Red Post Collection: "They Are Coming" is for new champion, ZenonTheStoic ask.fm round up, 2015 WC Site, & more

"They Are Coming" is a teaser for the next champion.

"They are coming = new champ teaser. Confirmed."

• On live in 5.17, players may notice a mysterious swirl appear above their head at the beginning of the game. "They Are Coming" also referenced in 5.17 patch notes.

• The 5.18 PBE cycle also contains a new teaser, a set of "Lamb" and "Wolf" masks that randomly spawn above a champion when they die.

Iniquitee on popular "DhaMa" fan concept

"Hey folks (and Rakoon Jesus in particular)! 

I wanted to jump in here and drop a quick note now that we're headed full steam into the new champ hype train (yes, these mask assets on the PBE are teasing a new champ, confirmed!). 

Dha and Ma is a super cool concept, with a lot of compelling elements. The yin & yang, dark & light dual nature has a lot of very novel thematic and visual flair that hasn't been explored in League yet. I wanted to quickly dispel the notion that this was a direct inspiration, however - in fact, the first concept for our next champion was created January 26 of this year. 

Champion ideation draws inspiration from many places, and often incorporates common and uncommon themes, concepts, and archetypes. There are thousands of champion concepts out there and it's common that we can find one or many that mirror some of the themes that end up making it into a released champion. Innovating in the space via art, gameplay and theme can be a real challenge, and it's common to be able to point to another character from other games, comics, movies or other media and be able to say that there are similarities. In the end, though, we strive very hard to create something truly unique to our game and universe, and I hope that of all the things you can call new League champions, "derivative" is not one of them. 

We love that players are passionate and engaged enough with League to come up with super cool concepts like these, so don't stop! I look forward to getting all the juicy details into your hands so you guys can learn all about how we came up with and delivered the champion concept and who it turned out to be (I think you're gonna dig it).
In the mean time.. they are coming..."

Instant feedback updates land on PBE

"Hey all, 

We’ve shipped out a suite of new features on the PBE. Earlier this year, we tipped our hand on what’s in today’s release, so skim that post for the big ideas. It all boils down to upgrades to instant feedback, League’s automated system for detecting, punishing, and (one day) rewarding certain behaviors in League: 

In-client reform cards 

Until now, reform cards were sent via email to offending players. Now they’ll appear in-client, delivering context on the punishment and displaying the chat log that triggered the punishment. Pushing reform cards into the client ensures players receive the information they need to understand the punishment and change their behavior for the better. Since the vast majority of you won’t ever receive a reform card, here’s what one looks like:

 

Chat restrictions 

Instant feedback began with two-week and permanent bans because the negative behaviors spurring them (homophobia, racism, sexism, death threats, and excessive verbal abuse) are both overwhelmingly rejected by the community and hard to mistake. After crunching several million games worth of data over the last few months, the instant feedback system’s now ready to help reform more mild, but persistent negative behaviors with chat restrictions. 

Intentional feeding bans 

Intentional feeders ruin games, so the behavior nets players two-week bans, and can escalate to permanent bans if it continues. Through a ton of in-game metrics, chat logs, and even historical play patterns, we ensured the system understands the difference between intentional feeding and being crushed by a Riven main in solo queue. You shouldn’t need to worry about just having a bad game. 

Like with all new feature launches, the whole player behavior team will hand-review the first few thousand cases to make sure everything’s working right."

[Link] do you think league has a possibility to have a 2 in 1 champion? like the Vikings on Heroes of the Storm 

Short answer is it's unlikely. 

Long answer! When we made League, we looked at the obvious inspiration, Dota, and made some baseline changes to the game that Dota, being a War3 mod, couldn't make. One of them is the "stickiness" of self selection. In League, you cannot "unselect" yourself as a unit, and this has a lot of positive implications, but it also means that RTS-like controls are out of scope. This is the most intuitive control scheme for multiple units. 

So if we wanted to make a champ that was two independently controllable units, we would need to do a LOT of work on the UI / input side. Additionally, many skills learned on this champion would not be transferrable to other champions and no other champions would prepare you for this dual champion. And finally, because brain cycles are a finite resource, there is only so much complexity we could put into the champion's actual kit--most of its complexity budget would be eaten up already by the mere fact that you're controlling two independent units. 

TL;DR: I don't think this kind of champion would be a good fit for League, but as always I could be wrong!

[Link] What champions have you worked on? preferable from first to latest 

I've worked on: 

Sejuani (rework) (this was mostly Meddler, with me helping a little and learning the tools) 

Lucian 

Xerath (rework) (Xelnath lay the foundation for the rework. I took over in the second half of the project, mostly focused on simplifying and polishing the kit) 

Azir 

Tahm Kench

[Link] I've been playing a lot of Tahm Kench since his release and think he's in a good spot. I think the addition of titanic hydra and dead man's plate helped him out a lot. But with that being said I think jungle and top is actually much better for him. What do you think? 

Yeah, it's possible that on a purely numerical level his jungle/top are actually much stronger. The health scaling on his R passive is bonkers to be sure. But that said, I think we (collectively as a playerbase) are so very far from the skill ceiling of his various ally interactions. Ask yourself how much you played around the fact that, say, persistent ally effects continue ticking while the ally is in your stomach? How well are players optimizing usage of Abyssal Voyage? 

I think top and jungle (particularly jungle with Cinderhulk) are the easier to optimize roles for him where his power derives from simple numbers. Support is much harder to optimize and has a lot more room to grow.

[Link] What do you think about Xerath, now? It is been a year and half since his rework. 

I'm not happy with the "shove enemy into tower and never fight" gameplay I often see, and I wished I had the time to go back and work on the Q some more, but overall? I'm super happy. We wanted to make a long range sniper with real weaknesses and I think we delivered. Also love that he's such a natural counter to Azir (not so much anymore these days).

[Link] i saw u cast games during season 1 worlds. Why did u choose not to pursue your casting career but instead design OP champions? :P 

I was given an option to join the champion design team toward the end of 2012 and I jumped at it. I loved casting, but I never thought I was great at it. It sort of accidentally ended up casting because someone thrust a microphone into my hand in August 2010, and I loved it, but I never thought I had a real future as a caster. I could see the likes of Phreak and Riv do what I did so much better and show so much more passion for it.
But possibly more importantly, being a game designer has been my dream job since I was 6 years old. I bugged my dad until he taught me BASIC, I devoured all games I could get my hands on, and I modded and made maps for every game that let me. 

Casting was more of a "oh I guess no one is doing this right now? And I don't entirely suck at it? Cool, let me do this for a bit" thing. Game design? Very much my one true calling my entire life. So it really wasn't a hard decision. 

[Link] When designing champions do you take into consideration what the enemy feels like when they play against it? While Xerath and Lucian feel the best champion to play against and if you die to one it was because they outplayed you, Azir and Tahm feel terrible to play against with no weakness andoutplay 

We do talk about the playing against experience more than the playing as experience! Both Azir and Tahm do have real weaknesses, but they're very hard to abuse and don't feel super satisfying when you do. That's my bad! With Tahm, though, I'd suggest you try playing champions that are good at kiting against him. Tahm literally does nothing to, say, an enemy Kalista. He's slow and doesn't do much to you at range at all.

[Link] What happened to the Warwick rework? 

I answered this on Reddit four months ago: 

[The Warwick rework] got shelved when I moved on to Azir! I had a kit that was decent, but at the same time we had spun up a Reworks team that has since brought you stuff like the Sion rework, and we decided that that was the level of rework Warwick needed to be truly successful. Since I had fitted the WW rework between two other projects (Xerath rework and Azir) I didn't have the time (nor was I on the right team) to fully redesign him from the ground up. I moved on to Azir, and the reworks team did their own list of prioritizations, in terms of which champion needs a rework most. Sion obviously topped that list, and while we haven't had a rework quite as massive as Sion since, I think stuff like Soraka, Tristana, and Viktor have shown that we've leveled up what we consider a rework these days. Warwick will still get a full rework, and we may or may not use any of the stuff I was working on (with a tendency toward probably starting over from scratch), but other champions such as Poppy and Ryze are higher on the priority list.

[Link] Was there ever a situation where you had an ability in one of your champions kits where your colleagues would say: "Oh no. That is way too OP! What are you thinking Zenon?" 

If there wasn't, I wouldn't be doing my job. Tahm had a passive at first where standing near him would gradually reduce your vision range until, at full reduction, you'd lose ally vision too. It was the scariest thing. I ended up compressing it into the devour moment.

[Link] With TK so new, what are you currently working on? Do you do smaller projects or have down time between champion releases? 

I am working on the next champion! You don't really have downtimes between champions; you start ideating on new a champion while you're still doing follow-up work on the last champion. Part of the difficulty of the champion release process is that so much design and balance is guess work, so as the data rolls in and you see how people actually use your champion, you have plenty of adjustments to make. At the same time, the early phases of working on a champion are very much about brainstorming and thinking up things that might be cool to do in game and then putting the champ into playtests to see if these patterns are actually cool, so it's a very different kind of workload from, say, bug-fixing toward the end or polishing skills and inputs toward the middle of the process.

[Link] What champions do you think have the most boring kits, currently? 

Warwick, sadly. But also Yorick's kit is very underwhelming. The ult is sort of a cool moment, but there are so, so many problems with it. I'm glad I'm not working on a Yorick rework; I wouldn't know where to start! Fortunately we have a really good team in place now that does these reworks, and everyone's favourite grave digger to hate is in good hands.

[Link] What do you think of letting players knock a champion out of Tahm's mouth by hitting him with hard CC? The ally saving can be really frustrating to deal with and it'd be nice to have at least some option against it, even if it means throwing CC at the tank. 

We had this implemented early on in Tahm's development, and it was just the worst. It's so hard to differentiate purposeful play on the enemy's side ("I CCed you because I saw you eat your ally!") vs accidental / ambient CC ("I guess you stood grouped with your team when I Malph ulted you; oh you had something in your mouth? Too bad for you!")
We also had a version implemented where Tahm would drop his passenger after receiving X% of his max health in damage over the duration of the devour. Same thing there; in high stress situations where you most need to save an ally, that kind of damage just happens ambiently with little to no intention specifically to single you out on the enemy's side. 

What all this leads to is the skill feeling unreliable and random. We learned that clutch safety spells in League need to be reliable in many ways for them to feel good to everyone, so we kept it simple with Tahm's W: the ally untargetability starts on devour *BEGIN* (so they can't randomly die on the way into your mouth), and no force in the world can force you to drop your ally (other than death). Instead we put tuning levers into different aspects of the ability: its range, its cooldown, Tahm's lack of tactical mobility, and the minimum devour time (you cannot devour an ally for LESS than 2 seconds, unless you die before the 2 seconds are up. This means your team will ALWAYS lose that ally's contributions for a minimum amount of time.) 

Yes, ally devour is super annoying to the enemy whose only mission in life it was to kill that Jinx. This is actually a good sign--it means that the spell is not only powerful, but noticeable (compare to, say, Amumu's W, which is RIDICULOUSLY powerful but not noticeable at all). For each "god screw that Toad" the enemy mumbles under their breath I guarantee you there are half a dozen "holy shit thank you Tahm"s that his allies say. On balance, that is a good skill. What it means for the enemy is they need to adjust their approach against a team with Tahm saving people. This is what we call an output on the game--Tahm being in the game forces you to play differently. How do you play it? I'm going to let Penny Arcade field this one for me: 

http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2007/09/21

[Link] how much time does it takes to release a new champion ? from the concept until its release. and which is the most difficult part on the champion creation (character, lore, model, animations, skills etc) ? 

It takes about 9 months to make a champion.

And in the game.