Table of Contents
September sales schedule
The September sales have been announced! Check out the list to see whats on sale:
"Check out all the champs and skins on sale this September! Like previous sales schedules, we’re not posting the exact dates for each champ and skin, but they’ll all be on sale sometime next month.
Just a heads up – since we’re publishing these in advance, we won’t offer partial refunds on champs and skins purchased before they go on sale."
Thunderdome 2017 Team PVC Updates
The team working the 48 hour game jam is back with two more updates in their development. The first update was at 24 hours in:
"UPDATE: Check out the video of the build we're talking about below -
Last night, those who stayed past 11 got rewarded with a first look at the first really playable level setup - this was a first for me. To see something go from bits and pieces to an actual game was incredible. There was a Ziggs, and you could control him (it even felt smooth). You could throw bombs and blow stuff up, catapult yourself over obstacles with his satchel, and run off a screen with no bounds into a game-crashing abyss. We still weren’t at a full game loop, but you could see a little glimmer of what it could be, and it wasn’t too far away.
This morning, the room is buzzing. We’ve made a lot of progress and we’re now speeding toward our feature lock at noon. Everyone has been working tirelessly on their contributions, and no one is ready to miss the cutoff and get voted off the island (features, not people). This is the day we burn as hard as we can, because tomorrow we have a deadline to hit.
We still have a lot of problems to solve. We have all 5 enemies rigged up and behaviorally coded, but not yet implemented into the game. Imagine we’ve got 5 guys on the bench just waiting to go, but we can only guess what they’ll actually do based on how they look. To compensate, VFX is making as many “plug and play” particles as possible, without fully knowing what these baddies will need - there’s no more time to wait.
“I just fought our first character in the game ever - and killed myself with the first bomb I threw... haha, it's starting to be fun!”
Some people are wondering whether friendly-fire from your own bombs is what we’ll actually end up with, others are certain that’s part of the secret sauce for making this fun.
“Fingers crossed!” someone yells from across the room. We cut the build, time to playtest.
Our updates get shorter and shorter as we get more comfortable with what each team is trying to do, and more anxious to get it done. We all gather to watch Strokke, our production lead, play through a level and celebrate the miracle that is a working game loop, but don’t waste any time in running back to our own computers to download the build ourselves.
Half of the team immediately identifies problems and opportunities they’ve been itching to jump on and get right back into it, while the rest of us play around and try to progress through the fairly difficult levels. Many of the first comments that pop into our feedback document are about level design and tuning, problems that would have been incredibly difficult to spot without a fully playable build. We report in on everything from bugs, to UX and design, to things that just feel plain bad. We’re still not sure about friendly fire, but bumpers are exciting.
”Getting bonked in the head with a bomb that bounced off a bumper is really funny” says one point of feedback.
Overall we’re happy with how far we’ve gotten in just one day. Everyone is having fun playtesting while singing along to Take on Me, which someone has started playing in the background for some reason.
With a massive list of what we want to clean up over the next 24 hours and a grab bag of enemies that still need building out, everyone takes what we’ve learned and hopes that today will magically become twice as long. 4 hours until the next check-in."
The second check in was 4 hours later:
"Midway video update
We’re really starting to cook with gas. This is concerning in a room with so many explosives, but also exciting.
One of the leads calls an impromptu team meeting to rein in the speeding train a bit and ask a new question: “Where’s the fun?” Designers talk about how our first play test had enough shallow mechanics to split into three games, and we want to go deeper on one.
Everyone agrees there’s too much going on, so we talk about what works.
The design lead pulls up a document with three categories the team has identified: acrobatics, trick shots, and hordes of enemies. We look at it for a few moments without any immediate outcries for what feels right. There’s some element in each of these that we all like.
“What should it feel like to be Ziggs?” This is a question we can answer.
“Exploding!” - “Running around and blowing everything up.” - “Reckless gameplay.” These behaviors and emotions instantly jump us all onto the same page for how to narrow our vision. If we want to do more exploding, we need more objects that can explode. If we want to be reckless, we don’t want to care about difficult terrain or -gasp- friendly fire (at last, there’s the answer).
Friendly fire probably wouldn’t make or break our game direction because we can design around it, so instead of finding a ‘right’ answer we just needed to find what felt right for Ziggs.”Let’s focus more on monsters and dial the destruction way up.” We also decide that we want bigger levels (a few teams are visibly uncomfortable), and a third stage if we have time (silently screaming).
We start to think about how we want players to experience the game - is it speedrunner friendly? Let’s remove some random elements we were considering to make that path easier. Because we pulled off the mini internal alpha, everyone is phrasing things like “It wasn’t fun when X happened to me” or “I would have enjoyed Y more if we made it harder”. This might sound obvious, but we’re landing on a much better end product because we’ve been able to spend half our time looking at an actual game. We’re collaborating a lot more now because of it, too. With a shared experience and frame of reference, we’re all speaking the same language.
Our next checkpoint is 7 hours after that team meeting, the official all-in (DUN DUN DUN!).
That’s when everything needs to be totally done so we can get to optimizing, QA, and polishing. We’re still having some nasty performance issues on lower end machines, and that’s top of the priority list for the home stretch. Our leads are serious about keeping those final hours for problem solving.
"I'm the lock master, so if you want to get a feature in after 10pm, come ask me and I'll probably tell you to fuck off...but I’ll say it a lot nicer than that.” We mostly believe him on both accounts."Keep a look out for more updates!
Ask Riot: Hextech Limits and the Screaming Void
A new Ask Riot is out, covering Hextech crafting limits, Pentakill Kayle, and more:
This week we’re talking chest limits, PentaKayle, and the screaming torture of the unending void.
Why does Riot limit the number of Hextech chests you can buy over a 24-hour period?
If you look back at the League of Legends business model post, one of the tenants is “we want to add content that excites you when you first hear about it, feels good when you buy it, and leaves you glad when you look back, even months later.”
The part of “leaves you glad when you look back” was a major factor when adding in the limit for Hextech chests, as we wanted to do what we could to avoid buyer’s remorse.
We’ve all heard stories of drunk purchase regret or a kid getting ahold of their parent’s account and racking up hundreds of dollars in microtransactions in a single day. Our goal is for players to feel good about all of their purchases, and these limits help ensure that as much as possible.
We are also concerned with fraud, as we didn’t want someone to steal your account and spend it all on chests. I know what you’re thinking “But Rito, someone can steal my account and just buy all the skins!” – while that is true, it’s a little easier for us to interpret the intentionality of skin purchases versus the randomness of boxes when rolling back fraudulent purchases.
Since the system was implemented, we’ve been monitoring how often players hit the ceiling, and while some players do hit the max limit, it is relatively rare. We’ll continue to reevaluate what the upper limit of chests should be, so please share any thoughts you have on this.
DONTHASSLEDAHOFFRevenue Strategist
What happens to a champion when he/she recalls?
To a hell of screaming silence, where black and white lose all meaning and the only direction is inward. Where the infinite possibilities of existence are compressed into a single moment of abject horror, where one can see the ultimate shape of the universe and realize the terrible truth that there IS no shape — no beginning, no end, and no meaning or texture beyond that which we apply to it. An eternal, unyielding, soul-twisting miasma of light where the memories of those you loved and those you hated intertwine until the emotions are one and the same. You are overwhelmed with a single desire: to escape. To return to the world you once knew, to flee this world of hateful simplicity and unity, to be amongst the difficult and the unpleasant and the complex once again because even the torture and terror of everyday life is preferable to the unending, heart-shattering peace of this nothingness.
In other words, the same place Pokemon go when they enter a ball.
REVERENDANTHONYSenior Writer, Worldbuilding
Why didn’t you name it PentaKayle?
We were leaning toward it, but then we pulled out the band’s contract to double-check the fine print…and, well…
CALL US BY OUR ****ING NAME YOU ****** ** * **** ********.
…the answer was blazing at us. No really, I have third-degree burns on my fingers.
(Real talk, we considered it, but ultimately decided that a pun would better serve a goofy thematic like Toy Box [Meowkai, Pug’Maw] instead of a badass one.)
Writer, Skins
Thanks for reading this week’s Ask Riot. Have a question?
Head over to Ask Riot and sign into your League account. Check out the Pro Tips, then ask away.
We promise to read every question, but we can’t guarantee they’ll all get answers. Some questions may already be answered elsewhere, and some won’t be right for Ask Riot.
This isn’t the best place to announce new features, for example, and we might skip conversations on issues we’ve talked about in depth before (though we can clarify individual points).
We are listening, though, so keep asking. We’ll make sure your questions are heard by the Rioters working on the stuff you’re curious about."
Quick Hits
- Riot Martlet commented on Clubs over on Twitter:
"So Reddit was asking about Clubs. We'll be increasing the clubs cap to :100: members before 2018."
Reminders
Last up, a few reminders on upcoming and ending soon promotions and sales!
- As mentioned in 7.16 notes, ARURF returns to the RGMQ from 8/11/17 12:00 PT to 8/24/17 11:59PM PT!
- The Arcade Boss World event is happen now through 8/24! For all the details on the event, check out our event page!
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