Red Post Collection: GP and MF on Champion Update Schedule, Caitlyn and Malphite Changes to PBE soon, Moobeat /ALL CHAT

Posted on at 4:33 AM by Moobeat
Today's red post collection includes Gangplank and Miss Fortune being added to the Champion Update Schedule, ricklessabandon noting he has Caitlyn and Malphite changes coming to the PBE soon,a new episode of /ALL Chat, and more!
Continue reading for more information!



Table of Contents


Champion Update Schedule Updated - Gangplank and MF added!

Riot Support's Champion Update Schedule post has been updated with a few new additions!

The following champions have been added to the list:
  • Gangplank is now listed as being up for a Visual and Gameplay update.
  • Miss Fortune is now listed as receiving a Minor Visual Update

Caitlyn and Malphite changes to PBE soon

ricklessabandon has tweeted out he has a small set of changes for Caitlyn and Malphite coming to the PBE soon!
[1] "spoiler alert: small caitlyn buffs incoming"
[2] "okay…i've been at work too long—need to get dinner before i forget! should be some caitlyn and malphite changes in the next pbe update, btw"
[3] "ah, sorry—for those curious the changes are focused on making caitlyn feel better about her passive and malphite better about brutal strikes"
[4] "and also making it so caitlyn doesn't get her ult cast canceled when the target dips into fog of war before the channel begins"

New Missile System on PBE - Rewriting Skillshots

Here's Riot Meyea with a heads up on the new missile system now on that PBE; the team has re-written how skillshots work behind the scenes!
"Hello Summoners! 
We've re-written how skillshots work. 
My team at Riot is called CUTS. We Clean Up The Stuff (There's a synonym for "poop" in the real name). The "stuff" my team is cleaning up are skillshots. Like, all of them.
This video(Thanks for the shout out Gosu) is an example of a bug that actually exists on live right now. And frankly... fixing bugs like this involves a lot of change. If you fix some bugs, other bugs come up. Even worse bugs. Unless we re-write it. Which we've done. Huzzah! 
Re-writing how skillshots work is a huge change and the last time we put our changes on the PBE you guys were quick to find gameplay-impacting bugs. 
SHOUTOUTS TO THESE GUYS FOR POSTING. I <3 THE PBE COMMUNITY.
Oblivioncrusader, Frick You Austin, PO Little Mac, Micro98s 
(I probably missed some threads. If you made a thread about skillshots 2 weeks ago post it in the comments and I'll add it to the shoutout list x.^) 
This weekend I'm making a post because if there are no gameplay impacting bugs then we're ready to put our changes onto the live servers. 
Please feel free to leave any issues you find in the comments below! 
x.^"
When asked about the differences between the new and old system, Riot Meyea commented:
"The old system was not able to support a lot of things. I'm not an engineer- I'm a Quality Analyst and so I won't pretend to know how the old system is written as opposed to the new system, but essentially everything should behave exactly or almost exactly in the new system as it does the old system. 
What's different for players is that bugs that are considered un-fixable in the old system are now fixed in our system. It also means that there's the possibility to be more creative with skillshots, allowing the potential for really interesting abilities."
He continued:
"Playerside, it should work exactly the same. It totally won't thought because what kind of dream world are we living in that we could re-write something that is exactly the same. 
More practically, there will be small insignificant differences probably everywhere but importantly we will be able to fix bugs and do more creative things with skillshots in the future"

When asked what else this team has worked on, Riot Meyea noted:
"Yes, other large under the hood changes have been made by this team. I wasn't involved with the other projects and so I'm not familiar with what specifically they've fixed. I'll ask the team since I'm just curious now as well. 
A reason you might not have heard of this team is because it's not permanent. It's created on a need basis. Specifically this time, the team was brought together because our missile system was so dysfunctional that bugs couldn't be fixed without creating new ones. Extreme things like that require a complete overhaul, but most things actually don't and so this team dissolves once they're "done" with whatever they were called together for. 
I like to think of us as the Justice League."

Regarding expanding tooltip information

In a reddit thread inquiring about the possibility of expanding tooltips out to contain more information (such as how much movement speed some abilities give or other "secondary" effects), Ghostcrawler commented:
"It's a noble goal and something I would personally love to see. The reason it's not there yet is a combination of work and value.

First the value. In a really broad sense, there are two kinds of players: those who know the numbers already and those who don't care. I exaggerate of course, but my point is there is probably a pretty narrow band of players who might be interested in knowing more about what a specific ability does, but I don't know that they are going to spend precious game time reading it on a tooltip. Most likely they would look it up later online. If anything, ability tooltips want to be be as brief as possible so you can quickly scan them out of the corner of your eye rather than reading a paragraph.

The second issue has to do with how tooltips are constructed. League is released in a whole lot of languages, and all the ability tooltips need to be localized (which roughly means translated but has some elements of culture and not just language). The game engine isn't smart enough to magically pull all of the numbers for abilities (it can pull some) because some of the numbers are buried pretty deep in formulas in scripts. These are the kind of thing that need to be edited virtually by hand (and then re-localized) every time they are changed. Bad numbers are probably worse than no numbers at all because players then learn not to trust the tooltips anyway.

This isn't strictly an issue for League. Every game code I've been familiar with had similar challenges where some numbers are just hard to pull out and you end up writing them by hand, which creates a lot of potential for bugs.

Is it rocket science? No, and we can do it, and probably will at some point. I just wanted to point out that it's not a switch we just flip and get all the numbers for free as some of these posts suggest.

I don't know anyone at Riot that is really that worried about the burden of knowledge issue mentioned. Maybe that was a concern at some point. These days, we acknowledge that League's a pretty complicated game and we know we ask a lot of players. I also don't want to imply that we're trying to hide numbers either to make things artificially harder to learn.

Optional expanded tooltips would be sweet too."
Gypsylord also added:
"We try to keep tooltips short and only put in the relevant information because people stop reading them when they get too long. While you might sa, "Screw peeps who don't read long TT's. Their lack of desire to be informed is their fault," that doesn't change the fact that they still won't finish reading, they still won't be informed, and their game experience will suffer as a result. As designers we need to find ways to mitigate that.

So then what about the people who do want to be informed you ask? Why are we punishing them by not positing up numbers? Honestly, the simple truth is that a lot of numbers don't matter. Jinx's minigun gains 50% of its total AS bonus on the first stack, and an additional 25% on each additional stack. This is not in the TT and as a result most players don't know about it. I don't think that really matters though because whether or not you know about the mechanic you're going to play Jinx the exact same way. Need more AS? Switch to minigun. Why? Because the TT tells you it gives a metric ton of AS and you can FEEL that it is powerful after using it once. In this case the exact details of the ramp mechanic do not matter.

That said, we aren't perfect at this and sometimes we do omit relevant details that truly do matter. Any specific examples wehre this happens that you guys feel are particularly offensive?"

/ALL Chat | It’s Ekko Time! Ft. Moobeat

Last up we have the latest episode of /ALL Chat, including discussion on Ekko and an interview with a special guest!

"Today’s ALL Chat features more Ekko fan art than you can shake a chrono-stick at, Surrender@20’s head honcho Moobeat, and playing new champs in ranked.

Tell us what you think!"

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