitational (MSI).

Tickets will be available March 11 at 7:00am PST/10:00am EST/3:00pm CET via Donald L. Tucker Civic Center's website. Live commentary of the event will be in English at Florida State University in Tallahassee, Florida, on May 7-10.

With regional metas going head-to-head and top teams meeting on an international stage, this should be four days of elite play and exciting matchups. Stay tuned to Lolesports to see which teams will take the MSI stage and represent their regions in Florida.

RELATED ARTICLES:
The 2015 Mid-Season Invitational Power Rankings - 3/3/2015"

Red Post Collection: Champion Design and Music Panels from PAX East, new /ALL CHAT, and more!

Table of Contents