Red Post Collection: Your Shop is back, Ask Riot #3 - Yorick, Mastery, & Chroma, Champion Shards for IP, & more!

With the upcoming legendary Dark Star Thresh debuting in the 6/1 PBE update, a Dark Star Thresh login theme has been uploaded on the LoL youtube page!

Check out our PBE coverage for in-game previews of Dark Star Thresh and Dark Star Varus!

Your Shop is back through June 23rd

As you may have noticed, the "Your Shop" (previously seen during Snowdown and Lunar Revel) has returned in 6.11 with personalized discounts through June 23rd!

"Your Shop is back! Score deals on champs and skins selected just for you until June 23 at 23:59 PDT. 

Here’s some info to get you rolling:

• Your Shop opens with six deals on champs or skins handpicked for you by a really smart robot
• These deals only exist in Your Shop, so you won’t see them anywhere else in the store
• Ultimate, Legendary, and Limited skins are not featured in Your Shop
• Legacy skins not featured in the store may be available in Your Shop (ﾉ^ヮ^)ﾉ*:・ﾟ✧
• Relatively new champs or skins won’t be in Your Shop (e.g., Super Galaxy, etc.)

That’s it! Your Shop is now open, so go eat a four-leaf clover, find a rainbow, and throw a horseshoe at someone (we don’t actually know how luck works)."

To access this, click the purple icon between the normal shop and hextech crafting icons!
When asked about the not seeing relatively new skins, DontHassleDaHoff mentioned:

"It's roughly 90 days, but yes, newer skins aren't included."

Chromas, Yorick and Champ Mastery in Ask Riot 

The third installment of Ask Riot is out and includes questions on what happened to Chroma packs, discussion on Yorick's upcoming champion update, and adding Champion Mastery to 3v3 and ARAM!

"Welcome to Ask Riot. 

This is a space where we focus on your questions and give you answers. 

This week we will be looking at Chromas, Yorick, and Champion Mastery on ARAM and TT. We reviewed over 9,000!!! (specifically 9,743 we’re not just memeing) questions in dozens of languages last week and picked three topics that were important to you. A full quarter of the questions asked had to do with skins, Yorick was the most asked about champion, and a lot of you wanted to know what the hell is going on with Champion Mastery. 

Have a question (or two) yourself? Go to ask.leagueoflegends.com and sign into your League account. Read the Do’s and Don’ts and then ask us something. We’ll be adding a repository of the answers to the web once we’ve accumulated a few of them. 

We’re committed to reading every question but can’t guarantee we’ll answer every one. Why not? 

Some questions will be answered elsewhere or won’t be right for this space. (We won’t be launching new products here or taking away from existing conversations.) Even if your question isn’t the one being answered, we’re listening and we’ll be sharing with the Rioters who are working directly on the things you’re curious about. 

Why haven’t there been any new Chromas lately?

We believe Chromas are a great way for you to celebrate your passion for a skin and the alternate fantasy it represents. There’s a lot of potential for Chromas and our first offering of them didn’t meet that potential. We also listened to your feedback about the variety of chromas available, pricing, and having to get them in packs of three. We want to improve on all of these areas for the next version. 

Until we can deliver on that experience, we’re not releasing any more until we’ve figured these things out and we’re actively working on this solution. – SuperCakes 

Is Yorick every going to get his rework or should we bury this champ forever? 

The short answer to this is, YES, Yorick will be getting a full rework! No need to bury him, the Yorick rework is actually in full production right now with a pretty large team digging away at him. 

To give you more context, the way Champion Update works now is that once a champion goes into full production there is a very small chance that it will be ‘iceboxed’ (or delayed for a long period of time). Early ideation on Yorick actually started in the second half of 2015. We have a team called a “Core Pod” that starts ideation on a champion very early. This is comprised of a designer, a narrative writer, concept artists, and the product manager. Together, we try to put together a new design, visual concept & narrative for the champion. We’ll share this development with stakeholders periodically to keep them updated and gather feedback on the work. Typically, there are several of these happening at once. 

This is the point in production where it is very possible for a champion to get iceboxed if we can’t come up with something solid. That’s why we don’t really talk about champions at this stage very often. Once we have the design, art & narrative approved, we are greenlit to go into full production, and at that point we add it to the Champion Update Schedule. For example, Warwick was recently greenlit but won’t actually start full production until after Ryze. 

Another question I have heard is, “Why was Ryze put ahead of Yorick? Why are you delaying Yorick more?” The answer to that is, the Champion update team now has 2 separate rework teams and Yorick went into production after Poppy finished. The team that worked on Taric is working on the Ryze update, so while Ryze recently popped up on the champion update schedule it actually hasn't affected Yorick's timeline. However, Yorick’s rework is on a much larger scale due to him being a “Minionmancer” and the additional models that need to be created which make them take longer than your traditional characters. Things can and do change, but I would expect to see him some time after Ryze, but some time before Preseason, if things go well. 

Yorick's update has many similarities to Taric's update in that he has a 100% new kit but will occupy the same role as he does now. Yorick is still a toplane Juggernaut with a focus on summoning minions, though his kit has been heavily modernized. I hope you are excited to see the new Yorick as we are to show him to you! – Reav3 

If or when is there going to be implementation of the champion mastery system to ARAM or TTL? 

We are close to delivering mastery for ARAM and TT to players, but don't have a release date locked down yet and will be sharing some additional details in the coming weeks. 

Player grades in champion mastery are determined by looking at your performance stats at the end of a game vs. the global averages for your champion and position. ARAM and TT are very different from SR, so a special set of rules had to be developed to measure and rate player performance in those modes. This took us some time to develop, which is why it hasn’t been added to those modes, while champ mastery was added for each rotating game mode as it was released. 

As some of you have pointed out, mastery level 1 to 5 are as much about continued play on a champ as they are about skill mastery, great play just accelerates gains. Mastery level 6 and 7 have a higher competitive bar as far as performance requirements. Alternate game modes are intended to offer variety in play with a less competitive standard for players. We want to maintain mastery levels 6 and 7 as achievements specific to high performance in competition, so they will only be achievable in SR modes. - Riot Socrates 

Please feel free to hit us up in the comments. Each of the Rioters who answered will do their best to engage in a conversation with you."

Be sure to submit your questions here.
Following the post, Reav3  jumped on the boards to clarify a point about the gameplay of Yorick's champion update:

"Yeah, we feel Yorick is similar to old Taric, in that his fantasy and role match up, he just needs to be heavily modernized. Sion acting like a AoE Mage and Poppy acting like a Assassin we felt were thematically mismatched."

In response to concern about possibly moving the schedule around or Yorick's update being pushed back significantly, Reav3  explained:

"What I was saying in the post is that Yorick is far past that point. I was saying that we have other champions that we haven't talked about yet that are at that point. Once we add a champion to the update schedule and start talking about them there is a pretty small chance of them getting iceboxed. It is always possible though as we would never release something we didn't think was high quality, it is just very unlikely. So far I don't think any champions that have been added officially to the champion update schedule have been iceboxed."

When asked if Mordekaiser is on the list for a champion update sometime, Reav3 commented:

"Mordekaiser is on our list to get a full Visual & Gameplay update one day, probably the size of Taric/Sion. We feel like the Death Knight Thematic is very strong and we aren't delivering on it very well right now. We aren't actively working on it right now though, but he is definitely on our list!"

When asked about the status of a possible Evelynn champion update, Reav3 noted:

"Yup! She's on the list as well. I would say she is higher priority then Morde, though not sure when we will get to her." 

RGMQ - Legend of the Poro King on Friday & Updated Schedule

Legend of the Poro King returns this weekend in the rotating game mode queue! As usual, look for things to start up around NOON (12:00 PM) server time!

The updated rotating game mode queue schedule is also out! Next weekend from June 10th through June 12th we'll return to Hexakill: Twisted Treeline, followed by One for All after that June 17th through 19th, and back to Ascension on June 24th though 26th!

Meddler Grab Bag - Champion Updates & Rengar

"Quote:

Pls say this to me. Will ryze rework be in patch 6.12 or patch 6.13? Im dying to know

No, it will not be."

Meddler  continued:

"Quote:

So does he actually have a fixed month rather than a fixed date?

Our projects have estimated release patches. Those can change though, based off work going at a different speed than expected, priorities changing, unexpected bugs or balance problems etc. That means we've got estimates even for champs like Warwick who are quite a long way off, they're very much a best attempt at a prediction though rather than a certainty."

"Quote:

the order of completion is Ryze-Yorick-Warwick right?

Ryze is almost certainly next, and Yorick's the most likely champ after him. Gets a bit less certain after that, though Warwick's a reasonable prediction."

When asked about the next class update and if Rengar might be included, Meddler commented:

"Quote:

So let's say assassins are selected to be the next roster update, and Rengar is on the list, but you decide he would be more of a fighter/diver than assassin, because that's a better space for him or whatever.
Would you make someone a better diver during an assassin update?
I asked this about Diana in another thread, but I'm just curious what you think.

I could see us looking at Rengar in a Diver or Assassin update. We do want to keep focus on one class of champions at a time, given it allows us to focus a team on a shared set of design problems and enables item etc supporting work too. Some exceptions are ok there though if they're in a similar space and taking advantage of those learnings/systems."

He continued:

"We see Rengar as more of an assassin at present, hence that classification. Lot of discusison though as to whether a healthier Rengar would be closer to a diver or skirmisher. I think it's likely we'll work on Rengar for the end of year class update, can't speak with any confidence about direction until we've had some time to prototype and test some things though."

Meddler  continued:

"Quote:

Rengar represents a lesson not learned by riot: The lesson of original Eve. Burst and CC, from stealth, from a character with ultra high range and dependable "reach" on the win condition characters of the other team. You nerfed eve for it; then you made rengar with the exact same idea. 

As it is he's an excellent diver with limited fallback patterns or follow-up moves. Not quite good enough at skirmishing to be capable of limiting return damage or sticking post his initial through mobility and evasion, and not healthy enough due to his signature move to be given adequate burst. 

Rengar is the people's favorite: probably because what assassin players seek in a character is a "delete" button for the player on the other team and rengar, when he is strong, provides reliabely. Nonetheless - a bad design.

Yep, Rengar's got some problems on his kit that ideally we'd have avoided based off past experience. The intent with his design was for much longer combat/kill times to avoid those issues, that didn't work out as desired however, leading to some extremely low times to live for his targets from the start of the engagement to the end (for them at least).
I do think it's important to call out the positives on Rengar as well though. His kit has issues, but some really good stuff as well (Brush passive changing how/where he wants to fight, Ferocity usage, coherence of theme and gameplay etc)."

As for which class will be up for a class update next, Meddler commented:

"Quote: 

....yes. And I'm asking if they know which group is going to be worked on.

We're doing some early exploratory work at the moment. Assuming that goes well enough to give us confidence to commit to a specific class I'm guessing we should be good to start talking about which one and our thoughts in about a month."

Dynamic Premade 1,2,3 Limiter Enabled at High Ranks 

Following the recent article on Dynamic Queue and the Future of League, Riot Socrates jumped on the NA boards to note the previously mentioned premade 3 player max limit is now enabled:

"We are now enabling premade limiter 1,2,3 for Diamond 5 and above in NA.

We're are also adjusting autofill to require a longer estimated queue time."

Hextech Mystery Champion Shard in shop

Hextech Mystery Champion Shard is now available in the shop, under Accessories -> Hextech Crafting.
This new item costs 195 RP or 1700 IP and will give one RANDOM champion shard. This champion shard has no restrictions and can be turned into blue essence or combined with other shards.

The Hextech Mystery Champion Shard was added as a more reliable way to gather blue essence needed for the recently added Champion Mastery 6 and 7.

Design Stream Q&A w/ Harrow VOD

Another week, another design live stream! This week's stream featured our host Scarizard and champion designer Harrow!

During the stream they also mention that Harrow is the gameplay designer for the next new champion to be released (after Taliyah). This will be his first champion release.