Surrender at 20

Red Post Collection: Riot Pls, /Dev on TFT, QGT: June 20 & more

Today's red post collection includes a new Riot Pls on Teamfight Tactics and an updated death recap, a /Dev blog on TFT, Meddler's quick gameplay thoughts for June 20, and more!
Continue reading for more information!


Table of Contents


Riot Pls: Teamfight Tactics and Death Recap

"New001 gives updates on death recap, the client, and the upcoming game mode Teamfight Tactics."

/Dev: Design Pillars of Teamfight Tactics

Check out this /Dev blog on Teamfight Tactics from Volty- "Mastery, playful competition, and discovery."
"Hey everyone! I’m Volty and I lead the game design team working on Teamfight Tactics. Welcome to our first designer dev blog! 
As many of you have probably seen by now, Teamfight Tactics is our take on the autobattler genre that Dota Auto Chess inspired earlier this year, and we couldn’t be more excited to get it into your hands. Many of us fell in love with the genre when it first emerged, and like some of you, we couldn’t help but wonder what an autobattler based in the League of Legends multiverse could look like. Teamfight Tactics is the result! From drafting your favorite champions, optimizing their trait synergies, equipping them with items, and sending them into battle—there’s a lot we love about this game and we can’t wait to see what you think. 
Teamfight Tactics (TFT) is easy to get into, but has tons of depth. I’m going to take some time today to talk about three of our TFT design pillars: mastery, playful competition, and discovery. 
Mastery 
The experience of skill growth is one of the most appealing parts of playing TFT, and there are many skills you can master. Whether you’re playing the game for the hundredth time or the first, we want to ensure that you feel improvement and growth. Therefore, we wanted to support many areas of mastery when developing the game, and each of these has many sub-skills and points of mastery within: 
Knowledge: You might emphasize drafting the most powerful champions, assembling complex and interlocking trait synergies, and equipping the best items. If so, you’ll need to hone your knowledge of these game elements through study and analysis. 
Flexibility: You might play more improvisationally, remaining sensitive to what champions you are seeing in the draft, seizing opportunities that are presented, and building compositions flexibly. To do this, you’ll need an understanding of how the game works and an open mind to consider the best course of action in any situation. This is testing your flexibility. 
Fortune: You might favor the refresh button, giving you a chance to high roll into powerful compositions early. You may be willing to risk a lot on preserving a win streak or finding the perfect item to complete a combo. These lines of play invoke tests of fortune—the skill of managing luck and unpredictable outcomes, both good and bad. 
Perception: Perhaps you will study the moves of your opponents. TFT rewards your understanding of each match. Pay attention to what champions and strategies are left open and what builds your opponents are pursuing. Through careful perception, you can draft copies of open champions and build teams that counter the strengths of your opponents. 
Speed: TFT is a complex game, with a lot to think about. Speed of judgment will allow you to gain an edge on opponents who hesitate and second-guess. Forging forward with confidence will give you the time you need to lay plans and anticipate next steps. 
We’ve designed TFT to allow mastery growth across these domains. How you choose to play TFT changes which areas of mastery are emphasized, creating your own playstyle. We also felt it was important to de-emphasize some other skills so that these could really take center stage. For example, TFT won’t reward you for having the click accuracy to reach 300 CS, the reaction speed to flash out of skillshots, or the ability to coordinate with teammates. Mastery is foundational to the autobattler genre, and we’re excited about the approach we’ve taken. 
Playful Competition 
So what’s unique about Teamfight Tactics? Beyond delivering a deep and rewarding game, TFT is also a shared experience—one that is competitive and challenging, but also interactive, social, and, well, playful! Playful competition is about fostering a joyful attitude toward your competitors and the game, taking the game seriously but also delighting in the shared spectacle of an autobattler. 
Playful competition has motivated us to build several features into TFT. The first of these is paired matchmaking. In each round of TFT, you will be paired up with one of your opponents. One of you will journey though a swirling portal, along with your team, to visit the other player’s arena. That’s where you’ll fight a single battle, with one winner and one loser, for that round. 
Paired matchmaking means that you share each round of combat with another player. When you witness Gnar knocking several champions into a Kennen ult, you’ll know someone else saw it too. If you sweep your opponent, you’ll know the damage you dealt to his life total mattered. 
We’re excited about players using Little Legends as their avatars in TFT. They have a ton of personality, and it’s awesome to see the variety that other players bring to the game when they enter your arena or you visit theirs. Players can activate animations like greet and dance, and also use emotes from League of Legends. 
Another feature that really pushes playful competition is called shared draft, but it’s also been called the “carousel” by players. The way this works is that periodically everyone’s Little Legends are brought together on a single central island. There, ten champions are created in a rotating ring—and then players are released to run after and grab the best champion they can before others beat them to it. If it sounds crazy… it is! What’s more, we put an item on each champion to make the decision even more interesting. 
Shared draft creates a nexus of tough choices, player interaction, competition, and strategy. It’s somehow silly while also very nuanced—in highly-competitive games we’ve found the considerations that can factor into a shared draft to be surprisingly complex. Do you value this champion, or that item? Can you predict what other players will do? You’ll only have a few seconds to decide! 
I hope this gives a sense of what playful competition means to us and how we’re realizing it within Teamfight Tactics. 
Discovery and the Future of TFT 
The last topic for today has to do with our attitude toward TFT and the future. 
When you first play Teamfight Tactics, there will be 50 champions in the game. This is a good amount of champions to let us explore a bunch of familiar themes and make great autobattler gameplay. Since there are 144 (and counting!) champions in League, you might wonder whether you’ll get to see your favorite champ in TFT. In short—we want to bring more champions to TFT in the future. 
The plan is to do this in two ways. The first is by adding one or two champions to the game every patch or two. We’ll increase the number of champs in the game in this way until we get to around 60. This gradual addition of champions is valuable because it lets us regularly build upon a familiar game by introducing new options and strategies, which prolongs the experience of exploration and discovery. You might even have some ideas about what champions we might add based on the champions and traits that already exist. 
The second way we’ll add more champs to TFT is more explosive. We believe that TFT is an experience that doesn’t just include discovery—it thrives on it. When you talk about the game, watch streamers, and read guides, you’re growing your mastery of the game, and often quickly. This period of rapid improvement is really enjoyable, and the mystery of not knowing what to expect, or even what’s possible, is very powerful. 
We will use slow addition of champions to shake things up, but we think you’ll eventually get tired of seeing the same (or very similar) strategies used. You’ll get comfortable playing builds you know how to play. The metagame will become increasingly solved and matches could start to feel repetitive. 
The answer, we believe, is to periodically release new sets of champions. A new set features new champions and traits, and refreshes the potential for exploration and discovery. Our goal is to give you a fresh experience of Teamfight Tactics through a meaningfully different collection of mechanics and theme. You’ll have this experience while still applying what you’ve learned in previous sets—the rules of TFT and some of its content, like items, will be retained. 
As developers, we value new chances to improve on our work by taking what we’ve learned about what you enjoy and what you don’t, and carrying it forward. With sets, we’re excited to do just that! 
This brings me to my final point. Earlier I mentioned the League of Legends multiverse. There are nearly 1,000 skins in League. By tapping into this unbelievably creative and diverse selection, we can explore a huge variety of themes as we travel from one set to the next. For example, Yasuo appears in the first set as an Exile Blademaster, casting Steel Tempest in his base skin. In a later set, he could return as an Odyssey Reaver, casting Wind Wall with the skin to match. 
We’re just getting started with our launch set, and we’ve kept our theme pretty familiar to Summoner’s Rift and canonical League of Legends. With upcoming sets, we’re going to explore sections of the League multiverse, using amazing skins and skin lines, and fresh traits drawn from those themes. I hope you’re as excited as I am!"

Quick Gameplay Thoughts: June 20

Check out Meddler's quick gameplay thoughts for June 20th:
"Hi folks, 
Usual Disclaimers 
These posts will often contain talk about future work we're doing, or planning to do, that isn't yet guaranteed to ship. The nature of the work could change or, depending on what we discover, projects mentioned may get delayed or even stopped. If you'd like to see a Tweet whenever a new one of these posts goes up: https://twitter.com/RiotMeddler 
TFT 
At time of writing TFT's been out on the PBE for nearly 24 hours. It's been exciting and a little tense watching to see what you folks will think and how the PBE server will cope with so much more demand to play than it normally gets. Very grateful for all your feedback so far, whether you've had a chance to play yourself or have checked it out on a stream. Wanted to run through a bunch of things we're planning and things we're considering doing so notes on those below. We'll also have a dev blog going out tomorrow that covers some of our thinking around design principles for TFT and some longer term plans.  
Things that will be in upcoming patches (some first patch post launch, some a bit later): 
  • DPS meters.
  • More detailed unit stats when you Right Click a unit to inspect them.
  • More bug fixing, though we're hoping to hit all the big stuff at least before it leaves PBE.
  • A ranked queue.
  • Improved clarity around unit positioning on the board. Likely involves further work on the ground textures to make movement easier to track, could well include an toggle option to show a subtle hexgrid overlay all the time.
  • Refinements to PVE rounds including difficulty tuning.
  • Ways to get more information about what items will build into without having to commit them to units first.
  • Additional balance and bug fixing (these should be in every patch for a while). 
Some things we're discussing based off feedback so far: 
  • It's a common point of feedback that players feel like the board is too small. We're happy with it as it is currently and want to give it a bit more time to see how positional play does or does not develop with the currently available space. We're open to revisiting though if the feeling persists with players, especially if it reduces depth in the game.
  • Similarly we think a maximum unit cap of 9 is the right place to be, especially given things like Force of Nature that let you exceed that cap and other items that let you add additional synergies. Again, open to revisiting though once things have had a bit of time to play out.
  • What our options are to make two and three star units more distinct and more satisfying. We'll likely refine the existing silver and gold visual effects further regardless, especially given we think they're looking really good on some champs and not others at present. Discussing other angles as well.
  • What additional information to next work on conveying through the scoreboard on the right hand side of the screen. It currently just shows player name/health, should we make adding things like loss/win streaks to it for example a priority ahead of other TFT work?
  • Whether we’ve got the tuning right on how much damage a player who loses a round takes. For the first day of PBE that calculation was bugged and often higher than intended. Watching to see whether the intended values are appropriate or whether we should also make some adjustments so that games don’t resolve too suddenly or drag on forever.
  • Whether item drop rates are too high or too low and how much we should or shouldn’t be controlling variation in items earned from PVE rounds for different players.
Little Legends 
In addition to their role in TFT we're also looking to bring Little Legends to other game modes. We want to make sure we're not damaging combat clarity by doing so though and a lot of extra units running around in the middle of a fight can make things quite a bit harder to follow. We've got some behavior in place for them as a result where they'll show up in ARAM games but hang back from the action. They'll be visible, but not in prime combat areas and will run towards the Nexus when an enemy champion gets too close. Play-testing so far's suggested that's a promising approach for making them still appreciable but avoiding them feeling underfoot and in the way. Plan is to see how that goes in regular games, refine the approach further, then see whether there are appropriate ways to get them into SR games as well, using both lessons from ARAM and potentially other techniques again. 
Sona 
Sona’s been a really interesting champ to track the playrate and performance of recently, with the emergence of Sona plus a tanky support (usually Taric) bot lanes showing a lot of strength. Some thoughts on her as a result:
  • Our starting point is that it’s good to see new picks getting used in different positions provided they’re not crowding other options out.
  • From a power perspective Sona’s stats in various skill ranges are on the border of what we’d generally consider overpowered. Digging into the numbers more however it looks like Sona + support is stronger than those averages suggest. There’s still a lot of support Sona data mixed in in solo queue, with Sona + Taric for example being dramatically stronger than Sona as a support statistically. In pro some teams have a very high pick or ban rate with Sona + X and we believe that that would be the case for most other teams as well if she remains in her current state for an extended period.
  • We’re confident Sona’s too strong as a result and will be taking some power out of her. We’re targeting her AP scaling on Q and E, rather than her bases, looking to bring down Sona’s power with higher income/more aggressive (AP) builds than with more utility item and/or lower income builds.
  • Goal here isn’t to push Sona out of the ADC position necessarily, but to address overall power. It’s possible that does end up with her no longer seeing ‘ADC’ play if that’s something that only happens when her numbers are out of line."

Meddler commented on a previous post on elemental dragons:
"Iceboxed for now, not expecting a new dragon type this year at least."

Ask Riot: Little Legends

Check out this week's Ask Riot - "Testing tech, Sona/Taric bot lane, and Little Legends."
"Today we’re talking about testing League, Sona/Taric bot lane, and whether Little Legends lay eggs. 
What does Riot think of Sona/Taric bot lane? 
We’re fine with allowing it to exist as long as it does so within the confines of normal champion balance. So in practice, what that means is that if it breaks our thresholds for overperformance in professional play (determined by extremely high pick and ban rates), then something about it should be nerfed. The same would apply if it were to break thresholds for any other audience, but that doesn’t seem to be the likely case here.
Though the strategy itself isn’t exactly what we would consider the pinnacle of League gameplay, we’d prefer to snuff out unconventional strategies once they prove to be actually overpowered rather than simply because they’re unconventional. Doing so in the past has probably led to some of the scene’s general reluctance to innovate. 
Game Design Manager 
How do they do the testing process so that the game can serve almost any PC, regardless of their characteristics (RAM, processor, etc)?

Riot approaches this challenge by first understanding what types of PCs the players in each region are playing on. Armed with that information, we have our testing teams run the game on representative hardware configurations within specialized testing labs. For example, while we may not be testing your specific hardware configuration, we are likely testing cards in your series with the same manufacturer. And even though it’s impossible to test every possible configuration for every patch, we work hard to hit the most popular set ups out there. 
The testing labs have the capability to change up configurations very quickly, so if we receive reports from players about a specific hardware issue, we can investigate with hardware that is very similar, if not the same brand and model. We also maintain a selection of legacy machines built to League’s minimum specifications, so we can make sure that new patches are as stable for as many players as possible. 
QA Manager 
Do Little Legends lay eggs?

Riot Cactopus approached the peak of the tallest mountain in all of Targon. Panting, out of breath, he heaves himself up the last step to find a simple platform with runic inscriptions from an unknown language. He kneels before the platform, perplexed. Suddenly, he hears a soft whisper, a cold wind all around him, breathing into his ear, “Place your wallet upon the platform to see true greatness.” He doesn’t understand where this voice is coming from, but the compulsion is overwhelming. He places his wallet on the cold stone, and the runes ignite with a magical flowing energy. They pulse… pulse… pulse… and a blooming light appears above the platform as a small egg slowly descends.  
He picks it up and examines it. It’s warm… so very warm. He trades it between his hands a few times, wondering what its purpose could be. 
Then he hears a small crrk. And a louder crack that splinters down the egg shell. He drops it in a fright, and it falls to the ground and shatters—a huge explosion of light erupts from the egg! He is blinded and falls backwards. He opens his eyes, blinking a few times, trying to see clearly… and into focus comes the most lovable, adorable, magical creature he has ever laid his eyes upon. His life will never be the same. 
No one knows the details of the magical process that determine whether or not Little Legends make eggs, but we do know that Little Legends make great friends. 
Delivery Lead for Little Legends 
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


Here's the champion/trait/item balance changes going out for #TFT after today's (6/21) PBE deploy. We will not be actively balancing over the weekend. Thanks again to everyone testing the game! The community support has been overwhelming and it's helping us improve TFT daily.


Reminders

To round out this red post collection, here are a few reminders on current promotions or limited time events!
  • Make sure to check out the LoL Twitch Prime rewards! - "Get up to 3 Legendary Shards, a full Legendary Skin, 7 Skin Shards, and 4 Exclusive Emotes as long as you stay a Twitch Prime member."

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