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Red Post Collection: New Live Recorded Music Headed to TFT, Ask Riot: Events and Game Modes, & More

Today's red post collection includes new live recorded music coming to TFT in 9.18, this week's Ask Riot on events & game modes, and more!
Continue reading for more information!


Table of Contents


New Live Recorded Music Headed to TFT in 9.18

Here's Ampson with details on new music coming to TFT in 9.18:
"In patch 9.18, we're adding new live recorded music to Teamfight Tactics! Through development and beta, the audio team was very happy with where the musical themes for TFT landed, which mainly consisted of synthesized musical instruments. In our effort to make the music as high quality and polished as possible, we decided to go into the studio to live record extremely talented musicians to capture real human performances of the music for TFT. 
As a quick primer into the adaptive music system in TFT, the music will change based on what phase of the game you're in. For instance, during shopping phase the music is calmer and less busy, but as battle phase starts the music transitions into a more energetic combat driven style. There are also 3 different “chapters” of music: the first chapter goes from the beginning of the game to when first player is knocked out. The second is from that point until there are only 3 players left. Then the final chapter brings us home. 
We’re still ironing out some bugs so please bear with us and let us know if you notice any weird things like volume spikes or musical stems playing over each other. We hope the new music makes your TFT games that much better!"
Check out this tweet from Bryan Higa with a sneak peek of the new music!


Ask Riot: Events & Game Modes 

Check out this week's Ask Riot:
It’s all about events and game modes this week. 
You regularly offer events around themes, champions, or skin series (like Project), but these events have become less quality over time. The gaming experience doesn’t bring anything new to players (like game modes), and we have very limited tasks compared to former events, which makes it banal. Will you do more substantial and interesting events for players?
Yes, absolutely! We’ve heard this feedback and wholeheartedly agree—events have become more stale this year. We want each event to feel like a unique experience that all players can be excited for, which is why our goal moving forward is to make participating in events more rewarding, more novel, and more memorable for everyone. 
Here are some of the ways we hope to achieve this: 
  • Bring back game modes (new and old) to events
  • Improve how missions interact with events, similarly to Trials (ex: Trials gave you a progress bar you filled up by doing missions, which in turn gave you house-specific rewards for the event, so it all felt more cohesive)
  • Deliver more missions and a greater variety of missions beyond just “farm minions,” “get kills,” or “earn gold” 
You’ll begin to see some of these changes soon, starting with our first small steps for the upcoming Worlds event, and we’ll continue making improvements into 2020. I hope you enjoy the Worlds event, and we look forward to hearing your feedback during and afterwards! 
Game Design Lead 
Why can’t we play custom games of URF and the other game modes?

We’ve talked before about the type of work that goes into keeping rotating game modes functional: Things like new and updated champs, abilities, items, runes, and skins don’t always play nice with modes. Changes or refactors to the game’s underlying code—like how damage is recorded or how textures are loaded into game—can be even more problematic, as the rapid development cycle of RGMs often means we’re building them with duct tape and bubble gum. Back when we were releasing modes more frequently, this type of upkeep work took about half of the Modes team’s total time. 
But what about customs? Wouldn’t it be okay for rotating game modes to be a bit buggy if there’s nothing on the line, and shouldn’t that make it easy for Riot to offer rotating game modes in customs? 
The answer is no. We aren’t willing to offer a knowingly—basically intentionally—buggy experience for customs because we want your League experience to be high quality regardless of how you’re playing. Principled stances aside, some bugs are bad enough that they can crash entire game servers, meaning hundreds of matches would crash, not just the customs they occur in. So even if we were willing to let players opt into a buggy experience in custom games, it’d still lead to risks for the rest of League players as well. 
That means it takes the same amount of work to bring a mode back for customs as it does to bring it back for queues, which takes us back to our previous discussions around why we’ve chosen to invest our time into developing new modes, rather than keeping older modes on rotation. 
RIOT POPC0RNER & RIOT AETHER 
Any updates on Clash?

In May, we shared a list of what we’d need to do to relaunch Clash globally. Here’s an update on our progress… 
  1. Redesign: Done!
  2. More Internal Testing: Done!
  3. Regional Testing: This is where we’re at now, and it’s going well. We’ve run three regional tests using the new Clash model in Turkey, LATAM South, and NA. So far we’ve only run into minor issues, so we’re gonna keep moving forward. We’re tentatively planning to hit the rest of Riot regions over the course of a couple weekends between now and mid-October, but our schedule could definitely change depending on how things go.
  4. Global Beta: Once all of the regional tests run smoothly, we’ll run a bigger beta across multiple regions simultaneously. We’re currently hoping to do this at the end of this year or early next year.
  5. Launch: Once we complete a successful global beta—and see the new system works to scale and across all regions—Clash will be ready for prime time. Date is TBD.
We’ll keep ya updated as we continue to make progress on the milestones above. 
Designer, Competitive

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."

Star Guardian In Game Models and More! 

Check out this post from Riot Swimbananas with a detailed look at each of the new Star Guardian skins! These are great references for cosplayers, artists, and more:
"With even more Star Guardians hitting the Rift, we wanted to make sure you had everything you might need to create your own Star Guardian content! Whether that be making new cosplays, creating stream overlays, or creating the most iconic fan art- we have collected some assets for the newest Star Guardians. 
If you end up using these, make sure to tag @LeagueOfLegends on Social, so we can see what you create! 
Game Model Turnarounds:
Take a close look at all the details, and see exactly what’s going on under those feather capes! Included in this Zip File are the reference photos for Star Guardian Zoe, Xayah, Rakan, Neeko and Prestige Neeko.

Splash Art: 
Want to just download all the Splash art? Contained in this convenient zip file is the splash art for Xayah, Rakan, Zoe and both versions of Neeko! 
In-Game Special Effects: 
Want to see the skins in motion? Our friends over at Skin Spotlights have made videos going over all the in-game animations and special effects!

Miscellaneous

  • Riot Jag tweeted that he has a few Practice tool changes coming to the PBE Soon: [1][2][3][4]
"Had a little time in between projects so I implemented a few often-requested cheats into Practice tool that should be hitting PBE next week. Definitely welcome feedback, but keep in mind that I'm unable to add cheats that require major new UX (like change Champion/Runes). 
(1/3)" 
"-Spawn Jungle Camps has been split into "Spawn Jungle Camps and Rift Herald" and "Spawn Jungle Camps and Baron". 
-"Fast Forward 30 seconds" is now accompanied by "Fast Forward 10 minutes". 
-Sion Passive testers rejoice - there's now a "Suicide" cheat.  
(2/3)" 
"-Target dummies no longer have 10000 HP, 100 Armor and 100 MR. They now have 1000 HP and 0 Armor/MR. 
-4 new cheats are available - Add 100 Max HP to an enemy, Remove 100 Max HP, Add 10 Armor and MR, Remove 10 Armor and MR. 
(3/3)" 
"1 more Practice tool cheat just added for PBE Monday, in addition to the ones I mentioned earlier: 
-Fully stack Legend, Manaflow Band, and Vision/Hunter Domination runes. Sadly I couldn't add Overgrowth for technical reasons here. 
Ok now I'm going home, have a good weekend all."
"TFT - It's Friday before a patch which means preview time. The new Loot Distribution is the big headliner of the patch, as well as buffing under used units/items/traits. Should be fun! 
Big thanks to @RiotSapMagic who made this while on vacation. He's da best!"
"Your semi-weekly dose of server problem-os, NA League news, and other! 
We’ve got the final team qualifying for Worlds from NA this weekend, Pantheon heroically dove into TFT, and there was a bunch of player impacting problems during this period :( 
Follow-Ups:
  • Mac voice still not working properly (Bug under development)
Ongoing
  • None
Server Stuff:
  • High Error rates for players logging on(8/22, ~68 minutes) Automated alerting notifies the NOC that login errors are climbing. Investigation starts, but before a root cause can identify where or why the service is having problems, the errors return to normal values.
  • Internal data tracking too high(8/22, ~25 minutes) An internal monitoring system spits out an alert that a particular data tracking thing is overloading with data (too much volume). As the NOC alerts the team that owns that thing, to start analyzing why the system is getting too much information, the levels return back to normal.
  • Mission delays for players(8/22, ~10 hours) Internal monitoring notifies the NOC that mission processing is delayed from average values. Teams that deal with Missions are alerted, and investigation shows a few possible root causes. Continued investigation leads to the realization games are getting stuck in the processing DB and not moving. Rioters manually remove the one game that was stuck, and processing continues at normal values.
  • LP gains/missions progress not working in TFT(8/27, ~24 hours) The main patch is deployed, however other regions notice TFT LP gains are not working properly, as well as missions aren’t progressing. TFT is disabled in all regions. Testing on PBE leads to a proper fix, but it will require platform restarting, so the fix is scheduled the following morning. The fix rolls out, the platform is force-restarted, and TFT starts working properly again.
Game Stuff:
  • Ping increase for non-peered ISPs in Eastern US(8/24, ~33 hours) First reports on Boards about higher ping for players. Network engineers investigate, and confirm that routing looks suboptimal for a swath of non-peered ISPs. Network engineers uncover that backend internet connections (the big pipelines the entire Internet usually is routed through) have differences in settings that shouldn’t have happened. Communication starts with companies that run the backend, and the delay is fixed on their end.
  • Reconnect spikes/ping spikes(8/25, ~210 minutes) Automated monitoring notices a few game servers having reconnect spikes outside of acceptable limits. Automated systems enable compensation mode for the affected servers. Total volume of compensation mode triggers Rioters to start investigating root causes, even as the spikes return to normal levels.
Morgageddon
"Compete for $25,000 in prizes at PC Cafes across North America! 
Tournaments are being held in 75 US and Canadian gaming centers – a full list of centers taking part can be found here! 
The tournament will run every Tuesday in September. The next events will run from 1pm PST – 9pm PST on 10th September, 17th September and 24th September. 
The top 64 players that rise to the top of the leaderboards will play in the semi-finals on Saturday 28th September. 
The top 16 players from that event will then go through to compete in the finals to be held on 29th September and a chance to win one of 8 grand prize packages 
What are you waiting for?! 
COMPETE. 
PROVE YOURSELF. 
WIN! 
For additional details about the event, visit here!"

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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