Surrender at 20

Red Post Collection: Select Tier 3 Rune Price Reductions, PROJECT skin sale, League's social systems discussion, & more

This morning's red post collection includes a heads up on the upcoming permanent price reduction of several tier 3 runes, ricklessabandon noting he has a Miss Fortune change to the PBE soon, Lyte with details on player behavior and the end of season ranked rewards, a reminder that the 1350 RP PROJECT skins are now are on sale for 975 RP through September 24th, discussion on LoL's social systems, and more!
Continue reading for more information!



Table of Contents


Upcoming Price Reduction on Select Tier 3 Runes

Good news everyone - a selection of the most common Tier 3 Runes are having their price reduced at the end of the month, including AP & AD quints, AD & Magic Pen reds, Armor yellows, and MR blues! These will all be reduced in price by 50% starting on September 29th at 12 PM PDT!
"A short while ago, there was discussion around making “rune bundles” to help out players who were just getting started on their tier 3 rune pages. After some thought, however, we came to the conclusion that we could do something easier… 
On 9/29/2015, we’ll be putting the following tier 3 runes on sale permanently for 50% off: 
  • Greater Mark of Attack Damage: 205 IP ⇒102 IP
  • Greater Mark of Magic Penetration: 410 IP ⇒205 IP
  • Greater Seal of Armor: 205 IP ⇒102 IP
  • Greater Glyph of Magic Resist: 205 IP ⇒102 IP
  • Greater Quintessence of Attack Damage: 1025 IP ⇒512 IP
  • Greater Quintessence of Ability Power: 1025 IP ⇒512 IP 
Once again, we plan to run this sale permanently, beginning 9/29/2015 at 12 PM PDT. 
Good luck out there!"

Miss Fortune Changes coming to PBE Soon

Feeling fortunate? ricklessabandon tweeted out that he'll have a small Miss Fortune change on the PBE soon that will net more damage on her R!
[1] "put in a miss fortune change. should be on the pbe tomorrow i think? should help her out a bit. please check it out if you're interested~"
[2] " looking at a very simple change to her ult. she'll do more damage after the change~"
He continued, noting this is just something to hold over MF players until Statikk's larger changes are done:
[3] "the latter. this is meant to help out miss fortunate players more presently while that follow-up work is developed."
When asked about the Sona changes he had briefly mentioned a while back, ricklessabandon noted:
[1] "in a holding pattern for right now. essentially, i have to complete any 'urgent' work before continuing (and i still have some)." 
[2] "sure thing! i really, -really- want to get back to her, so hopefully i (and sona players) won't have to wait too terribly long~"

5.19 & Balance Changes

With the 5.19 PBE cycle underway and a new champion up for testing, Meddler popped into a thread inquiring if we'd see many balance changes on the PBE:
"There'll be some, it'll be smaller than the average patch though. We've shifted a lot of focus onto work for the large preseason patch later in the year."

Lyte on Ranked Rewards & Player Behavior

Lyte has taken to his ask.fm to clarify Riot's stance on ranked rewards and player behavior as we near the end of the season, confirming that players who have been banned for cheating, banned for behavior in the last 3 months, and who have ACTIVE chat / ranked restrictions will not receive rewards.
"Quote:
Am asking again... so what riot games decide about Ranked Rewards ? 

We're working on a website that will outline the Ranked Rewards policies for 2015 and have a full FAQ, but we'd like to release some information early. 
1) In 5.18, Chat and Ranked Restrictions are now powered by machine learning, and capable of handing out restrictions within 15 minutes of matches. We're also introducing a new escalation system for penalties, so players will now get 10 chat restrictions, 25 chat restrictions, a 14-day game ban then a permanent ban for repeated offenses. You can read more about this upgrade in a design blog by Neurocat here: [ link ] 
2) In 5.18, we've also launched the new Intentional Feeder Detection system. This system can ban intentional feeders within 15 minutes of matches, but we've tuned it relatively conservative to start to make sure that we do not punish players for just having a bad game. 
--- 
Because we've launched Instant Feedback, Upgraded Chat and Ranked Restrictions and Intentional Feeder Detection during the 2015 Ranked Season, we've decided to make some changes to the 2015 Ranked Rewards policy. Our design philosophy focuses on player reform wherever possible; however, a second goal was to make it super obvious whether players would receive rewards or not by End of Season, and to reinforce that sportsmanship is a fundamental aspect of competitive play. By announcing the changes at this time (especially after the restriction reset), the vast majority of punished players should have enough time to reform by the End of Season. 
Here's this year's Ranked Rewards policy: 
1) Players with ACTIVE Chat and Ranked Restrictions by End of Season will not receive ranked rewards. 
2) Players that have received game bans for cheating (hacking, scripting, Elo Boosting, etc) will not receive ranked rewards. 
3) Players that have received game bans for player behavior (verbal or gameplay toxicity) will not receive ranked rewards UNLESS they have had no punishments for AT LEAST 3 MONTHS up to the End of Season. 
4) Players that have received Low Priority Queues (from LeaverBuster) will not be affected in 2015 because we don't want to punish players for the random DC or hardware/ISP failure. 
5) Ranked Reward eligibility is reset every season. So, if players are excluded from rewards in 2015, they are eligible for rewards in future seasons as long as they are neutral or positive. 
6) Players that are intentionally toxic on purpose for the rest of the season because they are ineligible for rewards will be given penalties up to a permanent ban. 
Hopefully that clears up any questions about Ranked Rewards in 2015. For next season, we'll be posting this info earlier in the season; in addition, player behavior systems will inform you in-game when you are approaching ranked reward ineligibility."

Activate PROJECT skins sale

Now that FIRST STRIKE is over, the 1350 RP PROJECT: Fiora, Leona, Lucian, and Zed are all now on sale at a discounted price of 975  RP each through September 24th!
"Unlock PROJECT: Fiora, PROJECT: Zed, PROJECT: Lucian, and PROJECT: Leona for 975 RP until 9/24 23:59 PDT."
Be sure to check out our PROJECT post for preview screenshots & videos of these skins!

Meddler on Aatrox

In a thread discussing Aatrox and his current place in the game, Meddler chimed in:
"I'm with you that Aatrox has some issues, and that means he sometimes doesn't feel very satisfying to play, I don't personally feel it's because he's weak though. Statistically he does ok, nothing special, but pretty middle of the pack. I actually feel you hit the nail on the head with one of your other comments "need to look at him and make him stand out from the ordinary". That's Aatrox's big gameplay issue - he doesn't have a distinct enough gameplay identity, so the only major gameplay reason to pick him is if he's the strongest option in his class (diving fighters). Other divers have more unique things they bring to a team, so there's reason to pick them even if they're not numerically the strongest (Jarvan has strong synergies with Gnar and Vayne, Nocturne can join a fight from long range, Vi offers almost guaranteed access to and CC on a priority target etc). Since Aatrox doesn't have something that distinct however he instead has to compete purely on more general grounds (damage, tankiness/sustain primarily). To feel good he'd therefore need to be noticeably overpowered. 
The solution, following that logic, then is to find something special Aatrox can offer and put a significant part of his power budget there. We don't have work on Aatrox currently prioritized, but have kicked around some ideas for ways to do that whenever opportunity to work on him permits. There's one direction in particular I personally feel's got a lot of potential (and some noticeable risks), before I get into details about that though I'd love to hear other people's thoughts on what we could do to Aatrox to give him a unique space in the game."

Private Chat Rooms Update on PBE

The 9/16 PBE update included updates to Private Chat rooms (not public!), including a slew of new features such as making channel officers, chat persisting through login/logout, and more!
Here's Limely with more information from the PBE boards:
"Hey all, 
Private, persistent chat rooms, now on the PBE for extended testing, are the latest effort at improving League’s social systems. The idea is to give you easier ways to stay connected with your core group of League players and we plan to expand on this feature for the next few months. 
Long-term, features we create should make it easier for you to find and get friendly with people you want to play with. For more on the vision for social systems in League, check out this chat between some teammates and I. 
Persistent chat rooms will store any messages sent between members while you’re online and instantly be available when you log onto League. You can own one chatroom be a member of three at any given time. 
Once you set up a chat room, you can:
  • Name the chat room
  • Invite new members
  • Promote current members to officers (they can invite and kick members)
  • Demote officers back to members
  • Kick members
Because this is PBE, we’ll be regularly pushing updates to the feature, and that means we’ll need to occasionally reset all of the chat rooms. We’ll let you know before we hit reset! 
Let us know if persistent chat rooms make it easier to stay connected and hit the Rift with friends! Also, bug reports - give us those here. :3 
Thanks, 
Limely :3"
Here's a shot of the private chat room and options panel in action on the PBE!
 As mentioned in the post, Limely and Drevarius also popped on the boards to discuss the updates!

Limely and Drevarius on League's social systems

To go with the above improvements to private chat rooms, Riot NaKyle wrangled up Limely and Drevarius to discus League's social systems now and into the future!
"Hey all, 
To share some insight into the PBE release of persistent chat rooms, Limely (product owner and designer) and Drevarius (designer) dished about the past, present and future of how we hit the Rift with friends. Read on to learn more about where we’ve been and where we’re headed with League’s social systems. We’ll hang out to answer questions below. 
NaKyle:
So, persistent chat rooms hit the PBE earlier today. How do you expect players to use them? 
Drevarius:
We expect groups of friends to use persistent chat rooms to stay connected, organize games, and potentially get to know friends of friends. Having a bit of chat history also makes it easier to have some context for the conversation when you log on and join the chat room. 
Limely:
We also put moderation tools in there so players can have some control and keep out unwanted guests like spam bots and sketchy dudes. Ultimately, this stuff is pretty overdue, but we’re still excited to get it out the door. 
NaKyle:
Cool. So, bigger picture: “Social systems” is a big and kinda vague term. What’s it mean to you? What are some of your guiding principles for building social systems and features for League? 
Drevarius:
Social systems are essentially features that connect players and encourage them to experience League together. This is still a big and vague description, but there are a lot of components that contribute to social, like finding IRL friends (Facebook friend discovery), learning more about the friends you already have (player hovercards), and sweetening the pot for playing together (party rewards). 
Limely:
These features all individually add value, but they’re pretty narrow and isolated in terms of the problems they solve. We want to start looking at “social systems” as something more cohesive. We want to get to a point where the whole suite of features work together to do all the things Drevarius mentioned and more. 
That’s our big picture goal, but the actual implementation starts with some tedious overhauling of existing and foundational systems. That work was and still is time-consuming and almost invisible to players, which sucks. The strategy moving forward is to release larger features piece by piece, that way we ship stuff at a better cadence and iterate based on timely feedback from players. Persistent chat rooms, a pretty modest system on its own, is an example of one of those smaller, quicker steps. 
NaKyle:
How do small steps like persistent chat rooms feed into that broader vision for social systems? 
Limely:
Well, we’ve tried to make it easier to connect players with their friends, but we’ve learned that sometimes it takes more than that to get friends actually playing together. If you have no context as to the type of player your new friend is--jungler/silver/Warwick main--you might never go to the trouble of finding out if your playstyles are compatible, let alone jump into a game together. 
Drevarius:
It’s about more than providing playstyle context through hovercards though. Party Rewards get people playing together through bonus IP, but that doesn’t mean the friendship will stick and those players will keep playing together. So the strategic approach Limely’s talking about needs to include ways of finding players that you want to keep playing with. 
NaKyle:
You mentioned friends of friends. Do you see those connections as especially important? 
Limely:
Yeah, we do. You’re more likely to have things in common with friends of friends than outright strangers. And besides that, when we help you connect those dots, you can play together without that mutual friend. 
NaKyle:
Hopefully the mutual friend doesn’t get too jealous. What are some of the bigger picture social challenges you’d like to tackle in the future? 
Limely:
I think the big one we’re aiming at is giving players a reason to strengthen the bonds they have with current connections, maybe even helping them become genuine friendships. We think there’s something compelling about a group identity as well. That group identity can attract strangers who share similar playstyles, giving players even more people to play with. 
Drevarius:
We also want to make sure that the friends we’re helping you make are friends you can actually have a good time playing with. That mix of group identity, similar playstyle, and a mutual friend or two could be really compelling. When I group up with friends, I feel like I’m ready to take on the world--we want more players to experience that feeling. 
The three of us will hang around the comments for a bit. Hit us with your questions about League’s social systems and look for persistent chat rooms to reach live after a bit of testing!" 

Drevarius also answered a few questions on the new persistant chat rooms, including if any of these features will make their way to public chat rooms:
"Quote:
1) Does the name for a chat room need to be unique from all other chat rooms, or does the player login identifier suffice? 
2) What will happen to existing chat rooms with established userbases and purpose? 
3) Will the persistent chat rooms still be found by knowing the name and typing it in, or would the display name of the creator be used instead? 
4) Will there be a way to browse persistent chat rooms? 
5) Is the user limit the same as current chat rooms?
PERSISTENT CHAT ROOMS
1) Yes, names must be unique. 
2) Existing public chat rooms will be unaffected for now - we will have improvements for public chat functionality in the future. 
3) These new persistent chat rooms are private for now - you must be invited to get access. 
4) We are looking into this. 
5) We are starting testing conservatively with 50 max members. 
Limely will be answering the social systems questions :D."
When asked if there are plans to raise the current chat sizes, Drevarious noted:
"We'll be starting at a max of 50 for persistent chats, while there are no changes to the current size of public chats (200). 
We anticipate increasing the size of persistent chats over time as we gain a better understanding of their load on our system."
As for more on the social systems, Limely commented:
"Quote:
Social Systems 
1) What are some of the projects you are interested in pursuing under the umbrella of social systems? 
2) Would something like player volunteer systems (e.g. Emissaries of the League) be part of your wheelhouse?
1) League of Legends is so much better with friends that we are exploring several different methods of encouraging and facilitating social play but everything is in very early stages so nothing more to share yet! :3 
2) We are aiming in the future to be able to empower communities and potentially individuals who are interested in making League a healthier environment for learning. We are not doing anything directly with player volunteer systems but are looking instead into what tools we can provide to make this a better experience.

Riot Games privacy policy updated

Next up we have Mutacious with a look at the updated Riot Games privacy policy that will go into effect soon, including making it easier to read and setting up for the future.
"We’re making a few changes to the Riot Games privacy policy and wanted to let you know what’s changing and why. 
Starting on October 16, we’re replacing our current privacy policy (available here) with an updated version, which you can read in full here. After that date, your use of League of Legends and other Riot services will be covered by our new policy. Here’s what’s changing: 
  • We’re making it easier to read. Documents like these can be overwhelming, full of dense language and endless legal clauses. In the revised policy, we’ve used more straightforward language that’s easier to read and understand. We’ve added section summaries, interactive elements, and more to help guide your review. There’s also now an entire section detailing the choices and controls you have to further protect your privacy. 
  • We’re updating it to cover new features. Features like Friend Importer are new to League, and they need to be covered by our privacy policy. Our new policy reflects these new features and more accurately (and clearly) explains how we’ll process info to support them. 
  • We’re setting it up for future growth and development. Riot continues to grow and offer new types of experiences (like mobile apps and websites), and we continue to grow internationally - the new policy reflects that. Some changes in the policy also allow us to use industry standard advertising practices and to better surface content that’s relevant to players based on their preferences.
We know privacy is very important to many players. It’s important to us, too. Our goal with updating our privacy policy is to provide players with transparency and choice. We’ve simplified the language and added context to make it easier to understand, and we’ve taken care to ensure players have meaningful choices to protect their privacy. 
Riot’s legal team will be on hand until 4PM PDT to answer any questions you might have about the new policy in the comments below."
There is also a brief FAQ attached to the post:
FAQ 
What is the Riot services privacy policy? 
Our privacy policy explains what info Riot Games collects when you visit the Riot services (like League of Legends), as well as ways we might use or share it. 
What’s changing? 
To see all the changes, we suggest you take a look at the full policy - but here’s a quick rundown: 
Most of the changes are aimed at making the policy easier to read, with straightforward language, section summaries, and interactive elements. There’s also now an entire section detailing the choices and controls you have to further protect your privacy. 
The new policy also includes some changes to cover new and future functionality for Riot services: for instance, features like Friend Importer and mobile apps like Blitzcrank’s Poro Roundup are new territory for Riot, and need to be covered under our privacy policy. 
When does the change take effect? 
The new policy will take effect on October 16. 
Why are you changing the privacy policy? 
Our goal with updating our privacy policy is to provide players with transparency and choice. We’ve simplified the language and added context to make it easier to understand, and we’ve taken care to ensure players have meaningful choices to protect their privacy. Besides accessibility, we also needed to update the privacy policy to cover new and future functionality for Riot services - it’s been awhile since we last updated our privacy policy, and these are frequently-updated documents that reflect a company’s present day operations. 
What can I do to further protect my privacy? 
Our new privacy policy includes a section detailing the choices and controls you have to further protect your privacy. 
How do I accept or reject the new policy? 
The new policy applies to playing League of Legends or using Riot services after the effective date - if you play League of Legends or use any Riot services after that date, it’ll be covered under the new policy."

Patch Rundown 5.18 - The Worlds Patch Part 2

Following part one yesterday, Scarizard and crew are back with part two of the patch rundown for 5.18!
"The gang returns to take a closer look at 5.18’s updates, including changes to the juggernauts, Gangplank, Fiora, and Warrior Enchantment. 
Patch 5.18 Notes - http://na.leagueoflegends.com/en/news/game-updates/patch/patch-518-notes"
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