Red Post Collection: 2016 Highlights Playlist, Visual Language of Hextech, Final /ALL CHAT, Snowdown Ends 9th, and more!

Continue reading for more information!

• Snowdown 2016

• Red Post Collection: Elementalist Lux Login Dev Blog, Mordekaiser bugs, 2016 EU LCS Christmas Special, & more
• Champion & Skin Sale 12/30 - 1/2

Rewatch the highlights of 2016

"With a new year and a new season in sight, take a look back at League in 2016.

Miss a video? Full playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list..."

Full length versions of the 31 videos - including cinematic videos, champion trailers, teasers, community projects, and more -  can be found in the description or in this youtube playlist..

Don't forget to check out your personalized 2016 Season In Review [here].
Here's a new Nexus article looking at the visual language of LoL's Hextech aesthetic - seen in everything from the updated client to merchandise packaging and more.

Hextech Concept Art

A NEW LOOK FOR LEAGUE OF LEGENDS FOR YEARS TO COME 

As we began exploring what the new look and feel of the League client should be, we wanted to create a visual style that felt like a fantasy game, but avoided the normal fantasy game UI cliches. Parchment and other distressed elements that littered the client in the past look dated relatively quickly, and we wanted to build a flexible visual language that had the ability to scale over multiple features and mediums in the future. In addition to that concern, we wanted to unlock a visual style that didn’t require a dedicated visual artist (or more than one) to be on a team to create a layout. With how fast League grows and iterates, we wanted to avoid some of the problems of the past where resource bottlenecking prevented potentially valuable new features from staying on the shelf for too long and becoming stale. 

HOW IT MANIFESTED INTO HEXTECH 

At the same time as our visual exploration phase, the foundations team was working to better define Piltover. They had begun to create some initial directions and concept art, including some showing a technology they dubbed “Hextech.” Thematically, Hextech served as a way of democratizing magic to those who didn’t have those abilities naturally. Items like Jayce’s hammer, Heimerdinger’s gadgets, and Vi’s gloves are all examples of Hextech in action within the game. 

This concept of a magic powered machine really fascinated us, and we began to wonder: “What is the client itself was like a Hextech tool that the players could use to interact with the magical world of the game?” This served as the stake in the ground that we built the user interface around, and began to develop some of the basic foundational shapes and colors of this visual language from it. 

THE LANGUAGE OF HEXTECH METAL 

To make sure we fully vetted this look and feel out as a scalable visual solution, we wanted to boil it down to its absolute core and build from there. As we continued to work with the Foundations team through their concept art for Hextech and Piltover, we reduced the overall shape language of the technology down to THREE CORE SHAPES:

HOW THEY ALL COME TOGETHER 

The combination and intersection of these shapes together in the Hextech visual language works to bring an ornate decorative framing to key areas of attention. As you see the use of Hextech metal throughout the League client and other, you can see how each shape plays upon each other to draw the eye towards a focal point.

Lobby Banner Design

THE LANGUAGE OF HEXTECH MAGIC 

Hextech magic acts as an intelligent partner as you navigate through various screens of the client, guiding you and highlighting crucial pieces of the experience. Primary buttons and important gameplay UI elements are charged with this signature magic element, and serves to draw the player’s attention towards key interactions. While this element shows up in many different ways, such as timers, activity indicators, and progress bars — it always follows a few core tenants: 

Social Panel Queue Timer

Ready Check Timer

CORE TENANTS 

VISCOUS 

Hextech magic tends to stick around and has some weight to it, falling somewhere in between water and smoke. 

DIRECTIONAL 

Always moving towards a particular direction, the intelligent aspect of the magic is geared towards guiding people. 

VALUE 

The highest values should be used to attract the player’s attention, saving brighter executions for pivotal moments in the experience.

HOW THIS LOOK FLOWS THROUGH THE CLIENT

Now that the core pillars of the Hextech design language have been established, we can get to the juicy part—how it appears throughout the updated League client. As you’ll begin to read through, you’ll notice that each element of these design elements play a crucial part towards solving specific problems. 

THE INTERFACE LAYER 

Whether it’s for major features or ancillary information, the use of metal linework lives on the top layer of the client, and acts as a framing element to support and draw focus towards key pieces of information.

Champion Mastery

THE INTERACTIVE LAYER 

Adjoining the interface layer of the client are the key methods in which a player would interact with the client. These layers of the user interface have been distilled down to three core areas of interactions: Gameplay, Secondary & Utility. 

GAMEPLAY BUTTONS 

The use of blue “Hextech Magic” buttons appear sparingly throughout the client, and are reserved purely for actions that where the player will be interacting with actions relating to the game itself. 

Play Button and Client Navigation

SECONDARY BUTTONS 

Gold buttons that appear throughout the client work to provide interactions in and out of secondary information. Navigating through a carousel, closing out of a modal window, and purchasing items all have a similar look and style to them. 

Skin Selection UI

UTILITY INTERFACE 

Buttons and interface items on the utility level serve the purpose of providing or distilling information for the player. Sorting, filtering, and tooltips all fall into this layer of interface interaction. 

Champion Information Tooltip

THE LOOK OF LEAGUE MOVING FORWARD

While this visual design style will be shown prevalently throughout the updated League client, it’s important to note that the look of League of Legends does not stop there. Some levels of Hextech have already started seeding their way into the world through a number of different mediums. Here are a couple examples:"

Riot Sotere on Poppy Nerfs in 7.1

Riot Sotere stopped by the boards to talk briefly on Poppy, noting on nerfs on the way in 7.1:

"She's got some nerfs on the way for next patch. R damage and shield duration, I believe."

He added:

"Quote: 

Thanks for the response, yeah this will work I guess. Although I would have liked to see her Q CD increased a little. 5 Seconds, but once she get's full build and has some CDR it get's ridiculously low. I guess we will see how these turn out though, thanks.

She still has to be able to do damage and provide threat. 

Her q is pretty strong and repeatable, but we were mainly aiming at toning down her capability to burst you down in a duel."

These tentative Poppy changes can be find on the 7.1 PBE cycle page.

Riot Axes on Bot Lane Ziggs

In a thread inquiring about the team's thoughts on the recent surge of bot lane AP Ziggs (being played for powerful turret destroying capabilities), Riot Axes stepped in to note:

"Haven't discussed Ziggs with the team yet, but I don't see any reason why we'd try to force him out of bot lane. We'll of course need to ensure general game balance - if it's super overbearing in bot lane, it'll get nerfed for that reason. (I haven't looked at the data yet, so I'm not saying it is overbearing) 

We've actually been tweaking rules to open up tower killing to more classes for a while - for example, putting armor/MR on towers and allowing penetration to work on it at midseason - in the hopes that something like this would eventually happen."

The Final Episode | /r /ALL Chat 

To round out 2016, here's the final episode of the community focused series /ALL CHAT!

"Time for more /R, where we respond to your comments and questions! 

/ALL Chat (the show) is retiring, but community-focused content is not! Stay tuned for an announcement early next year about what's next!"