Red Post Collection: GP Rework to include New E, Lyte on Tribunal & Reform Cards, Children's Day Fan Art, & More

Continue reading for more information!

• This Week in eSports [April 27th - May 3rd]
• Champion & Skin Sale 5/5 - 5/8
• Free Champion Rotation, Week of May 5th
• Forsaken Jayce Now Available

• 5/4 PBE Update - Chroma in TB, SSW Tweaks, Tentative balance changes for Akali & Olaf
• Red Post Collection: Champion Mastery coming to live soon!

Table of Contents:

Gangplank Rework to include new E

In a boards thread discussing abilities with short cast times that force them to stop moving, Meddler commented that Gangplank's current E will be replaced when they do his rework:

"At a general level we believe cast times that stop a champion's movement are important because they give other players a chance to react to your actions. Removing them usually feels great for the player of a champion, but it does result in some cost to the game as a whole. Skills that give movement speed boosts as the core of their power however can be good candidates for being instant cast, given that's an over time effect that therefore does leave opportunities for other players to engage. 

In Gangplank's case we'll be replacing his E entirely with a spell that's got more choices for the GP player. If we were keeping it though I'd imagine we'd take the cast time off. The W by contrast is a spell we feel should have a cast time, given it's both a solid heal and a CC cleanse, so assuming it stays on the kit (which looks likely) it'll continue to have a 0.25s cast time."

Riot Scuffy also commented on Reddit that Gangplank's Q will not be come a skill shot:

"Quote:

If parrley becomes a skillshot I'm ****** done

Parrley not becoming a skillshot. You can stay :)"

Repertoir on status of Taric rework

In a boards thread asking about the current status of Taric's long awaited gameplay and visual rework, Riot Repertoir commented:

"Taric's 90% or so done from the gameplay side actually. However, due to him needing new model, animations, vfx, sfx, etc., there are still a few big projects ahead of him. It probably won't be until late fall or winter that we reveal changes."

ricklessabandon on Akali PBE changes

Akali received a few changes in the 5/4 PBE update, including her Shadow Dance (R) now putting her 150-250 units behind where she jumped from.

ricklessabandon tweeted out a few bits about the change:

[1]"oh, right--akali's ult now places her 150-250 units behind her target (less bonus distance the further away they are) "

As for the benefits of the change, ricklessabandon noted:

[2] "when chasing, you get to pop marks more reliably. when fleeing, you get more distance between you and the target."

When asked if you can still be interrupted in the dash, he noted:

[3] "the same as live, so you can interrupt it with stuff like flay. basically, it's the same dash with more distance."

As for if they will reintroduce Akali's E triggering her Q mark, he noted:

[4] "probably not. it introduced some patterns in lane that weren't ideal (primarily the effective range increase and no minion aggro)"

The Live Gameplay Team Presents: The Live Gameplay Q+A! (feat. You)

Scarizard has taken to the boards to announce a new initiative from the communications team - the Live Gameplay Q&A.  The team has opened up a ask.fm account and will be collecting player questions to address in periodic collection.

"Hey y'all - this year, we're focused on building more stable communications between ~DESIGN TEAMS~ (that's us) and all you beautiful players out there. This means more iteration and experiments to see what works and what doesn't, as well as more dedicated feedback sessions to see what you're interested in as we move along. Today we're unveiling one such experiment, creatively titled the Live Gameplay Q+A. Let's get down to bronze tacks. 

So what is this thing? 

Glad you asked! Simply put, players submit questions to our official ask.fm (ask.fm/asklivegameplay), after which we gather the Live team, fish a couple of responses out of the ol' mailbag and put together a blog-style response to be posted here for your consumption every few weeks. 

What kind of questions are we talkin' about here? 

As our name suggests, we're only really able to shed light on topics related to Live Gameplay - luckily, that comes with the broad definition of almost everything in the game. Systems, items, and champion balance? You got it! Skins, servers, and player support tickets? not so much. 

Can i just ask questions at any time? 

Due of the large amount of questions to keep track of, we're focusing on set collection periods where we'll actively monitor your submissions. We'll post in advance when these periods begin and end, as well as keep track on the official page itself.

The first collection period runs from May 4th to May 10th - hey, that's right now! 

Head on over to the site [ask.fm/asklivegameplay] to begin submitting your questions on all things Live Gameplay right now and tell your friends! 

(Unless you don't have friends. Make some friends and then tell them!) 

(unless that doesn't work either. i'll be your friend.) 

-S"

As for when they will put out the first collection of answers, Scarizard noted:

"After the 10th we'll start sifting through the responses globally (quite a few other regions are participating) and grab a couple to post some detailed responses to. I won't post the tentative dates for publishing (as it's the first time we're trying this) but the first publication should be well before the month is finished!"

As for how many response they've seen so far, Scarizard explained:

"A few hundred since i posted this up on noon. Folks get passionate because they care about a game and feel like they aren't being heard or considered - we're here to show they are. It's frustrating, and while not everyone has something constructive to say (REMOVE RIVEN messages today my god) i'd rather we take the brunt of that frustration and pave the way for a conversation that just let everyone bottle it up forever, y'know? 

While you're at it, consider tossing a question into the abyss! It'll get read, that much i can promise you :D"

When asked ab out the usage of the ask.fm platform instead of an in house solution attached to the boards , Pwyff noted:

"Supply and demand, but you make a great point. The one challenge we've had with communications for some time now has been twofold:

1.) Getting internal teams all synched up with what we want to do, what we want to talk about, our values, etc. 

2.) Finding scalable platforms to communicate with players without burning out both designers and players.

Over the past year we've made a lot of progress on 1 (and have a lot more to go), but 2 has been a huge challenge because we have so many different regions that speak different languages, use completely different social hubs, etc. Our initial thought was to pilot super-mega-holistic solutions that solved everything, but we're quickly realizing that won't work. Instead, we're trying to pilot smaller, agile concepts (like Scarizard's idea to do a Live Gameplay Q+A), see what works and what doesn't work, get feedback, and then continuously iterate as we go. If you like things like this or get inspired to ask for something else, let us know and we'll throw it into our idea board.

Long term we should be able to identify what works here and in other regions and then we can let everyone do their own thing while tying it all together under new programs.

TL;DR though if this is super successful, why not pilot it in-house and get resources? But if it doesn't, we'd rather not put all of our eggs in one basket because that makes us pretty slow when it comes to actually trying things. We're going a different route at the moment."

Got questions? Head on over to the Live Gameplay ask.fm!

On the Basic Tutorial and Intro Bots

In a reddit thread inquiring about the in-client basic tutorial and some of the things it attempts to teach new players (such as building a thornmail on Ashe),  Riot Boourns shared his thoughts  on the tutorial and the expanded Intro Bots experience:

"Quote:

So basically you're playing Ashe. 

-You need to buy thornmail, there is no explanation of how you should itemize. Thormail. First item. As an ADC.
-The camera is locked most of the tutorial, one of the most important things that players should learn, to play with unlocked cam.
-There is no explanation of last hitting minions and the benefits of it.
-It's played on Howling Abyss.. god damn. 

Another strange thing is: when you hover over your ability power the game says "Ability power increases the amount of damage you do with activated abilities." So the newbie player will think, if he buys AP for Ashe (or Riven for example), she will have a better damage on the champion's abilites. 

Ofc there is the battle tutorial, but as far as I know a lot of new players ignore that, not to mention it has it's own mistakes as well. 

There are a lot of messed up things in the tutorial of the biggest game of the world. It's just not on the level as the game itself..Why doesn't Riot update it or something?

tl;dr Try intro bots, that's the newest experience and the one that we nudge new players into. The things you suggested are actually more suited to an intermediate learning experience. Truly new players know a lot less that you would expect.

I can provide some background on this, having worked on the team that was doing new player features. We did a lot of research and technical investigation into modernizing the tutorial. We discovered that the tutorial, for all its weirdness, actually does a pretty good job of successfully getting you through a first look at the game. Instead we actually spent a lot of time working on intro bots, because it was lower cost due to a more modern bot/scripting system and it was also something you could play for 5-10+ games and get some valuable learning from it. Intro bots is also the default choice that you see when you enter the game as a new player and it's designed to teach you even if you haven't played the tutorial or battle training. If the team was still together, we might have considered re-doing the tutorial and battle training (possibly into a single experience), however it would have been a complete restart on the experience IMHO. The tutorial is really old and difficult to work in, all the incremental changes we investigate were too expensive for the benefits it would provide to new players. We talked about turning off tutorial and battle training, but in the end they still teach you some valuable things that intro bots doesn't cover.

I would encourage folks to check it out and give some feedback. However, I would point out that a more experienced player probably won't see much of the contextual guidance that we built because you'll already be doing the right things (like using abilities... or remembering to level them up). However even the changes to recommended items should give you an idea of the approach we took.

Regarding locked camera. When we started the team, I was strongly in favor of quickly moving people into unlocked camera. As an experienced player, it's pretty clear that it's kind of a noob trap. However, our 20+ observational studies with actual new players convinced me that having the camera locked by default at the start was almost essential to playing. Anyone who didn't have an RTS background had a really hard time playing the game with free camera. The improvements that we made to the locked camera are one step towards giving people a better alternative to a hard locked camera. I still think we can provide a better path to unlocking your camera, but the evidence we saw showed that the tutorial or even intro bots was too early for most genuinely new players.

For last hitting, we did talk about this and I've worked on thunderdome projects that explored it. If you ever watch a new player, you'll quickly understand that they have much more fundamental things to learn. Like right click moves/AAs, left click casts spells. Or that you should remember to use abilities. Or remember to level them up. Or know how to buy items. We spent a lot more time on those problems in the end because you needed to learn that before last hitting is valuable (no use having gold if you don't spend it on items, right?).

Having the tutorial on ARAM is deliberate (and actually it's ARAM that is on the tutorial map). When you're learning the bare bones basics of the game, it's better to not have the distractions of other lanes or dragons/barons/jungle. You're not going to benefit from trying to learn any of that stuff when you're just trying to move and attack or cast abilities.

So I'd say try intro bots and please give us some feedback. That's our most recent best effort at tackling this problem with a small team of people. I'm pretty proud of what we did with the resources available, and we saw some encouraging effects on new player retention. When you look at it, try to keep in mind that new players know a lot less than you think. It's hard to remember what it feels like to be a new player when you're 100's or 1000's of games in. But how did you ever know not to buy two boots (to make a pair obviously...), that right click moves, 'b' brings you back to base, 'enter' brings up chat, all that stuff that we all take for granted now.

Lastly: thornmail on Ashe. I hope Brackhar feels some amount of shame for doing this. It's a total hack. It's basically so that you can't die to minions and it will autopush you to victory from the passive. I don't even know if that's true anymore after the changes to thornmail over the years. Although every time I bring it up he tells me he's proud of finding a creative solution to the problem."

He continued:

"I hear what you're saying, and habits are hard to change. I'm not saying that the tutorial doesn't show you some wrong things, however I am saying that our research suggested that those wrong things didn't ultimately have a lot of retention and we spent a lot of effort with intro bots showing you simplified (but correct) ways to do things. We had to pick one or the other essentially, and we believed that intro bots would compensate for any wrong things the tutorial might still teach you because games 2 - 10+ would have a greater long term impact than a 15 min tutorial experience. 

The difference here is that if all you get is one guitar lesson and I teach you the wrong thing, you'll probably turn that into a habit and have a hard time changing in the future. If I let you use your 3 finger instead of 4 the first lesson just so you can play and not leave frustrated, and then in your second/third/fourth lesson let you get more comfortable and train you out of using your 3 finger... well there I think you have much less chance of forming a bad habit."

Optional Facebook Friend Finder being enabled

The Facebook Friend finder included patch 5.8 is starting to be enabled on different servers!
When the option is enabled on your server, you'll see this pop up in the corner of your screen after opening the the buddy list:
From there you can either add friends via summoner name as usual or connect your facebook account to find friends who have also connected.
For more information on this OPTIONAL feature, check out the announcement from last week:

"If you opt-in to the feature, you’ll start seeing friend suggestions near the bottom of your League friends list. From there, you can add your friend on League or just dismiss the notification. That’s literally the only thing this feature does. Here’s what needs to happen for you to see a friend recommendation: 

• Both you and the suggested friend have activated and approved this Facebook feature
• You are already friends on Facebook
• You aren’t yet friends on League
• Neither you nor the suggested friend have previously dismissed the recommendation

When you open a recommendation, you’ll first see your friend by their Facebook icon, full name, and summoner name. If you and your Facebook friend both agree to be LoL friends, you’ll start to be identified by your summoner name and summoner icon (though we’ll pre-populate friends notes with your real name so you can remember who’s who). If you dismiss the recommendation, you won’t appear as a suggested friend for that player. 

We’re not being obnoxious with this feature:

• This feature will never post to your (or anyone else’s) Facebook Timeline
• People who aren’t your Facebook friends will never see your name, profile picture or profile
• Not a single byte of your Facebook data will be shared with strangers or other companies
• This feature is, and always will be entirely optional
• After approving the feature, you can turn it off at any time 

If you’d like to know more, check out our FAQ page, or just ask your questions here!"

Lyte on Tribunal and Player Behavior Systems

Lyte has been busy on reddit answering all sorts of questions regarding the Tribunal and what the Player Behavior Systems team has been up to.

Starting with a comment on why one of the loading screen player tips still references the Tribunal despite it being down for maintenance for about a year, Lyte commented:

"The tip is out of date, and we should have taken it down. 

However, I don't think there are many unjust bans and chat restrictions, and players are definitely not being chat restricted just because of being reported--the system doesn't work off just reports. Secondly, the Report System validates every report, so if you are a player that false or troll reports often your reports are worth nothing to all player behavior systems. If you are a player that reports accurately, your reports become more valuable. All replacement systems directly assess and review chat logs, and all systems have some form of manual review to ensure a high accuracy. 

I'm happy to answer questions, and we are ready to talk about some of the new Tribunal features in May."

 He continued, speaking more to why the whole process is taking so long and why that "tip" that started the whole conversation was still there in the first place:

"To be honest, we thought working on the Tribunal and Team Builder Draft projects were more important.

10 years ago when I was just a gamer, I used to think like you did. "Why didn't that company fix that? It's so easy. It'd take 10 minutes tops." But once I started getting a few years of experience at a studio in Seattle, then at Riot Games, I began to learn that game development isn't easy.

For example, the tips system was part of a large-scale experiment to see if different tips could affect player behavior in the game. You can read about the experiment here: 

[LINK]

Because it was a global experiment, every server had different versions of tips, and different localizations of the tips. We could have gone in and fixed the tip, but we would have had to update the experiment for every single server. But it's never just 1 small polish feature. There's 100 things like this that we could do, and there's no shortage of little polish things that we could do to a game as massive as League.

However, at the end of the day, would you rather us work on the 100 small things, or work on bringing you Tribunal and Team Builder Draft?"

When asked why the Tribunal has been down so long and why it has been over a year since the initial post about it's updates went out, Lyte explained:

"I think there was a common misunderstanding about what we were spending time doing. That's our fault for not talking about things more as we worked on the project.

When we brought the Tribunal down, it was specifically so we could run a lot of experimental projects to see how we wanted to re-design the Tribunal. For example, we applied machine learning for the first time to see if we could build a system capable of learning multiple languages in real-time, and give feedback to players in real-time. This system had to also learn what players believed was negative or positive over time automatically, which is a pretty challenging feat. This was a pretty complex experiment that took months to complete, but the results were about 200% more accurate than our old player behavior systems.

After we ran all these experimental projects, we incorporated everything we learned into the new Tribunal design, then started work on rebuilding it with the new, futuristic vision in mind. A part of this vision was to combine all player behavior systems under the umbrella of Tribunal, meaning that the system has to be capable of handing out every type of punishment and reward in the game. Because the Tribunal had to be able to identify and review positive behaviors too, we had to do a lot of experimentation and analysis on how to measure positive behavior, and what it looked like in the game. So, that took some time, and we incorporated all those designs into the new Tribunal as well.

All in all, it's a pretty massive project, but one I think players will be excited to see."

Lyte continued, noting that REFORM CARDS (chat logs and other evidence to explain why a punishment was handed out) will be the first feature to be brought back online:

"We've decided to launch features as they finish, so the first feature we are bringing back are Reform Cards. So, players that are getting the "escalated bans" for homophobia, racism, sexism, death threats and excessive harassment will automatically receive their chat logs with every ban. This system will fire out the punishments and feedback immediately after games, which we believe will greatly improve reform rates for negative players. Players will also always have an e-mail with their chat logs so you should never see players wondering why they were banned on Reddit or the boards again.

We're going to then expand the system to include all chat restrictions and ranked restrictions. I'm writing a post this weekend with the team to post sometime in May that will explain the the order of the features and what the new Tribunal's long-term vision is."

Lyte continued, elaborating on why some features such as the return of Reform Cards will be coming out sooner rather than all together:

"We're going with the iterative release approach because we believe players want some of these features NOW instead of waiting for a full release down the line. By the end of the plan, we should have covered every type of punishment and reward at a pretty impressive speed after the incidences are detected.

We've chosen Reform Cards first because transparency and feedback about why a player was punished is one of our core pillars, and we want players to always understand why they got a ban."
He also clarified:

"The first feature will be in May, not the entire roadmap. Don't scare the team :P"

As for what the team has been working on while the Tribunal has been down, Lyte recapped:

"We worked on Suggested Players, LeaverBuster, Party Rewards, Positive Mystery Gifts, and Team Builder Draft too.

Sometimes you have to take some time off, run a few experiments and do a few tests before continuing with such a complex experiment like the Tribunal. We're bringing in a lot of world-class scientists and doing things like machine learning and building sentiment analysis models... it's not as straight forward as you may think. Research of this kind in the academics could take 2-3 years to finally publish."

As for that lack of communication in some areas, Lyte continued:

"Eh, every single project is nuanced. Different scopes, different timelines, different goals and challenges. Even every country might perceive the project differently and have different questions or concerns.

Communication is a life-long path of mastery, and if you've perfected it and can do it for every single project, you'd be an extreme demand by almost every company in the world."

When asked if there will still be a "judgement" system in the new Tribunal, Lyte commented::

"Yes; however, our first few features will be things like Reform Cards that players can benefit from right now instead of waiting for the entire system to finish development.

As for a timeline on the Reform cards, Lyte noted:

"We'd like to start beta-testing on NA/EU in May, with all Riot Regions following shortly after.

We're working with Garena and Tencent to get beta-testing of Reform Cards rolling in their servers too."

When asked if the new Tribunal will be available on all servers, Lyte noted:

"Yes, part of our vision for this project is to finally bring all servers into one cohesive player behavior experience. This is part of the reason this project is so complicated, a lot of servers were out-of-date when it came to player behavior systems."

Lyte continued:

"We're trying to get to a point where servers get all features at the same time, but it's pretty difficult in a game as massive as League. 

Because the new systems are all tuned by cultural standards, each system is actually quite different and customized to a specific country. So, as we do beta-tests and launches we try to focus the team on 1 server at a time. If the beta-tests go well, we can start batching servers into groups and doing them all at once. But, for the first beta-test we want to be safe. 

The first beta-tests tend to be on NA because that's just the timezone the team is in. For all other beta-tests like OCE the team has to be at the office like 2-5 AM."

As for the issue of in-game toxicity and more immediate punishments, Lyte noted:

"We've begun testing a system capable of identifying gameplay toxicity like intentional feeders/trolls.

In North America, for example, hundreds of intentional feeders are insta-banned after 2 games. We're slowly going to ramp up the system until it can detect more nuanced intentional feeding but right now, you rarely see intentional feeding like the old days with 5 Zeals and 0-20 scores."

When asked about the accuracy of all of these restriction and punishment systems, Lyte commented:

"There was never a point where every single report or punishment was hand-reviewed by a Riot team member.

However, we do a process called random sampling where we get batches of punishments, review them by hand, and measure things like false positives (when a player was going to be punished but didn't deserve it). We generally hold our systems to a 0.1% standard, which means that a system needs to have less than 0.1% false positives for us to release it to players. To give you a relative sense of what this means, most scientists in academics hold their studies to a 5% standard, meaning that their error rates are in the 5% range while we force all player behavior systems to be in the 0.1% range.

We also do random sampling and spot checks on what we believe are "close cases." We usually do not review cases that are slam dunks. When a player has been reported in 50% of their games for example and has dozens of racist chat logs, we don't need to hand-review the player."

He continued:

"The 0.1% standard is our bare minimum to launch a feature, but usually our systems are more accurate. 

For example, in our last wave of manual reviews, we had 1 false positive in every 6000 reviews."

Lyte also commented on Ranked Restrictions and why they require wins to be lifted:

"There's a bit of nuanced to ranked restrictions. Generally, you'll get them only if you play ranked (or are negative in ranked); however, in some cases, we may give players Ranked Restrictions to prevent them from playing Ranked because we know they'd be even more toxic than they are in Normals.

We had to make the requirements to finish Ranked Restrictions "Wins" because otherwise it was very easy for players to do things like troll games on purpose or AFK and force games to lose faster to get rid of their Ranked Restrictions."

When asked about plans for the honor system, Lyte noted:

"Yeah, one of the problems with the Honor System right now is a queue problem. About 20% of players on each server has ribbons, but most of the players are in Co-op vs Bots or Howling Abyss. One of the first things we need to do is re-work how queues are calculated in Honor so that players in each queue can more easily get ribbons.

After that, now that we have a good understand of what positive behavior looks like, we want Honors to have more meaningful impact in the game."

He continued on the Honor System, answering a question on if the solution is just having more honors handed out:

"One of the problems might be incentives for honoring someone; but, I bet most players don't know that there are currently 250% more Honors handed out than Reports in the game. 

So, do we really want "more" Honors handed out? Maybe... if there are positive behaviors happening that are notbeing Honored, then the answer is yes, we want to increase honors being given."

When asked about his thoughts on the Goodwill system from SMITE, Lyte noted:

"It's a neat take on player behavior, but League has a lot of similar features.

For example, if you look at all the customized punishments available in League, they are:

• chat restrictions
• ranked restrictions
• low priority queue
• game bans

If you look at the customized rewards available in League, they are:

• party rewards (bonus IP)
• champion mastery (group bonus to champ mastery)
• positive surprises throughout the year (player behavior icons, mystery gifts, bonus IP)

So if you are verbally toxic or leave games, you can lose the ability to play Ranked until you play a few normal games (just like the Goodwill system). If you play with friends (and are positive), you'll benefit from the Party Rewards (bonus IP) and Champ Mastery bonuses (bonus Champ XP) and be eligible for positive surprises throughout the year.

We just have to do a better job tying everything together, which is what we want to do with the new Tribunal--it's the system that will rule them all and bring all the penalties and rewards together into one cohesive experience."

As for the common concern of players being punished for someone inaccurately spamming you with reports, Lyte noted:

"It's very difficult, if not impossible to be restricted or banned from report spam. I've checked tens of thousands of cases over the years when players think they've been banned due to report spam, and it's only happened 1-2 times.

The Report System actually validates every report, so if a player is false reporting often their reports have 0 value. If a player reports accurately, their reports have a lot of value. If you are getting a bunch of false reports, nothing will happen to you."

Lyte also commented they they want to let players know what their reports are doing:

"Yes, we want to give players feedback on their reports."

He continued:

"Yes, one of our features is to give players feedback on their reports and when a report successfully punishes or reforms a player and makes League a better place."

Later on, he reiterated:

"Our goal is to give players feedback on their reports; however, we have to be careful not to give too much information out which may allow players to reverse-engineer things and potentially exploit the systems too.

In some countries, we also have to be careful about internet stalking and how a report feedback system could encourage it.""

When asked how Team Builder has impacted queues and the perception of a Team Builder style draft being "easier", Lyte commented:

"We know that some players think Team Builder Draft will require less skill because you can choose the positions you want to play, and don't have to master every position. 

However, we found that even in the current Ranked experience, most players only have to play 2 positions on average typically. Even given this data, we have a few ideas in place that will still reward players for being skilled in multiple positions. 

We're going to talk more about the Team Builder experience and lessons we've learned in the future, but not the right topic for this thread."

Children's Day Fan Art

May 5th is Children's Day in Korea and to celebrate Riot KR has posted a collection of community artwork showing various champions as children and adults!

Fan Artist Feature - Rachel J Corey