Surrender at 20: Red Post Collection: TFT /Dev Update #1, QGT: June 28, & More

Today's red post collection includes /dev updated #1 for Teamfight Tactics from Riot SapMagic, Meddler's quick gameplay thoughts for June 28th, the return of Clash testing on the PBE, and more!

Continue reading for more information!

Teamfight Tactics — /dev Update #1

Here's Riot SapMagic with a /dev update on Teamfight Tactics now that it's been released:

"Hey everyone, Ed “SapMagic” Altorfer here on behalf of the Teamfight Tactics team. We’ve been pretty blown away so far by TFT’s reception—a ton of you are trying to play TFT. Unfortunately, that excitement means our servers are under a lot of stress in some regions and we’ve encountered a few issues as a result. In this post, I want to detail the issues and what we’ve been doing to fix them.

Issue: Unusually long off-peak queue times for North America

Shortly after we went live in North America, it looked like our servers were overloaded even though we were below capacity. We were also seeing some unusual errors in North America and a few other regions that we hadn’t seen in OCE and JP. We started looking at configuration differences between our servers and found all the regions with the errors had a slightly different configuration and we used that info to identify the problem.

Status: A fix was implemented around 1:00 am Pacific Time (UTC -7) Thursday and the server looks healthy. We will continue to monitor over the next few days to make sure North America stays stable.

Issue: Unusually long queue times and players unable to play other game modes in EUW

The configuration bug from North America thankfully didn’t affect EUW, but as we approached peak hours throughout Europe we saw instability and long queue times as a result of tons of players queueing up for games. We implemented queue time delays, but still saw issues crop up with the services that power parties and matchmaking. We temporarily disabled the queue while we investigated those issues.

Status: It took a couple tries but we identified a fix which is now live and EUW is looking relatively stable. We will be continuing to monitor the region for other issues throughout the weekend.

Other Regions

We expected the issues we saw in EUW to affect other large regions, so we temporarily delayed TFT’s launch in a few places to give us time to find a solution. Now that we have fixes in place, our plan is to finish deploying Teamfight Tactics to all our remaining regions within the next few hours.

Having said that, if we encounter any issues in those regions, we may need to take actions to preserve server stability, up to and including temporarily disabling TFT.

Going Forward

We’re cautiously optimistic that queue times and demand will stabilize, and we’ll continue to keep you updated through the client, boards, and on social media. For up-to-the-minute info about all things Teamfight Tactics, check out Riot MapleNectar or Riot SapMagic on Twitter.

These issues have been painful to say the least, but on behalf of the team, thank you so much for your excitement—and more importantly, your patience—as we find and fix them. If you’re seeing other problems that aren’t captured here, or you just have feedback about Teamfight Tactics, let us know in the comments.

Thanks for all your help, and we’ll see you in the arena."

Check out the most recent balance changes from Riot August and Glmarsi:

[1] "We just patched these #TeamFightTatics changes out to live and PBE (6/27).

We're currently focusing on stabilization and bugfixing, so expect fewer balance adjustments over the next few weeks."

[2] "Happy Saturday, folks! We've been watching Yasuo and Morellonomicon rampage all morning. It's a neat combo, but it's proven so powerful that it can take over lobbies without much effort or counterplay. We've just made some changes to curb that; details in thread ->

[3] "* Yasuo's Exile shield no longer scales with Spell Power
* Ionic Spark, Statikk Shiv, and Titanic Hydra can no longer proc Morellonomicon
* Morellonomicon burn reduced from 5%/sec >>> 2.5%/sec

Can't wait for you all to show us what's next! #TFT #TeamfightTactics"

Quick Gameplay Thoughts: June 28

Here's Meddler's quick gameplay thoughts for June 28, including thoughts on Life of a Patch, Wukong, Tahm Kench, and more:

"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

Life of a Patch

Now that we're through the 9.13 development cycle we're reflecting on how the Life of a Patch project went. We should have some thoughts on that and a recap early July. If you're not sure what I'm talking about details can be found here:
https://nexus.leagueoflegends.com/en-us/2019/06/join-us-for-a-patch-cycle/

TLDR is a lot of people who worked on the Summoner's Rift team for 9.13 tweeting a lot of details about the patch's development.

For those of you that followed Life of a Patch in detail, also very curious as to how you found the experience?

Some early observations on 9.13 champ changes so far

Just looking at day 1 states here:

J4, Kennen and Trynd were rescripted so their AOE abilities would be more responsive. At the same time they unintentionally also had the way the radius on those AOEs is calculated changed. That resulted in a increase of around 50 units on each spell adding significant unintended power. That should be hotfixed already by the time this post goes out. We'll then see how they're looking power wise, including whether the extra responsiveness added significant strength to them or was mainly just a feel improvement.

Diana's also looking much stronger in 9.13. At time of writing it's not clear why, given we weren't expecting any of the changes to her Q to add significant power. Suspicious there's a bug in there somewhere, doing some digging into her scripts as a result.

Sona - Statistically is down in power pretty much exactly as much as hoped on average. Not yet clear how much Sona + a tanky support (most often Taric) is performing though. Power of support Sona still looks ok so hoping we don't need to make any further changes.

Pyke - Changes have narrowed the difference between his support and solo lane performance substantially as hoped. We don't want to put support Pyke in a terrible spot by balancing around solo Pyke and also feel some of what the 9.12 version of solo Pyke at least was able to do wasn't good for game health (lack of sufficiently exploitable weaknesses/inappropriate combination of strengths).

Wukong Update

Thanks again for all the feedback on the Wukong update that's been in testing on the PBE, it's been really helpful in making a call on what to do with that project. We will be going ahead with those changes, likely with some changes from exactly what was on the PBE and certainly with some further balance adjustments. Not sure on timeframe yet, that's mainly going to be determined by availability of artist time to work on some new visual effects, maybe an animation or two and some revised sound effects.

Tahm Kench

We've got some work underway on TK changes for 9.14. Focus on those is more on reducing frustration playing against him than just balance adjustments, frustration in top lane especially. A key part of the direction we're currently exploring is reducing his ability to repeatedly CC the same target.

Safe ranged champs in top lane

Speaking of top lane we're also doing some work on a few champs who sometimes go top bringing a combination of powerful AA based damage output and good disengage. Current list is Kennen, Jayce and Neeko, with changes aimed at lowering their early damage output, giving them some more scaling instead and adding a bit more risk to their laning patterns.

Teamfight Tactics

Thanks for the patience with some challenges we're having with TFT's initial release. We've got a lot of work on things like login queues, server load etc underway and realize it can be really frustrating if you're in one of the regions that's got an overloaded server at present. We'll keep you folks in the loop whenever we've got updates to share.

Gameplay wise thanks for all the feedback so far. There are a lot of things we're working on adding or refining further (e.g. a lot of UI improvements that many of you have suggested). We're aiming to have a lot of improvements in 9.14 and each of the patches beyond it."

When asked about item distribution in TFT, Meddler commented:

"We're talking about possible tweaks to TFT item distribution. We do believe though that significant randomness, including variation in early power, is pretty valuable for the longeivity of the game. Examples of that in other genres are things like starting hand in Magic/Hearthstone, what you draw in poker, early loot in a Battle Royale etc. Playing from positions of strength or weakness result in a wider variety of experiences.

Having said that there are some things that feel off to us at present that we're highly likely to change, likely (but not guaranteed) in 9.14. Those are:

Players should never finish the first 3 rounds without at least one item component dropping

Players should never have 6 item components from PVE after the first 3 rounds

Players should never get zero items from a later PVE round (Krugs onwards) if they kill everything"

On the TFT beta pass, Meddler noted:

"The tab and the unlockable rewards are still coming for TFT. They'll arrive once it's stable enough to switch on the mission system for TFT on all regions. Looking at the number of people trying to play we concluded it was best to get the mode itself stable before switching on meta systems like that as well. Hoping to do that soon, potentially early next week."

Mid-Patch Updates

Here's a few mid-patch bugfix updates that happened over the last week:

6/28/2019 Diana Bugfixes

Diana

R+Q BUGFIX Diana is no longer able to use R - Lunar Rush a third time when Moonlight is applied to two enemy players via her Q - Crescent Strike

ATTACK SPEED BUGFIX Diana no longer gets additional attack speed when she performs any non-basic action like Recalling or activating an item

6/27/2019 Responsiveness Pass and Rammus Bugfix

As a part of our Responsiveness Pass for Jarvan IV, Kennen, and Tryndamere, certain abilities were rescripted to feel snappier. However, the range on those abilities were incorrectly increased, so we've gone back and returned them to their proper values.

RANGE UPDATE Jarvan IV's E - Demacian Standard > Q - Dragon Strike, Kennen's E - Lightning Rush, and Tryndamere's E - Spinning Slash now have their proper ranges

Rammus

HUNTER'S TALISMAN BUGFIX Rammus' W - Defensive Ball Curl and his Passive - Spiked Shell's empowered damage now properly procs Hunter's Talisman

6/26/2019 Jarvan IV Bugfix

Jarvan IV

E+Q BUGFIX Jarvan IV now properly knocks up jungle monsters or minions when he uses his E - Demacian Standard + Q - Dragon Strike combo"

The Return of Clash Test to PBE!

Here's Riot MoreChrono with details on the upcoming Clash test on the PBE!

"Clash tests are back!

Hey everyone, the time has come to test out some of the new features of Clash that we announced in a Dev Blog last month. We’ve got a new bracket formation system and longer lock-in time windows, as well as new tech to help deal with broken matches. This is where you all come in.

Please join us on July 2nd to test Clash! Registration will open on Thursday, June 27th at 9:00 AM PDT and the bracket formation window will open from Tuesday, July 2nd at 2:00 PM PDT until 3:00 PM PDT. We know there has been a lot of queue times due to TFT, but don’t worry, there is plenty of time to create your team.

How to Participate in this Clash test:

Sign up. If you need to sign up for a PBE account do that here. Please Note:

PBE account eligibility requires that you are Honor 3+

Entry will be free

Assemble a group of 5 players and register your team on the Clash tab between Thursday, June 27th at 9:00 AM PDT and Tuesday, July 2nd at 3:00 PM PDT.

If you are looking for other players to storm the rift with, drop by the PBE Discord and pick up some team members!

Bracket Formation is Tuesday, July 2nd at 2:00 PM PDT until 3:00 PM PDT.

Scouting will begin when your bracket has been formed and your opponent has been found. It will last for a minimum of 5 minutes

Compete! (you are guaranteed to play 2 games!)

Important Notes: As we’re playing on PBE, all skill-based matchmaking will be disabled. This means matches may be unbalanced, and won’t be like the full launch experience. We are also disabling the Ranked Eligibility restriction for these PBE tests so that we can make it easier to participate.

Teamfight Tactics on PBE will be disabled at this time.

Also, Player Support will not be handling tickets related to issues you might experience during this test on the PBE. There are a few reasons for this:
1. Since the PBE is updated up to multiple times a day, we may not get to your ticket in time to provide timely support.
2. The tools we use to support players on the live servers don't always apply to the PBE.

Please reply to this thread with feedback and questions or bug reports, and join us in the PBE Discord during the test! Thanks so much for your participation and support! GLHF!

Thx!

Riot MoreChrono"

Miscellaneous

The Good, The Bad, and the League: 6/13 - 6/26

"Preamble

Your semi-weekly dose of server problem-os, NA League news, and other!

We’re moving GBL to a twice monthly cadence, which should be more sustainable with our team’s workload.

9.13 rolled out, Qiyana will be launched shortly, Arcade has a few new faces, and TFT rolls out worldwide. Mordekaiser’s rework is pretty bug free, two factor auth is coming, and summer is here!

Follow-Ups:

Mac voice still not working properly Bug assigned to a specialist. (Core bug is still being worked on).

Ongoing

Server Stuff:

Automated Comp Mode Errors (6/17, ~11 minutes) Automated monitoring flags an alert that the automatic comp mode is failing to run, or running into errors. Before an investigation can start, the alert deactivated, as connectivity to the system self restored.

League websites not available (6/19, ~39 minutes) Landing page stops loading properly. NOC escalates to appropriate teams, and one team reverts a large policy change that rolled out. That, along with purging the web caches, resets the websites to default working order.

Watch.lolesports.com stuck (6/20, ~34 minutes) NOC is notified that there’s an issue with the esports website. Investigation shows console errors, and a recent deploy is suspect. The deploy is rolled back, and the website starts to work again.

Merch Store Timeout (6/21, ~152 minutes) Rioters report to the NOC that the Merch store is having issues. NOC investigates, finding the Merch store website is having issues on both internal networks and external viewing. Root cause was a problem associated with AWS, and rebooting the associated AWS instances fixed the issue.

DNS issues affecting services (6/21, ~33 minutes) NOC notices that players are unable to log into PBE (Thanks TFT). The NOC throttles down the login rate, getting logins to a healthy state and players are able to log in steadily and without issue again.

Multiple services having issues (6/24, ~100 minutes) NOC sees issues with 3rd party software and services. Continued investigation shows issues spreading to other services and websites. NOC can’t fix the 3rd party problem, so when the third party service fixes their problem, the associated services start recovering.

Game Stuff:

Packet Loss Like Symptoms (6/14, ~50 minutes) Packet loss like symptoms are noticed on a specific game server. After briefly checking logs, NOC drains games from the game server, and performs a full cold reboot. After restart, diagnostics show no problems, so the game server is added back into the pool to be used.

Avast update cause reconnect issues (6/14, ~50 minutes) NOC notices and is notified that players are running into reconnect issues. Investigation leads to AVG and Avast having problems. Avast rolls out an official update that should fix the problem. Players updating Avast and AVG should see their reconnect issue fixed.

Player Support Issues:

Morde arrived, Qiyana is incoming, TFT has arrived as well! Hopefully none of them break the servers too much. High queue volume on TFT was a thing, and patching issues may be slightly higher than normal because we rolled out 9.13!"

Check out these articles and video content from Riot Esports:

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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Red Post Collection: TFT /Dev Update #1, QGT: June 28, & More

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