Red Post Collection: 2/21 Mid Patch Updates, QGT: Feb 21, EUW/EUNE Clash Reschedule, Ask Riot & More

2/21 Mid-Patch Updates

The 10.4 patch notes have been updated with mid-patch updates for Sona, Soraka, items, & more!

"2/21/2020 Tiamat and Ravenous Hydra Bugfix & Immolate Items, Sona, and Soraka Balance Changes 

Poppy

• TIAMAT AND RAVENOUS HYDRA BUGFIX: Fixed a bug that allowed Poppy to proc Tiamat's and Ravenous Hydra's Active from range 

Rengar

• TIAMAT AND RAVENOUS HYDRA BUGFIX: Fixed a bug that allowed Rengar to proc Tiamat's and Ravenous Hydra's Active from range 

Sona

• BASE ATTACK DAMAGE: 49 ⇒ 45
• BASE ATTACK DAMAGE GROWTH: 3 ⇒ 2
• E - SONG OF CELERITY SELF-HASTE: 20% (+0.03 per 100 ability power) ⇒ 10/11/12/13/14% (+0.03 per 100 ability power) 

Soraka

• W - ASTRAL INFUSION COOLDOWN: 8/6.5/5.3.5/2 seconds ⇒ 6/5/4/3/2 seconds
• W - ASTRAL INFUSION COST: 50/55/60/65/70 mana ⇒ 40/45/50/55/60 mana
• W - ASTRAL INFUSION REJUVENATION HP COST: Reduced by 40/55/70/85/100% ⇒ Reduced by 60/70/80/90/100% 

Immolate

• BAMI'S CINDER PULSE DAMAGE: 6-23 (+0.02 bonus health) ⇒ 6-23 (+0.01 bonus health)
• BAMI'S CINDER PULSE COOLDOWN: 10 seconds ⇒ 12 seconds
• CINDERHULK PULSE DAMAGE: 12-29 (+0.04 bonus health) ⇒ 12-29 (+0.03 bonus health)
• CINDERHULK PULSE COOLDOWN: 10 seconds ⇒ 12 seconds
• SUNFIRE AND FORGEFIRE CAPE PULSE DAMAGE: 26-43 (+0.05 bonus health) ⇒ 26-43 (+0.04 bonus health)
• SUNFIRE AND FORGEFIRE CAPE PULSE COOLDOWN: 10 seconds ⇒ 12 seconds

"Some hotfixes coming today for 10.4 to make sure everything ends up as intended. We expect to sometimes have to follow up on changes and want to react quickly. 

-Immolate mechanic slightly too strong
-Soraka top nerfed correctly, support too weak
-Sona top still too strong"

Quick Gameplay Thoughts: February 21 

Here's Riot Scruffy with a quick gameplay thoughts for February 21st, including thoughts on matchmaking and ranked future, top lane impact, jungle satisfaction, and more:

"Disclaimer 

These posts will often contain talk about future work we're doing, or planning to do, that isn't yet guaranteed to ship. The work or goals could change depending on what we discover, and projects mentioned may get delayed or even stopped. That said, I believe it’s important to share as much as we can even if plans may change. 

Matchmaking and Ranked future 

We’ve been collecting feedback and ramping up on many big and small problems that we’d like to solve around matchmaking and ranked throughout the year. After taking it all in, we’ve created a pretty exciting roadmap for the future changes we’d like to make to ranked and matchmaking over the next year. Expect a dev blog very soon with our plans for the future. 

One update I do have for now is that we’re currently working on adding autofill parity to matchmaking - this means we can balance both teams to have a similar number of autofilled players on each team. Our results so far are very promising and we think we can ship this feature pretty quickly and see significant improvement. 

Top Lane Impact 

With our long term goal of giving top laners higher game impact (ability to carry a game) in high elo, we’re exploring a few different strategies: 

• Carrying through items - We have a few potential changes to core top lane items like Black Cleaver, Sunfire, and the Hydra items to give fighters and tanks some more carry power later.
• Early strategic impact - The dragon creates a highly valued objective that all positions other than top have a strong ability to contest. We’re hoping to get top more integrated into the early objective game through a more powerful teleport summoner or making Rift Herald more comparable in value to dragon.
• Turning leads into victories - Finding some ways to slightly amp up the payout in the early game for winning top lane can make it more comparable to the other positions. We’re exploring things like increasing melee damage to plates. 

Jungle Satisfaction and Personal Power 

With our long term goal of increasing Jungle satisfaction while not pushing their control over the early game too high, we’re testing a few things for upcoming patches: 

• Reduced Gank Power - in particular lowering the value of a gank (which is currently very high). This might sound counterintuitive for making jungle feel more satisfying, but the goal is to allow junglers to hold a bit more of the power themselves instead of donating it to their laners through ganks.
• Introducing a new early game homeguards when you respawn after a death
• Slight reduction in shared XP for kills by multiple champions
• Slight increase in XP for solo kills (which is a small buff for invade junglers, too)
• Increased farm XP
• With the reduced gank power we can give junglers more XP through farming the jungle

How snowbally is the game today? 

Short answer - it’s in a good state. 

Long answer - one of the key game statistics that we monitor and balance systems around is the amount of snowball in the game. Over time we’ve found that there is a sweet spot where we get the core benefits from snowball that we’re looking for: 

• There is enough snowball that early game leads matter (if the game had no snowball, you could sit in fountain for the first 15 minutes and still win)
• There is not too much snowball so that early game decides the game entirely 

Some interesting data to show - This is one of our metrics that tracks how decided (snowballed) a game is at 15 minutes. The three lines shown are 

• Red - Large Lead - One team has a 90%+ chance of winning the game
• Green - Medium Lead - One team has a 75%+ chance of winning
• Blue - Even Game - No team has a 75%+ chance of winning 

We’ve found that this “sweet spot” for snowball in LoL is when at 15 minutes, roughly 25% of games have large lead, 35% of games have medium lead, and 40% of games are close to even. Currently we’re seeing a pretty good state of snowball. 

You can see that in the last few seasons there have been spikes and dips in snowball, and through systems changes we’ve been able to re-stabilize that game state. 

Here are some factors that we commonly rely on when we want to change overall snowball a lot: 

• Kill gold/rewards
• Early objective rewards (towers, dragon, etc)
• Shutdown gold
• Death timers 

Thanks again for playing and engaging with us about the game. See you next time! 

Scruffy
https://twitter.com/MarkYetter"

Ask Riot: Autofill in Ranked

Check out this month's Ask Riot, including questions on Autofill in ranked and more - "Plus our plans for top lane and champion diversity in the jungle."

"Welcome to Ask Riot! 

This week, we’re talking about autofill, top lane balance, and the jungle champion pool. 

But first… a meta note. We recently moved over to a new website and don’t have the old “Ask Riot” button ported over yet. While we’re working on a fix, we’ll be using social listening tools and our question backlog to source questions. We should have a replacement in a couple months so you can keep asking us important things like, “will akali go away from my game if I install an antivirus on my PC?”, “how many yordles can tahm kench fit into his mouth at once,” and, “can you give shen a skin where he looks like a pineapple please. i really like pineapples.” 

Why is there autofill in ranked? 

When we make a game, we want to find ten players of equal skill in the positions they want to be playing. But unfortunately, not every position is equally popular, so we have to get people to fill in for those positions to make sure matches happen in a reasonable amount of time. Without autofill, finding matches would not only take longer, but they’d end up involving a broader skill range, as we stretch our search outward to find the 10th player we need. Our goal is to strike the right balance between making you wait for a game and making the fairest games possible, and autofill is a necessary part of that balance. 

While we probably can’t ever fully do away with autofill, we are looking to make changes to improve upon the system. We’re currently testing out “autofill parity” in some regions, which means that when we make a match with an autofilled player on one team, the opposing team also has an autofilled player so the matchup feels more fair. As soon as we know these changes are going well (hopefully within a few months), we will roll them out globally. And if it’s not going so well, we’ll roll it back and try again. 

Once these initial changes are in a good place, we can even try to get both autofilled players facing off in the same position. No promises here though—forcing autofills to be in the same position can make queue times explode if we’re not careful, so we’ll be doing a lot of testing first. 

- RiotIAmWalrus, Game Designer 

How do you plan to improve the top lane? 

Top lane is a position that I really love (it’s my main role), and we see it as a unique place where mostly fighters and tanks get to duel it out in the most isolated matchup on the map. So our focus here isn’t really on changing the experience or champ pool in the lane significantly (...besides balancing some very OP Enchanters). The area we think the lane could currently be improved in is having slightly higher overall game impact. In other words… how well can a great top laner carry the game? 

In upcoming patches, we’re exploring a few different ways to improve top lane impact: 

• Carrying through items: We have a few potential changes to core top lane items like Black Cleaver, Sunfire, and the Hydra items to give fighters and tanks some more carry power later.
• Early strategic impact: In the past we saw top lane having a higher influence with a much more powerful Teleport summoner, so we’re seeing if we can recapture some of that access it gave top laners to the wider game without falling into the old problems (full team of TP, bot lane party, etc.).
• Turning leads into victories: Finding some ways to slightly amp up the payout in the early game for winning top lane can make it more comparable to the other positions. We’re exploring things like increasing melee damage to plates and making Rift Herald more comparable in value to dragon.

- Riot Scruffy, Lead Gameplay Designer 

Why are you trying to make it so zed can jungle? 

We recently talked about this in Quick Gameplay Thoughts. At a high level, we’re trying to widen the jungle champion pool to help make the role more appealing. 

When we were digging into our results and follow-ups from this year’s preseason, we were really struck by a problem in the jungle role that we’d never been able to fix: Throughout League's entire history, low MMR players have preferred the jungle position least of all 5 positions, regardless of whether jungle is strong or weak relative to the other 4 positions. We think this will take a variety of changes to fix in the long term, but we want to also do some short-term work to improve jungle appeal. 

In terms of available viable champions in the role, jungle is fairly narrow. This makes jungling doubly hard to learn as a new(ish) player: Not only do you need to learn about clearing camps and ganking, you can't use the champions you're already familiar with. So, in 10.4 we added a handful of champs that see a lot of play in low MMR into the jungle pool. We made very focused changes that buff these champs' jungle clears but leave their lanes unchanged. If this strategy works well we may expand the jungle champ pool even more in further patches. 

- Riot Scruffy, Lead Gameplay Designer"

Miscellaneous

• Clash has been rescheduled in EUW and EUNE due to server instability issues that occurred just before the weekend started. Look for it's return in these regions on February 29 - March 1:

From Riot Brightmoon: 

"It’s with much sadness we have to delay the EUW and EUN Clash launch from this weekend to next. Server issues (unrelated to Clash) have been impacting those regions for the past 48 hours in ways we can’t give a solid Clash experience. This delay sucks after many prior delays"

From LoL EU: 

"🛠Due to widespread server stability issues, we're delaying the launch of Clash to Feb 29 - Mar 1, pending fixes for the server issues🛠

Right now I don’t have any more information than this, but will update you as soon as I can."