Surrender at 20

Red Post Collection: QGT: March 6, Ask Riot: Smurfs in Clash, Announcing the TFT: Galaxies Showcase, & More

[Added Quick Gameplay Thoughts: March 6]

Today's red post collection includes Riot Scruffy with the Quick Gameplay Thoughts for March 6th, this week's Ask Riot, covering smurfs in Clash, Ranked ARAM, and drawings for RP, as well as details on the TFT: Galaxies Showcase, and more!
Continue reading for more information!


Table of Contents


Quick Gameplay Thoughts: March 6

Here's Riot Scruffy with a quick gameplay thoughts post for March 6, covering the move for these articles to /Dev posts with the boards shutting down, autofill and duo parity, jungle and top work, Death's Dance, 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. 
Gameplay Thoughts moving to /dev 
As many of you already know, we’re shutting down the boards on March 9:
https://na.leagueoflegends.com/en-us/news/community/saying-farewell-to-boards/So this will be the last Gameplay Thoughts posted here, but it doesn’t mean these are going away. Both my and Meddler’s blogs will be going up on the /dev section of the LoL website. 
Autofill and Duo Parity Progress 
We’ve been testing Autofill Parity and Duo Parity on two regions each since 10.4 and are seeing some very exciting results.
  • Autofill Parity
    • Before - 11.4% of games had uneven autofill
    • After - 0.97% of games have uneven autofill
    • This is a huge decrease, and nearly completely eliminates mismatched autofill from the game
    • Queue times increased on average only a few seconds to accommodate this new constraint
    • We are in the process right now of rolling this out to all regions globally
  • Duo Parity
    • Before - 59% of games have uneven Duos
    • After - 21% of games have uneven Duos
    • This is also a massive decrease that we’re pretty excited about
    • We may be able to push this even farther, but unlike autofill, we’re seeing some risk where this could start to hurt queue times or match quality (MMR spread) significantly
    • Considering we’re still seeing this in some games, we’re keeping the MMR offset for duos as we’ve had for a long time
    • We are going to roll this out after we see autofill parity is stable globally 
Funnel Strategy 
Our last set of changes to increase the gold penalty for funneling junglers had a small impact, but didn’t solve the problem as much as we wanted. We’re currently testing an addition to the Monster Hunter penalty where funneling adds a 50% XP penalty on minion kills (on top of the current gold penalty). Junglers playing normally should almost never see these penalties. 
Philosophically - we sometimes support creative strategies like funnel but we will remove them in cases where we think they are too damaging the overall gameplay experience. Thiis mid/jung funnel has two major issues that warrant us fixing it: 
  • It’s a non interactive approach that doesn’t allow enough counterplay opportunities for enemies to slow it down (like conventional laning and jungling have)
  • It’s oppressively strong - this alone would be enough reason to nerf it 
Jungle and Top Work Continues 
We’ve been testing and shipping a number of changes to increase Jungle and Top position satisfaction over the last few patches. We’re continuing our work and have a few more changes still coming, look to PBE for iterations. As we gain confidence that these changes are hitting the goals, we’ll continue shipping them in the upcoming patches. 
Death’s Dance 
Our previous work on Death’s Dance should be coming to live in 10.6. Our core goals are:
  • Create a hybrid defense/offense item for fighters - picked in cases where you feel like you can rely on your offensive output to sustain (probably worse into heavy CC where steraks will better save you)
  • More clearly differentiate the item from Bloodthirster 
LoL Dev Team’s Going Strong 
As we’re entering our second decade of LoL and you see a lot of the exciting new games that Riot has been working on, I thought it was worth reassuring everyone that we have no plans to shrink the team or slow down support in focus of other things. The league dev team has been roughly the same size for the last few years and will continue to stay stable. 
Personally, it’s been a dream for me to work on such an amazing game for the last 7 years and I am as excited as ever to make LoL a better game than it has ever been.
Scruffy 
https://twitter.com/MarkYetter 
CAW CAW CAW"

Ask Riot: Smurfs in Clash

Check out this week's Ask Riot - "What are we doing about smurfs in Clash? Will we make ranked ARAM? How do I submit a drawing for RP?":
"Welcome to Ask Riot! 
This week, we’re talking about Clash smurfs, ranked ARAM, and submitting art for RP.

What are you doing to prevent smurfing in Clash? 
Smurfing in Clash is something we’re taking very seriously, but also something we know is very difficult to solve. We’ve already done some things to hinder smurfing, like requiring SMS verification, making players place in a Ranked queue, and running smurf detection behind-the-scenes to try and make sure we have the best possible skill estimate for every player. But these measures aren’t catching 100% of smurfs, so we’re going to keep adding in more measures to make sure Clash stays fair. 
This doesn’t mean you’ll never have a particularly stompy game in Clash, or ever bump up against someone who you suspect is better than their rank says they are. That said, we are going to continue implementing new ways to discourage smurfing. There are approaches we can take when we can conclusively identify that an account is a smurf, such as banning the account from playing in Clash again and revoking the rewards earned by that player’s team. We want to be VERY careful with those kinds of punishments, because punishing someone incorrectly would be awful, but we want to make sure that the teams winning Clash got there through fair play. 
- RiotIAmWalrus, Game Designer

I'd love to know if you’ve considered making a ranked version of aram. I would like a version of aram that’s taken more seriously. 
Ranked ARAM is definitely something we’ve thought about and discussed in the past, but it has a number of issues that make us cautious. Part of what makes ARAM fun is the randomness (it’s right there in the name), so putting too much emphasis on competition can make the randomness go from fun to frustrating. The champs you and other players receive can massively affect the outcome of a game, and no one wants to feel like they lost in “champ select” with LP on the line. 
Additionally, while ARAM is popular, there aren’t as many people playing at any given time as there are in Summoner’s Rift. Ranked ARAM wouldn’t be right for everyone, and if we split the population of ARAM players up between Normals and Ranked, matchmaking would take longer for both queues. Then if people stop playing as much because queues take too long, it’d only make the problem worse. 
One other issue is that Ranked ARAM could push players to dodge more or create limited champion ARAM-only accounts—both of which we already see today in limited amounts, even without a Ranked system for people to care about. 
All this being said, you’re definitely not the only player interested in showing off your ARAM skill in a competitive environment, and we have put more effort lately into balancing champions and items for ARAM. There may be some ways to bring that more competitive feel to ARAM, but just opening up a Ranked queue is probably not the right answer. 
- RiotIAmWalrus, Game Designer 
How do I send you a picture for rp? i need 20rp for beemo 
If you only need a tiny amount of RP to get your favorite skin, we’re here for you! Create a quality picture—perhaps lovingly drawn in three minutes with MSPaint—to showcase your years of artistic training and talent and your love for League. Then reach out to Player Support and open a ticket asking about your desire, and don’t forget to include your recently drawn masterpiece. We’ll be sure to fix you up! 
(To submit your magnum opus, scroll down on the Player Support page until you see the “Submit a ticket” button. We suggest selecting “RP purchases, store issues” as the request type, but as long you include your artwork and how much RP ya need, we’ve got you covered.) 
- Morgageddon, NA Live Ops"

Announcing the Teamfight Tactics: Galaxies Showcase


Here's Riot Beernana with details on the TFT: Galaxies Showcase:
"We're excited to announce the Teamfight Tactics: Galaxies Showcase will take place on March 12th and 13th! This event will celebrate the upcoming release of TFT’s next set - Galaxies - and will feature players from all over the world competing for more than $150,000. The Teamfight Tactics: Galaxies Showcase will be cast by Ovilee, DisguisedToast, LeTigress, Frodan, Riot Wittrock, and RiotMort and will reveal additional details on what fans can expect from TFT esports in the future.
FORMAT: 
The first day of competition will see 16 players get sorted into 2 groups to play a total of 8 games, 4 games per group. Players will earn points based on their final placement in each game, with the player finishing first in the fourth game (Golden Game) automatically qualifying for Day 2, regardless of the total point score. Of the remaining players, the 3 players with the highest cumulative point score in each group will also qualify for Day 2. During both days, players will earn points based on their final placement in each game. 
If 2 or more players are tied in point score, rankings will be determined by the following criteria: 
  • Highest number of 1st place finishes across all games played.
  • Best average placement across all games played.
  • Best placement in Game 4 
The second day will feature the top 8 players from the first day racing each other to accumulate 18 points first and the chance to win the Teamfight Tactics: Galaxies Showcase. Players who accumulate 18 points become eligible to win the tournament by placing 1st in any of the following matches. After a player has been declared a winner, the remaining players will be ranked 2nd-8th based on their total point score. 
What’s on the line: 
Teamfight Tactics: Galaxies will see a total prize pool of $150,250 distributed among all 16 participants based on final placings. 
  • 1st - $15,000
  • 2nd - 8th - $10,750
  • 9th - 16th - $7,500 
Each day will see the competition begin at 3pm PT with matches being broadcast on Twitch.tv/RiotGames and Youtube.com/LoLEsports. Finally, in order to avoid any potential risks from Covid-19, (aka the coronavirus) in place of a live event, the players will compete remotely from their own locations, however all the banter will still be available for your enjoyment live on-stream. We’re excited to share Galaxies with you as well as additional information about future esports plans for TFT!"

Miscellaneous



  • Riot Mort tweeted out a changelist for the PBE TFT Galaxies set that should hit in the Friday / March 6th PBE deploy:
"TFT - Thanks to everyone who has played Galaxies on PBE so far! It's been super useful getting all the feedback! 
We normally don't do PBE patch notes, but with new set launches we want to keep it up to date. So with tomorrow's PBE deploy, this will be on PBE for the weekend."

He also added:
"PBE Deploy times vary, but expect after noon PST."

  • Riot Xhanghai commented on the changes to TFT champion cards using models over splashes, and noted they would be changing them back:
"Hey Everyone,  
I'm Xhanghai and I work on UX design for TFT. We wanted to let you know that your voices (and memes) came through loud and clear. After internal discussion and consideration, we are making the decision to move back to splash art across Teamfight Tactics (TFT). You should see these changes take effect on PBE within the next week.  
That being said, we also wanted to take the opportunity to walk you all through how we were approaching models and our reasoning behind it.
Splash arts are beautiful. They are the highest quality illustration work we do on League of Legends. Each splash art is carefully crafted to tell new stories, inspire the imagination, and make the universe of League of Legends more complete and unique.  
They are also not created with TFT (and its specific use case) in mind and we recognized a few opportunities to replace them with something that could do a few things better:  
Flexibility  
The best version of the game has thematically cohesive sets. In order to achieve this, sometimes we need to make changes to the champion models you see in-game. One example of this in the Galaxies set is Graves.
We knew that Graves would be a great fit in the Space Pirate trait, but we didn’t have a skin that fit the thematic. We did, however have the vintage Jailbreak Graves model which we were able to make adjustments in order to bring him to life as the final member of the Space Pirate crew. 
Having four Space Pirate champions allowed us to get two levels out of the trait and build a more awesome gameplay where it was possible for players to loot items in addition to gold. 
Clarity and Quick Identification  
Using models allowed us to highlight important gameplay elements directly in the shop cards and better communicate champion-specific game mechanics. In Galaxies, Aurelion Sol’s star-fighters don’t behave in the same ring-like pattern on Summoner’s Rift. They also don’t receive a lot of visual prominence in his splash art, especially when scaled down. 
More freedom with the background also gave us the flexibility to more clearly show the relationship different champions have with each other (origin, class, role, etc.), especially if they didn’t come from the same original skin line.
Accessibility  
We also found from labs and surveys that as Teamfight Tactics expands to new audiences, new players with less League experience found it very difficult to identify the in-game models based on their splash art.
Many of the new players that have been joining us don’t have the years of League experience behind them, and we want to ensure that just like all of you that have been with us from the jump, that we set them up to find the fun as soon as possible.  
Back to Splash Art  
At the end of the day, we're taking this feedback as a huge compliment to all of the work the splash art teams and illustrators have done through the years. Their ability to resonate with all of you is awesome. We're still trying to find ways to solve the issues we talked about so we'll keep working on solutions until we find something that we're happy with. Until then, we're paying attention to all of your feedback (and again, even the memes) so keep bringin' it and we hope you all have a blast with Teamfight Tactics: Galaxies.  
A few of us will be around to answer any other questions you may have."

"The first step to creating games is playing them. From Azeroth to World War II on the Western front, we've logged our fair share of hours exploring worlds built by talented game developers. Riot creatives share the games that inspired them to join the games industry and the moments that made those titles so memorable."
  • Riot Mort noted more TFT: Galaxies changes coming later this cycle:
"TFT - Hope you're enjoying Galaxies on PBE so far. We've got quite a few changes that we are preparing that should go out for the Friday PBE build, so the weekend can be full of new testing and hopefully better balanced scenarios! "
  • Riot Scruffy commented on Sona and noted there would be further Soraka changes coming:
"Sona Top/Support balance looks really good after the spelltheifs + revert changes. 
We're planning some support (only) Soraka buffs for 10.6"
  • Riot Jag noted Azir buffering changes that did't make it into the 10.5 Patch Notes:
[1] "Two Azir changes in put into 10.5 that weren't in the notes: 
-Bugfix: Azir E should reliably detect collision with enemies it passes through."
[2] "-Buffering change (LOVE feedback): If Azir has his cursor over a Sand Soldier that is slightly out of range of his E, while there is a different Sand Soldier in range, casting E will attempt to walk him a short distance to the out-of-range Sand Soldier before casting E."
  • Eternals are now live on all regions! For full details, check out the Eternals FAQ! Here's KenAdamsNSA with more:
All activations complete for Eternals! Tencent regions are scheduled to turn on in 10.7. We're digesting threads from various parts of the web, and still have a few known issues that we're resolving next week, but thanks for all of your patience and feedback thus far!
  • Reav3 commented on the Fiddlesticks Mains subreddit that we would he was right around the corner... This coincides with the Fiddlesticks easter egg that was added to the PBE in the 3/5 PBE Update!
"While that's true, the idea of the devblogs was to post early enough to incorporate any feedback from players. We wanted to basically pull back the curtain a bit with the VGU poll champs. I know it seemed like it was very close because base fiddle was so far along, but with VGUs we then have to rebuild there entire skin catalog, which isn't trivial, especially with a champ like fiddle who has a pretty big skin collection, including a legendary skin. 
That being said, you won't be left in the dark for much longer, Fiddle is just around the corner. Don't say I didn't warn you...."
  •  Riot Brightmoon noted they were looking through Clash surveys for feedback:
"We are starting to pour through survey feedback on Clash and it’s really helpful. If you get a Clash survey please fill it out - each one gets read and helps us improve!!"


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