Red Post Collection: Incoming Pricing Changes to League and TFT, Conqueror Clash: July 11 & 12, & More

Posted on at 11:02 AM by Aznbeat
[7/3 Update - Added in the Behavioral Systems July Update & a few misc topics!]

Today's red post collection includes details on upcoming pricing changes for League & TFT, a new Conqueror's Clash tournament on July 11 &12, this week's Ask Riot on Yuumi and the next rotating game mode, and more!
Continue reading for more information!


Table of Contents


Behavioral Systems July Update

Here's the latest update on behavioral systems from Riot Codebear - "Sharing our next areas of focus for behavioral systems improvements."
"Hey everyone, Cody “Riot Codebear” Germain here to talk to you about our focus on behavioral improvements in League and the thinking and intent that'll inform features coming up through the pipeline. 
As we’ve discussed over the past few months, disruptive behavior in League is an area we haven’t made much improvement on in recent years. For our first phase of projects in this renewed push for change, we believe it’s important to tackle the in-game behaviors that directly impact the game outcome. We've defined that as behaviors that have the direct intention of causing a loss or direct intention of reducing the potential for a win, which can span intentional feeding, sabotage or game-based harassment (griefing), and idling or intentionally leaving the match. 
Based on player feedback and report data, we believe we'll get the largest impact from meaningful progress on the following two goals for Intentional Feeding and Leaving the Game/Idling in Game: 
  • Directly reduce frequency: This one's obvious, but still important to call out.
  • Mitigate harm to affected players: We can't prevent game-ruining behavior from ever happening, so it's important to us that we ensure the damage is minimized for its victims. 
OUR APPROACH 
As mentioned in previous updates, we're tackling these problems via iterative, solution-driven experiments with measurable results. We want to get our ideas in front of you for testing to find which ones have potential for meaningful, immediate change. If a feature needs years to ramp up before yielding results, it's too slow for us. 
Most recently, we’ve implemented our first experiment with Champ Select Reporting and Muting. The goal for this experiment, as stated previously, is to gather data specifically on behaviors that occur before rolling into a game so we can determine what actionable solutions can be put in place, and where. 
During these experiments we’ll be actively measuring outcomes and communicating with you all on where we stand each month. 
OUR NEXT ACTIONS 
The following three projects will be the next things to come out after Champ Select Reporting and Muting:
  • It’s been some time since we’ve updated the Summoner Code, which is our definition and values around what's expected of League players. We'll more clearly call out situations that are viewed as disruptive, and more clearly indicate the consequences of those actions. Solidifying our commitments and guidelines as a foundation for the League of Legends experience will allow us to more cleanly tie solutions to disruptive situations that occur.
  • We’re developing enhanced automated detection methodology specifically for intentional feeding and idle/afk behaviors to confidently verify when these behaviors have occurred—as close to the occurrence as possible.
  • Though we’re working to directly improve these detection for these behaviors first, we’re also taking stock of the state of other behaviors and mapping out our next steps for improving detection there as well in the future.
  • We’re designing improvements to the actions that occur when we identify AFK behaviors. Those improvements will both consider what enhanced penalty actions mean for the game and assess how we can mitigate the impact an AFK has on you as a player. 
THE LONG ROAD AHEAD 
We've got a lot of ground to catch up on, but the team is committed to bringing our behavioral systems up to today's standards. We’ll continue to update you on a monthly cadence with changes, how solutions are performing, and where we’re going next. 
Please continue to voice your concerns, and let us know what you think of our experiments as they begin to roll out. 
Signing off.
-Cody"

Incoming Pricing Changes to League and TFT

Here's an update on pricing changes for League and TFT - "We’re updating our global pricing on July 15th."
"TL;DR: We’re updating our global pricing on July 15. 
  • Several regions will see increased RP prices to account for new tax laws, currency shifts, inflation, and consistency across regions.
  • From July 1 through July 15 all regions will receive extra “bonus RP” on all RP purchases.
  • We’re also making adjustments to TFT mobile’s pricing to bring it closer inline with TFT Desktop 
At the beginning of each year, Riot assesses the current state of global pricing and makes adjustments to account for changes in currency inflation, taxation, and regional discrepancies. Here's last year's post, for reference. We normally enact these changes around March or April, but navigating challenges with COVID-19 delayed this year's changes by a few months. 
We’re notifying you now so you have visibility into the upcoming changes should you wish to purchase RP now before the changes take place. We’re also going to run an “Extra Bonus RP” promotion from July 1 until July 15 so you can stock up on RP. 
Below is a breakdown of the upcoming changes.The price adjustments were calculated based on currency fluctuations that occurred in 2019 and new regional taxes that were introduced in the beginning of 2020. 
League of Legends & Teamfight Tactics Desktop 
RP price changes
  • LATAM
    • While currency fluctuations alone would only call for slight adjustments to the price of RP, many countries enacted new taxation laws on digital goods which have had a more significant impact. Below is an estimate of the change you’ll see on the cost of RP in the store for both factors combined:
      • Mexico: +19% (VAT Portion: 16%)
      • Columbia: +11%
      • Costa Rica: +16% (VAT Portion: 13%)
      • Chile: +16% (VAT Portion: 19%)
      • Uruguay:+ 11%
      • Peru: +5%
      • USD LATAM: 5.5%
  • Brazil
    • Due to inflation and devaluation of the Brazilian Real to the USD, we’ll be seeing a 9% increase in RP Costs 
Extra Bonus RP 
When we release price increase announcements, we also try to run extra bonus RP promotions. For 2020, this will be a 100% increase to the bonus RP you get from buying RP in larger increments. 
  • Example: The 2600 RP bundle grants 400 bonus RP 
This promotion activates July 1 around 1:00 PM PDT (change may take an hour to complete) and lasts until July 15, 1:00 PDT when the price changes above go into effect. 
Teamfight Tactics Mobile 
We're resolving discrepancies between pricing for content in Teamfight Tactics mobile, versus pricing for the same content on desktop. 
The following regions will see a decrease in the price of content in TFT mobile. The decrease can be as large as 20% depending on the particular item, with larger percent decreases for lower-priced items. 
  • New Zealand
  • Europe
  • UAE
  • Egypt
  • Japan (Individual Little Legend Eggs only) 
The following countries will see an increase in the price of content in TFT mobile. Similarly, the increase can be as large as 20% depending on the particular item, with larger percent increases for lower-priced items. 
  • Mexico
  • Columbia
  • Costa Rica
  • Chile
  • Peru 
The following countries will see a decrease in the price of the 10+1 Little Legend egg bundle on pricing for 10+1 Little Legend Egg bundles to bring it closer in line with the pricing of ten individual Little Legend Eggs. 
  • Brazil
  • Turkey
  • Russia"

Conqueror Clash: July 11 & 12

Here's Riot Codebear with details on the upcoming Conqueror Clash tournament - "Grab your team for a special one-weekend Clash tournament July 11th and 12th!"
"Team signups open Monday, July 6 for a special one-weekend Conqueror Clash tournament! Matches will be held on Saturday, July 11 and Sunday, July 12—check the client for your region's schedule. While most of Clash's standard rules apply, there are a few special adjustments: 
Victory Point rewards have been streamlined to reflect the single-weekend timeframe:
  • 400 VP: Banner Level 1
  • 600 VP: Banner Level 2
  • 1000 VP: Banner Level 3
Premium ticket rewards have also been amped up! In addition to your standard Capsule rewards, you'll also receive Conqueror loot: 
  • Placing 1st through 5th in your bracket rewards a random Legacy Conqueror skin permanent (Karma, Varus, or Alistar)
  • Placing 6th through 8th in your bracket rewards a Legacy Conqueror skin shard (Karma, Varus, or Alistar) 
Best of luck!"

Ask Riot: Delete Yuumi

Check out this week's Ask Riot, on Yuumi and the next rotating game mode!
"Welcome to Ask Riot! 
This week, we’re talking about everyone’s favorite cat and upcoming featured game modes. 
What are your thoughts on Yuumi? 
There are so many ways to answer this, so let’s break it down into a couple of more specific questions based on what we’ve seen players talk about: 
  • Why is Yuumi a braindead champion that even a real cat could play?
  • Why should she even exist?
  • Do we think Yuumi is balanced?
  • Why did we nerf her healing mana costs so hard this patch? 
Why is Yuumi a braindead champion that even a real cat could play? 
So actually… We think this is a misconception, and the most clear way to show you why we believe so is to share her champion mastery curve in comparison to other champs. 
A champion’s mastery curve is a way of looking at how much more effective a player becomes on a champion as they play them more, as represented by how much their win rate increases over games played. Here’s what Yuumi’s look like, along with a couple other champions: 
Yuumi’s mastery curve is more in line with champions like Akali and Qiyana, who continue to see win rate growth well beyond the first ~20 games, than it is to champions like Neeko and Mordekaiser. 
Many “easier to learn” champions are picked up more quickly because they test a lot of the same things other champions tested already. For example, every new ADC in some way tests your ability to last-hit with a ranged auto attack and stand in the right place to deal maximum damage. 
Yuumi tests things that no other champion in League does. This is both why she continues to see win rate growth for so many games, and also why we believe some players don’t see her as being “hard to play.” The things many players have associated with playing League well aren’t being tested on her—like positioning and moment-to-moment dodging—but new things are. 
If you’d like to get into the nitty-gritty details of some of those tests, here are a few of them: 
  • Identifying when it’s safe to hop out and use her passive in chaotic teamfights, which means tracking enemies’ cooldowns to know when to do so. Failure to use Yuumi’s passive at all means leaving a lot of value on the table in the form of shields and mana. Using her passive at the wrong time means getting CC’d and killed.
  • Identifying who you should attach to because you can’t support more than one person at a time. Your heal has no range, and your exact positioning is beyond your control, so you need to be able to predict how your allies and the enemies will move. Otherwise, you might end up in a really bad place or forced to help the wrong ally.
  • Weaving Q around targets that aren’t who you’re trying to hit, which is a more simple but still unique skill test.
  • Managing vision control while being the slowest and squishiest champion in the game, which is a particularly challenging version of a skill test all supports have. 
All of this combines to make Yuumi a difficult champion to master, albeit in ways that look different from the rest of the champion roster. (You might compare this to someone like Singed, whose proxy playstyle is totally different from any other champion and takes ~100 games to master.) 
Why should Yuumi even exist? 
To be direct, we believe Yuumi fills a unique role in the champion roster—both in playstyle and thematic—and there is clear data showing that a lot of people enjoy playing Yuumi. 
When we look at champion popularity, we break it down into depth and breadth. Depth is a measure of the average number of games a player puts into a champion. Breadth is a measure of how many different players play a champion. Breadth and depth can be used as two axes of a graph to give us a more complete understanding of how popular a champion is. 
Here’s the graph showing Yuumi’s popularity since her launch. The thinnest part of the line indicates when she was released, and the thickest is from patch 10.12. 
Note: This is a log graph that shows champion popularity relative to each other. If this were a linear scale, Yasuo would actually be outrageously far off the page. Head over to this article for more details on how we use graphs like this. 
If you look at Yuumi’s depth of play, you can see there’s consistently a large group of players who engage deeply, even when she’s objectively quite weak. When she has a reasonable win rate for most players, Yuumi is also one of our most broadly played supports. One of the goals of the Champions team is to fill out our roster in a way that gives everyone the perfect champion for them, and Yuumi’s depth and breadth of play indicates we’re delivering on this. 
We believe Yuumi players are generally more interested in the cooperative elements of League—the teamplay, coordination, and relationships you form with your allies. We’re pretty confident Yuumi delivers on that in a unique way with a resonant theme. 
Do we think Yuumi is balanced? 
Excluding the most recent set of changes (we’ll talk about that next), I think it’s safe to say that no, we don’t think Yuumi has been in a state that’s balanced or that she’s been in a good place in regards to game health. 
The biggest game health issue we’ve consistently faced with Yuumi is ensuring she has sufficient counterplay, which is probably why 1) she’s so frustrating to play against, and 2) she’s perceived as being “easy mode” or not deserving of her wins. 
We agree that Yuumi hasn’t been fair to play against. But this doesn't mean Yuumi shouldn't exist—it just means we have to get more creative to ensure she does have adequate avenues for counterplay. In practice, this means making sure that Yuumi has to exit the safety of an ally and interact with opponents regularly. 
Why did we nerf her healing mana costs so hard this patch? 
These changes are intended to force Yuumi to utilize her passive in order to be effective, which means she has to regularly detach from her ally and interact with opponents. 
When we last made large changes to Yuumi in patch 9.24, we tried making it easier and more rewarding for opponents to capitalize on her squishiness when she detached from an ally by adding a cast time to her W and putting it on cooldown if it was interrupted by CC. However, she’s been able to take items and runes that have kept her mana topped off without her needing to consistently use her passive, which obviously made the changes less effective than we wanted. The result was a Yuumi who could (basically) healbot an ally with no gating. 
In order for Yuumi to be a healthy champion in League, she has to give opponents opportunities to interact with her. Changing her heal cost to be a percent of max mana will give us a tuning lever that bypasses items and runes and allows us to force her to utilize her passive regularly—which is always what we intended, but she’s thus far found ways to avoid. We hope that by forcing Yuumi to open that counterplay window throughout the game in order to be effective, it’ll make her more fair (and less frustrating) to play against. 
So if we take all of this into consideration and answer the question: 
What do you think of Yuumi? 
Our answer is that we believe Yuumi is a successful champion because she offers a unique and resonant playstyle, but we need to ensure she has sufficient counterplay moments in order to say she’s a healthy addition to League. 
The Summoner’s Rift Team

What’s the next featured game mode going to be? 
Up next is Nexus Blitz as part of the summer event. It’s on PBE for testing now and includes some new in-game events and rewards, plus a complete map reskin—Nexus Blitz is now set in an Ionian forest. 
The next featured game mode will be One-For-All during the following event. 
More broadly, we’ve been seeing a lot of questions about game modes in general, so we plan on talking more in-depth about our plans and approach in a blog later this year. 
HBBONG, Modes Product Lead

Where’s the third question? 
Right here. 
bananaband1t, Managing Editor

Have a question? Head here, drop your question in the box, and ask away."

Miscellaneous

  • Here's CestDommage noting that champion select muting will be available in all regions in 10.14:
"In Patch 10.14 Champ Select Reporting (and muting) will roll out to all regions. 
Still focusing on collecting data, though the first week has been instructive :)  
We continue to be open to any and all feedback which is spelled correctly."

  • Riot Xenogenic has tweeted a few Spirit Guard Udyr tweaks he has checked in that makes the ultimate appearances of his abilities kick in earlier than 6th rank" 
[1] "Spirit Guard Udyr fans: 
I'm about to checkin a change such that the ultimate forms of his abilities come online at 5 points in the abilities instead of 6. I'm open to feedback if you feel strongly it should be even earlier but feel like this is a good place to start."
[2] "I've seen quite a few comments saying people would prefer 4 over 5. As I said in my first post, I'm open to it. Let me know: do you want these forms to come online at 4 instead of 5?
Trying to weigh making them feel special while also making sure you actually get to enjoy them"
  • RiotRepertoir has tweeted that he is parting ways with Riot and LoL
"Hi everyone. Today my time at Riot comes to an end. It's been an honor and privilege to be able to pour my heart and energy into LoL over the years, and I'll miss being a part of the community dearly. Thank you to everyone along the way who made it such an incredible journey."




Other Games

"This is Ask VALORANT. We collect your questions and select a few to get answered every other week. This round we tackle cross-region play, pick and ban system, and a possible deathmatch-type mode."

Reminders

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