Red Post Collection: Aatrox Hotfix, Portrait Icons Available in Store, Summer LAN Party Merch, & More

Posted on at 5:38 PM by Aznbeat
Today's red post collection includes details on the five new portrait icons now available in the store, notes on the Aatrox hotfix pushed to live this afternoon, new summer merch in the Merch store, and more!
Continue reading for more information!


Table of Contents


Portrait Icons Now Available in the Shop

KateyKhaos noted the five champion portrait icons from the 8.13 PBE Cycle are now able to be purchased in the shop for 5000 BE each! These include Miss Fortune, Lux, Master Yi, Ahri, and Darius!

    

Katey also noted they would be staying in the shop for the forseeable future:
"Currently no plans to remove them from the shop."
As for the cost, Katey replied:
"They're tutorial completion rewards for new players. We wanted to keep them special, but also give veteran players a chance to collect them."

Aatrox Hotfix Now Live

Riot Jag noted a hotfix went out for Aatrox this afternoon:
"Hotfix buffs to Aatrox that just went live: 
HP up 30
Q damage up 5
E healing up 5%
E dash range up 50
E resets your AA
R CD 160/140/120 > 140/130/120"

Here's the full details from the Patch Notes:
"6/27/2018 Aatrox Balance Update 
Base health increased. Q damage increased. E healing increased. E distance increased. E now resets attack timer. R cooldown decreased at early ranks. 
Aatrox has released weaker than we'd like, so we're adding power into his baseline damage and durability and making some quality of life changes to his E. 
Base Stats
  • BASE HEALTH 580 ⇒ 600
Q - The Darkin Blade
  • Q1 DAMAGE 15/30/45/60/75 ⇒ 20/35/50/65/80
  • Q2 DAMAGE 125% of Q1 damage (unchanged)
  • Q3 DAMAGE 150% of Q1 damage (unchanged)
  • SWEET SPOT DAMAGE 150% of damage (unchanged)
E - Umbral Dash
  • PASSIVE HEALING 15/16.25/17.5/18.75/20% ⇒20/21.25/22.5/23.75/25%
  • DASH RANGE 250 ⇒ 300
  • NEW C-C-C-COMBO Now resets your basic attack timer
R - World Ender
  • COOLDOWN 160/140/120 seconds ⇒ 140/130/120 seconds"

League of Legends Promo Skins Goodbye Giveaway

Here's Isto with a notice regarding the free skins promos that rewarded Riot Girl Tristana, Dreadnight Garen, and Unchainer Alistar:
"Riot Girl Tristana and Unchained Alistar wave goodbye as they head into the vault! 
For a long time, Riot Girl Tristana, Dreadknight Garen, and Unchained Alistar were offered to players who followed League of Legends on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, respectively. Back in the good ol’ days of League there was no Hextech Crafting system, and the quality of RP Art wasn’t nearly up to today’s exquisite modern standards. League was also just beginning to grow as a game, so we wanted a cool way to incentivize you all liking, commenting, and MASHING that subscribe button on all our social channels for more great content. Hence, these “social promotion” skins were born. 
Fast forward to today, with more ways to get free skins, we decided it was time to retire this social promotion. 
It feels bad to just take something away that we’ve been giving away for free since the era when dubstep was a thing, so we wanted to offer you guys one final chance to quickly and easily redeem these skins before we retire them for good. Here’s what you need to do: 
  1. Go to the homepage of the Support Site
  2. Click “Login” in the upper right hand corner
  3. Enter your account details (the same details you use to log into the client)
  4. Click on “Submit A Request” at the top of the page
  5. Select “Free Limited Time Promotional Skins: Tristana/Alistar/Garen” in the dropdown
  6. Check the boxes for the skins you want
  7. Click “Submit”
  8. You should soon (almost immediately) receive an email from Blitzcrank confirming the skins have been added to your account 
That’s it! Make sure to act fast though, because on August 1st we are going to retire these skins for the foreseeable future, and remove the ability to redeem them from our site. Make sure to redeem them while you can! 
Special Note: Dreadknight Garen, as always, will remain in the store for 975 RP. We’re only retiring the social promotion."

Summer LAN Party at the Riot Merch Store!

Summer has officially started, and the Riot Games merch store is heating things up with new items during their Summer LAN party!
"The best Summer fun happens indoors. Game in comfort and style all Summer long with new Pocket Tees featuring a few of your favorite champions, grab a fuzzy Tibbers XL plush, or be the ultimate amphibian yordle with a Fizz Onesie!"
Check out the new merch below:
Warning: Wearing this may create random urges to hop everywhere and yell "SHARK!"
  
"Bigger, cuddlier, and fluffier than ever before.
Even more skippability.
Super enchanted red button."
"It isn't a real LAN party until you have poros in sunglasses somewhere in your life - like your mousepad"

Check out the landing page for more returning items (like the Mini Summer Poro 4-pack)!

Quick Hits

  • Gentleman Gustaf spoke on Reddit about the Patch Notes format, and some changes that would be coming for them: 
"Hey! Glad this was noticed. It's intentional but part of a larger process. We're re-assessing the way we do Patch Notes, because frankly they're way too long. The last 10 patch notes averaged 4100 words, which is about 20-25 minutes of reading time. That's great for our more engaged players who love to kick back and dive in the day before the patch, but for players who just want to know how the game has changed, it's a bit much. 
In the coming weeks, we'll be trying to make Patch Highlights (the video at the top) a more comprehensive product (especially the endcard). 
We know that the engaged audience does like hearing about our design philosophy, so we're not killing that. You'll notice that the context on early game snowballing is pretty long. Basically, we intend to provide much longer context for the truly notable changes, without bogging down the patch notes with in-depth explanations of simpler changes like "-5 AD" or "+3 Armor". We're still figuring out where those will live. 
Current goal is to move them out of patch notes, where we can afford to do deep dives into our goals and motivations (and then link to those dev blogs when related changes arise in patch notes). However, it's possible that we stick with the current strategy of having a few long posts within Patch Notes. If that's the case, we'll prioritize moving those changes to the top of Patch Notes. 
Ultimately, that means less of my **wonderful** jokes in the Patch Notes while we figure out what the core of Patch Notes is, but don't worry, once we've finished assessing, I'll be back to my usual trolly self. 
Also, cutting length from the patch notes is particularly fun for me because it lets me do things like limericks! (I've wanted to do a limerick in Patch Notes for a LONG time, and there will be more goofball contexts going forward :P)"
"Hi, 
So I actually went into this more on Twitter but people didn't see the rest of the Tweets. 
We do our planning quarterly, more or less. As of right now July 27, 2018 we don't have one planned. 
We also don't have all the skins for 2018 planned yet, but we have the big beats. 
We start planning in 2019 soon, because we know certain things: We know what Chinese Zodiac year it is. We know which Legendaries we're considering, which champ needs a skin, which new thematic we want to try. 
We do not plan things for 2019 in July 2018. :) 
You can see the thread here."
  • If you've played Aatrox after his champion update, you might have noticed his new style of tooltips! Here's Riot Brightmoon and Reinboom with more details:
Riot Brightmoon:
[1] "Aatrox is the first champion to have a new style of Tooltips - less information if you just want to quickly glance at them, more information if you want to deep dive into the details (by pressing SHIFT - like when you're selecting Runes). 
We have more plans to help improve Tooltips for champions (and items, and all the rest) soon, and will be batching a set of champions each patch with the updates. We'd love your feedback especially on the PBE boards (if you have that) or here as well."
Reinboom:
[1] "As much as possible" is rather a lot. I'm working on a rather simple spell right now that, to list all configurable gameplay numbers (cast frames, lockout frames, queuing frames, rotation adjustment mid cast... it just keeps going on and on) it would take about 3 screen lengths. Again, rather simple spell. Our tool for just configuration of a spell (... or spell part) is about 15 pages long of available options.

Hyperbole aside, I agree that having more information would be ideal. That concept isn't appealing to everyone though. For example, a lot of people bounce off even trying Jhin because they look at the passive tooltip and go "complicated champion, don't want to have to optimize all that", when many of those same folks would have a blast if they actually got a full game of him. That level of resistance has kept us from including more nuanced information in tooltips in the past. 
Aatrox's tooltips are an experiment to working on exactly this problem. By keeping the first tooltip reduced, we can show more information than we normally otherwise would in the "shift" area. Aatrox is just the first swing at this and just like Aatrox there will be more swings in the future. Also, super open (and we're discussing it) to the "always on" option in the options menu. Please, keep up with the feedback."
[2] "Considerably different, actually. :)

And yes, an engineering blog post is likely in order at some time. We're still working on things of them, so nothing in the short term. 
The short version: There's a significant reason we haven't done anything in the tooltips that may just seem like "obvious / smart" design decisions. From simple color changes, sizing changes, or feature additions... and that's because most of the structure of tooltips were written into the tooltip strings themselves. Which means any changes to those would have to be manually done to every tooltip in kind. And then relocalized in to every language for every tooltip. It's a rather baffling high cost to do and been one of the two major killers of tooltip project pitches in the past. 
Since you're data-mining, you can probably pretty clearly see this structure. "<titleLeft>Orb of Deception</titleLeft><titleRight>@Cost@ Mana...", all of that was written, carefully, by hand to get tooltips in place. Also just via a text editor. With very limited coloring support for it. And with very limited ways of looking up data values. And... and... and... 
All of that is going out the window. Newer tooltips (Aatrox) and "converted tooltips" (you've probably started seeing them) are not done by hand. They have another earlier data source, and localization sits in front of that source (and not the generated results). For everything in the new system, we can make large sweeping changes without relocalizing 700 spells (+ variants). There's also a ton of developer features about linking named variables into tooltips and behavior that better understands how League actually works. 
The results of those still feed into the same interpreter and tooltip renderer as before (hence you're seeing "GeneratedTip_..." things that look like old tooltip style), but it's built in such a way as to let us start swapping that out for future stuff as well that needs no such shim. :) 
There's also tons and tons of tiny side features, way too much to just share here."
[3] "One of the (more complex) features, data calculations, is in that vein, yes. It's not a 100% solve for requiring script updating, but it can currently cover vast majority of cases and can grow to cover all but super super game specific stuff. Only things it can't grow to hit are things like "How much damage this spell do this game, total", cause there's nothing really to base it on except the decisions scripts are making."

Reminders

To round out this red post collection, here are a few reminders on current promotions or limited time events!

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