Red Post Collection: Post MSI Game Improvements, Ask Riot: Next Chroma Sale? & More

Posted on at 3:12 PM by Aznbeat
Today's red post collection includes details on Post MSI gameplay improvements from Riot Scruffy, this week's Ask Riot on the Essence Emporium, retired Prestige skins & champion difficulty, and more!
Continue reading for more information!


Table of Contents


Post MSI Gameplay Improvements

Here's Riot Scruffy with a post on upcoming gameplay changes in future patches:
"Hey all, Scruffy here giving an early look at some of the gameplay changes we’re planning for patches 9.9 and 9.10. While we still have no plans for a formal midseason patch (big disruptive changes that reshape the way you play League), we'll have a higher than usual amount of changes like the recent Urgot work so these patches will be heftier than what you've seen in the first half of 2019. 
Systems Changes 
  • Early Jungle Lane Dependence - This one is here because we think we can target a common jungler pain point without a big amount of change. Philosophically we like for junglers to participate in the wider game and have to take risks to succeed, but we also want to solve a frustration point that early fights are too important and junglers feel overly reliant on laner rotations to succeed. We’re testing changes around scuttle mechanics and possibly other tactics to see if we can create a less pressured level 2 fight-or-lose situation.
  • Inspiration overuse as secondary - Inspiration is stifling a lot of other cool secondary rune tree options by bringing too much value. We are exploring both nerfs there and also buffs to the other tree minor runes to make them have more splash appeal.
  • Hunter’s Potion - This item is a tempting option that currently is a trap because it’s weak and additionally doesn’t really add a lot of interest beyond a ton of sustain. We’re experimenting with some small reworks to make this usable and fun but if we can’t find any compelling spaces we’ll remove this item altogether.
  • Aftershock - Pretty simple goals here to reduce the power of this rune on champs not building tanky while keeping it good on tanks and bruisers. 
Champion Changes 
  • Blitzcrank - We'll be shipping the quality of life improvements that you saw on PBE recently: making Blitz's passive shield more consistent, removing the randomness from R's passive, and giving Blitz a bit more payoff for auto attacking
  • Tahm Kench - The goal here is to make TK less of an action stopper in very high elo and pro while also making him a playable support pick for the average player. Our current direction makes TK slow when devouring an ally (like when he devours an enemy) to pull a bit of power out of coordinated saves. To compensate we’re buffing his Q slow and making devour -> spit minions cost less so that he can use it more
  • Zac - We’re currently testing a mostly reverted version of the Ult with a few improvements to help it have more clear gameplay and understandable impact.
  • Aatrox - He still has been too hard to counter at high level and pro play which really hurts his playability for normal players. Our current changes make his ult revive only activate if he gets a takedown while his ult is active to remove his reliable ability to deny his own death. To compensate we’re buffing his baseline stats and exploring some other spicy additions. 
As usual, these are all work in progress so we may change or even not ship some of these ideas if they don’t come together well. Thanks for playing with us and I’m looking forward to your feedback and ideas. 
Scruffy"

Ask Riot: Next Chroma Sale?

Here's this week's Ask Riot - "The Blue Essence Emporium, champion difficulty level, and retired Prestige skins.":
Nobody reads this section anyway. But if you did, you’d see we’re talking about Prestige skins, champion skill levels, and the Blue Essence Emporium.  
Will chromas for blue essence ever come back? Also will there ever be a way to get the green chromas outside of riot partnerships?

Yes! The Essence Emporium has been on a slight hiatus but is set to return in the next few months. We’ll also be including some of the League Partner chromas with the next drop—you can find out more about the League Partner Program chroma availability here. 
Revenue Strategist  
When making new champs how do you determine their difficulty/skill level? Like a Lux vs Azir.

There are multiple considerations around difficulty of new champions, and we try to balance them all.  
  1. Theme: Many themes imply and match well to a difficulty level for a champion. For example, “The Grand Duelist” makes you imagine a high-precision, high-skill playstyle, while a cute furry yordle like Teemo looks like he should be pretty straightforward and simple.
  2. Audience: Sometimes when we’re at the beginning of the champion creation process we may set a goal for making a high- or low-skill kit to create a new audience or meet an existing one. Thresh for example was intended to bring a more high-skill, aggressive playstyle to the support role, which brought in a lot of new support players.
  3. What else we’re releasing: The last consideration is just looking at our release schedule to make sure that we’re not overdoing it in one direction or another. Ideally we release high, medium, and low difficulty champions every year to give every player something that matches their playstyle. 
Lead Champion Designer  
Is there a way we can get Prestige skins after they’re no longer available, aside from using rerolls?

All Prestige skins can drop randomly from loot after they’ve been retired from an Event or Prestige Point Shop, just like other Mythic Skins. The drop chance is very, very small but it is possible to receive a Prestige skin from a Hextech Chest or other loot-related item (like Orbs or Capsules). Other than the loot system, we don’t currently have any plans to bring back retired Prestige skins. 
By the way, we’re adding some new ways to earn Prestige Points. You can check out the details here. 
Product Manager 
Have a question? Click on the button below, sign into your League account, and ask away. 
We’ll do our best 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."

Miscellaneous

  • Riot Jag noted some upcoming Aatrox changes in the 9.9 PBE cycle:
[1] Been working with SR team to have some major Aatrox changes coming in for 9.9, with the primary goals being to buff him for normal play while dropping his power in professional play. Mainly going about this by drastically reducing power in the revive, which should drop his 
[2] ability to tower dive in coordinated environments and also prevent him from having so many safe matchups.
Can't promise any of this ships, but here's what we're looking at right now. We might have to drop an additional World Ender mechanic before we're done. 
[3] Umbral Dash (E)
[RETURNED] :: Now has 2 charges, from 1
[RETURNED] :: Cooldown between casts to 3/2.5/2/1.5/1
[RETURNED] :: Charge cooldown to 22/19/16/13/10 
[4] World Ender (R)
Cast time :: .5 >>> .25
Revive Self Slow :: 25% >>> 99%
Revive Heal:: 10-50% Max HP >>> 30% Max HP
[NEW] :: Now also fears enemy champions on cast for 1 second 
[5] [NEW] :: Aatrox now only revives if he gets a takedown during World Ender
[NEW] :: Takedowns extend World Ender by 5 seconds, reset The Darkin Blade (Q)'s cooldown, and add 1 charge of Umbral Dash (E) 
  • A preorder for the upcoming Lux comic is now on Amazon, noting a release date for November 19th!
"In the shining city of Demacia, order reigns. The realm is safe and the people are happy...unless you're a mage. In a place where magic is outlawed, Luxanna Crownguard must hide who she truly is when she begins to exhibit magical powers. But when she seeks out an imprisoned mage to learn to control her magic, will she protect herself...or doom Demacia?"
"I can't speak to the Lux comic. I donno where they are with it. I've only seen snippets. But you can probably apply the same math that was used for Ashe (plus 1 issue) to figure out it's release date. (I mean Marvel's schedules are pretty locked.) 
Ashe is still due for release on the day we mentioned previously. (mid may I believe) Sadly, I don't know what's in the book, and I haven't seen it. The exact insides are decided by our editors without the authors feedback (I guess?) 
Zed is spinning up production soon... and I'm not allowed to say much about him. I can say he has 6 scripts done, and first script is locked (I.e. ready for the artist). 
This is probably because we are in a place where the team doesn't have much to report... yet. (Heck. I don't even know the answers)"
"Your weekly dose of server problem-os, NA League news, and other! 
LCS finals in St. Louis this weekend, ARAM changes happened in 9.7, and Zoe is a champion! Yep. Totally is. 
Follow-Ups:
  • Mac voice still not working properly The main League Bug associated with this has been re-prioritized and is being worked on, alongside several other Mac bugs. No additional update since last week.
Server Stuff:
  • PayOn has high failure rate (4/4, ~1 day) Automated alerts notify the NOC that something’s wrong with payments. Payment teams discover PayOn has higher than normal error rates. PayOn self-fixes their issue after performing their magic on their end.
  • Stats system causes issues with match history and missions (4/6, ~3.5 hours) NOC is altered to global delays with processing end of game stats. Investigation shows the root service is falling over and requires a reboot. The service is rebooted and core processes are spun back up once the hardware is restarted. The restart and reboot of hardware and software fixed the issue.
Game Stuff:
  • Memory Leak in matchmaking process (4/5, ~9 minutes) Teambuilder (a component of the matchmaking service) needs an update to prevent a memory leak, which also requires the entire matchmaking service to be turned off. Messaging is sent for the affected regions, and Yi quickly runs to the servers, forcing an update while matchmaking is down. The system is restarted, and the memory leak has been fixed. 
Player Support Issues: 
If you are having login issues, take a look at this to see if it helps. We also have some videos available that y’all can follow along with to help as well! 
Morgageddon & Couch Commando"

Reminders

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

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