Red Post Collection: LoL & TFT B-Patch Details, The State of Competitive - Spring 2022, Merch Drop & More!

Posted on at 7:23 PM by Moobeat
With Riot heading into break, tonight's red post collection includes a look at LoL & TFT B-patch details, a dev blog on the state of Competitive, new merch, and more!
Continue reading for more information!


Table of Contents


/dev: Making Behavioral Systems Matter More

Here's Riot TimTamMonster with a /dev blog on Behavioral systems - "We're shifting our approach to directly impact your experience and strengthen our community."
"TimTamMonster here, your new Product Lead for Behavioral Systems.
Let’s get right to it. I know many of you have been disappointed in the lack of progress made in Behavioral Systems over the last few years. You’ve told us again and again that this space is important. And I'm with you. That’s why I'm here to share some updates kicking off Riot's new approach to this space in 2022. 
Shifting Focus to the 95%

Over the last couple of years, we've largely focused on "behind the scenes" upgrades to our detection and punishment systems to improve your experience, and we now know this isn’t making enough of an impact. The data shows that only 5% of players are consistently disruptive. These are players we definitely should be punishing, and we will always continue improving our systems for that. But the other 95% are regular players who get tilted every once in a while, and these players make up 86% of our reports. In other words, almost all reports are on the average player who usually behaves well. 
We've all been there; League is a competitive game. But when each game has 9 other players, if everyone is occasionally disruptive, you’ll probably run into these behaviors often. And whenever you run into someone being disruptive, it doesn’t matter to you if they behave well most of the time. Their behavior in that moment still ruins your game, and that’s what matters. 
So how do we improve the behavior of 95% of players as a whole? That’s a tough question, but we believe it's by building solutions that directly impact you and by partnering with you, our players, to create a stronger community together. 
Reinforcing Positive Play 
Behavioral Systems shouldn't just be about punishing bad players—it should also reward great ones. When we first released Honor 2.0 in 2018, it was the first rewards system of its kind, and we saw an incredible response from you all. But we've failed to update it over the past few years and it's fallen short of your expectations. 
This year, we're upping the rewards with a new special recall VFX for players who are Honor 5 or have received an Honor from either a non-premade or two premades in their last game. Similar to the special Challenger recall, you’ll now have the opportunity to sport a special new Honor recall. 
"What else?" Did I hear you ask? "Riot would never dedicate a specific new skin just for Honor." Oh, wait... That’s exactly what we're doing! We’re working hard on an exclusive skin just for players who reach Honor 5 as part of the End of Season rewards. These exclusive rewards will give you a new way to show off in-game, in addition to existing Honor skins, chromas, and other rewards. So now’s the time to get your Honor on! Stay tuned for more details. 
Taking Action on Champ Select Reports 
Another area we lost some of your confidence in is Champ Select reporting. Although we have been monitoring these reports, we didn’t add punishments for them accordingly as promised. Champ Select reports only make up about 3.2% of reports today, but we know that your experience in every part of the game still matters. I’m happy to share that we are tying punishments to Champ Select reports, and you'll see an update on that in a patch coming very soon. 
Targeting Widespread Behaviors 
Another area we’re focusing on that we know affects the majority of players is Verbal Abuse. There are a number of exciting projects we’re planning, including an upgrade to more advanced models to increase Verbal Abuse detections. We expect to see improvements in this area by up to 10x. While Verbal Abuse isn’t directly reflected in game stats like KDA, it as a widespread issue that often leads to other disruptive behaviors. 
While these are just a few steps toward a larger goal, Riot is truly committed to this space, and I will ensure we continue to prioritize it. You can hold me to that. 
In turn, I ask you to remember this: When you get frustrated, only you can stop yourself from being disruptive. All 95% of us can support these systems by being the type of player we want to play with—even in Ranked. It’s not always easy, I know, but even the most perfect systems can't prevent all instances of bad behavior from occurring. Because it's not just about building systems to influence human behavior. It's also about the humans who play the game. It's about you. And you're here reading this, so I know you care about our community too. 
With your feedback and support, we can shape League's future together. I’m honored to be embarking on this journey together with you."

LoL 12.5b Patch Details

The 12.5b patch is now live, here is the details changelist from the Patch 12.5 notes:

"MID-PATCH UPDATES 
3/9/2022 Mid-Patch Balances 
We're taking care of some urgent mid-patch balances before we go AFK for a week. 
Champions 
Aphelios
  • BASE ARMOR 28 ⇒ 26
  • BASE HEALTH 530 ⇒ 510Ashe
  • W - MANA COST 70 at all ranks ⇒ 75/70/65/60/55
  • R - COOLDOWN 100/80/60 seconds ⇒ 80/70/60 seconds
Draven
  • BASE AD 60 ⇒ 62
Jinx
  • Q - FISHBONES MANA COST 16/17/18/19/20 ⇒ 20 at all ranks
  • Q - FISHBONES RANGE 100/125/150/175/200 ⇒ 80/110/140/170/200
Lucian
  • AD GROWTH 2.3 (101.1 at level 18) ⇒ 2.9 (111.3 at level 18)
  • PASSIVE - VIGILANCE BONUS MAGIC DAMAGE ON-HIT 14 (+10% AD) ⇒ 14 (+20% AD)
Master Yi
  • E - TRUE DAMAGE 30/37/44/51/58 (+30% bonus AD) ⇒ 30/38/46/54/62 (+30% bonus AD) (base damage reverted only)
  • R - COOLDOWN 100/90/80 seconds ⇒ 85 seconds at all ranks (reverte
Ryze
  • PASSIVE - MAXIMUM MANA INCREASED 5% per 100 AP ⇒ 10% per 100 AP
  • Q - DAMAGE 75/100/125/150/175 (+40% AP) (+3% bonus mana) ⇒ 70/90/110/130/150 (+45% AP) (+3% bonus mana)Varus
  • W - PASSIVE BONUS MAGIC DAMAGE ON-HIT 7/9/11/13/15 (+30% AP) ⇒ 7/10.5/14/17.5/21 (+30% AP)
  • R - BASE MAGIC DAMAGE 150/200/250 ⇒ 150/250/350
Zeri
  • BASE AD 58 ⇒ 53
  • HEALTH GROWTH 85 (1945 at level 18) ⇒ 90 (2030 at level 18)
  • BASE ARMOR 23 (+3.5 per level), 82.5 at level 18 ⇒ 22 (+3 per level), 73 at level 18
  • BASIC ATTACK - CHARGED MAGIC DAMAGE RATIO BASED ON TARGET'S MAX HEALTH 3-15% (levels 1-18) ⇒ 1-10% (+0.5% levels 1-7, +1% levels 8-13)
  • Q - TOTAL PHYSICAL DAMAGE 9/13/17/21/25 (+110% AD) ⇒ 10/15/20/25/30 (+ 110% AD)
  • E - COOLDOWN 23/22/21/20/19 seconds ⇒ 23 seconds at all ranks
  • E - PIERCE DAMAGE 80/85/90/95/100% ⇒ 60/70/80/90/100%
  • R - STACKS PER CHAMPION HIT BY INITIAL LIGHTNING CRASH 3 ⇒ 4
  • R - BONUS MOVE SPEED PER STACK 2% ⇒ 1.5%
Items
  • Locket of the Iron Solari
    • CONSECRATE (PASSIVE) - BONUS ARMOR & MAGIC RESIST 5 ⇒ 3
    • DEVOTION (ACTIVE) - SHIELD AMOUNT 230-385 (target's levels 1-18) ⇒ 200-365 (target's levels 1-18)

A set of nerfs for Master Yi went out as a hotfix on 3/4:

3/4/2022 Master Yi Nerfs
Master Yi 
While the changes in 12.5 succeeded in making Yi’s on-hit builds more optimal than his lethality builds, they actually resulted in a large buff to on-hit with roughly no change to lethality-overpowering Yi as a result. We’re tuning Yi down with some stronger nerfs this time, but ensuring that we’re pulling power from across his kit so as to not dramatically impact his gameplay. 
Base Stats
  • BASE HEALTH 599 ⇒ 550
Q - Alpha Strike
  • DAMAGE 30/60/90/120/150 (+60% AD) ⇒ 30/60/90/120/150 (+50% AD)
  • BONUS DAMAGE FROM CRITICAL STRIKES +50% Damage ⇒ +35% Damage
  • ON-HIT DAMAGE 100%, reduced to 25% for subsequent hits ⇒ 75%, reduced to 18.75% for subsequent hits
E - Wuju Style
  • TRUE DAMAGE 30/38/46/54/62 (+35% bonus AD) ⇒ 30/37/44/51/58 (+30% bonus AD)
R - Highlander
  • COOLDOWN 85 seconds ⇒ 100/90/80 seconds




Mid-Patch Updates

Teamfight Tactic's patch 12.5b has been pushed to live and the official patch notes have been updated with the changes:

"March 8th, Balance Changes

With a longer patch than usual, we've got a larger mid-week update than usual. Our intentions here are to keep the meta as healthy as possible until patch 12.6 goes live March 30th, while also decreasing the speed of combat.

 Even before patch 12.5 went live, the pace of combat has interfered with the clarity of each battle.This pace has been accelerated with high damage from champions, and after looking at the data, we’ve been able to confirm that the damage is just that—too damn high. So, we’re shipping more numeric changes than the typical mid-week update, which we think will slow down combat with the outcome of increasing clarity and thereby empowering informed decision making. TL;DR Combat you can understand is combat you can better control!

Augments
Some trait overperformance (Debonair, Twinshot) and underperformance (Hextech, Enforcer) can be tied to the power of their high-roll trait linked Augments. We’re doing a quick sweep of the most offensive cases to keep the meta diversity wide by tightening the power disparity between the best and worst trait-linked Augments.
  • Built Different Attack Speed: 50/60/70% ⇒ 60/70/80%
  • Hexnova (Hextech) Mana reave range: 1 ⇒ 2 Hexes
  • Irresistible Charm Damage reduction: 20% ⇒ 15%
  • One For All Attack Damage & Ability Power per Stack: 20 ⇒ 15
  • Sharpshooter (Twinshot) bounce damage reduction amount: 50% ⇒ 60%
  • Sniper’s Nest (Sniper) stacking Damage amplification: 10% ⇒ 8% (total: 40% ⇒ 32%)
  • So Small (Yordle) Dodge chance: 35% ⇒ 25%
  • Three’s Company can now only appear on Round 1-4
  • True Justice (Enforcer) Health threshold to active true damage: 50% ⇒80%
Traits
While many compositions have emerged viable in 12.5 a couple are looking too good, while one is striking out. While Stiker has struggled, many of its units have seen success in other comps, so we’re nerfing the units while buffing the trait to hopefully see Striker verticals open up as a viable option.
  • Clockwork Base Attack Speed: 10/40/80% ⇒ 10/35/80%
  • Debonair Health: 200/450/800 ⇒200/400/700
  • Debonair Ability Power: 20/45/80 ⇒ 20/40/70
  • Innovator Mechanical Bear Armor & Magic Resist: 70 ⇒ 55
  • Innovator Mechanical Dragon Armor & Magic Resist: 100 ⇒ 90
  • Striker Attack Damage: 30/65/110 ⇒ 30/70/120
  • Syndicate Armor & Magic Resist: 55 ⇒ 50
  • Syndicate 7 Bonus: 60% ⇒ 50%
Champions
We’re nerfing a series of core units to stronger compositions to create a more level (and slower) playing field for the next three weeks. Below I’ll provide some brief context for each composition:

Despite Twitch’s nerf in patch 12.5, reroll rat has been sinking his teeth on the cheese without triggering the trap that reroll comps often find themselves in—falling off in the late game. By hitting his AD scaling as he levels up, he’ll still be strong with levels (which provide a ton of base stats), but you may need damage from other sources later on.

Almost every variation of Debonair is overperforming, and it’s time the Debonairs become philanthropic with their power by giving some of their time in the spotlight to other comps.

Speaking of spotlights, a few Socialite units have become core enablers of various compositions, from Irelia carry comps, to Innovator, and the more rare, but powerful Enchanter Sniper comps.

Ahri’s orb pondering isn’t the only thing making the Syndicate a force to be reckoned with. Rerolling for one 2-cost carry often leads to many 3-star power houses for the price of one, leading to a focus on small, but widespread base damage nerfs across the entire shadowy organization.

With damage decreasing we’re shipping preemptive nerfs to Morgana and Vex to keep their tankiness in check.

Finally, we’re adding some power to our worst performing Legendary units to make them feel more like that boss that keeps killing you at the start of the game and less like reach trait bots.
  • Brand VIP Sear reduced damage for second fireball: 30% ⇒ 45%
  • Twitch Piercing Bolt Attack Damage scaling: 125/130/140% ⇒ 125%
  • Ashe Attack Damage: 70 ⇒ 60
  • Corki Bombardment Damage: 220/275/350 ⇒ 200/260/333
  • Rek’Sai Furious Bite base Heal: 150/200/350 ⇒ 200/225/400
  • Rek’Sai Furious Bite bonus Heal: 250/350/500 ⇒ 275/350/600
  • Syndra Force of Will Damage: 225/325/500 ⇒ 225/300/425
  • Talon Blade’s End Damage: 450/650/950 ⇒ 450/600/850
  • Zyra Grasping Spines Damage: 325/450/675 ⇒ 275/375/575
  • Gnar GNAR! Attack Damage scaling: 185% ⇒ 175%
  • Lucian Relentless Pursuit Damage: 185/295/315 ⇒ 175/275/300
  • Morgana max Mana nerf: 60/120 ⇒ 70/130
  • Senna Attack Speed: 0.75 ⇒ 0.7
  • Vex max Mana nerf: 40/80 ⇒ 50/90
  • Ahri Damage per Additional Orb on Same Target: 80% ⇒ 60%
  • Draven Attack Damage: 80 ⇒ 75
  • Irelia Attack Damage: 85 ⇒ 80
  • Sivir Ricochet Bounce Attack Damage scaling: 33% ⇒ 40%
  • Galio Health: 1200 ⇒ 1300
  • Kai’Sa Icathian Monsoon Damage per missile: 70/90/180 ⇒ 75/100/180
Bug Fix
  • Mana gREAVEance: Cutthroat (Assassin Augment) now increases the target’s mana by the intended 50% instead of 65%
  • Fixed an issue preventing Knife’s Edge, Battlemage, Featherweights, and Tri Force from being offered on 3-3 and 4-6
  • My type of math: Calculated Loss no longer grants 2 gold on wins"

Prior to the full notes being updated, Mort shared context and a changelist over on twitter:


The State of Competitive - Spring 2022

Here's Riot Codebear & Riot Riru with a dev blog on the state of competitive - "A look at the state of competitive today and thoughts on its future."

With the 2022 seasons of both ranked and Clash underway, we wanted to take some time to talk about the state of competitive play as we see it today. 
Goals: 
As with every season, we like to continually review our goals and evaluate how we’re tracking towards them. Specifically, for competitive play, we focus heavily on:
  • Competitive Integrity: Players have an even playing field in their competitive matches
  • Progression Opportunities: Players have meaningful goals to reach for
  • Team or Organized Play: Players are aware of, and can participate in, opportunities to play with others of similar intent and skill
We evaluate these goals by reviewing player sentiment and other metrics such as match availability (time to queue), quality (are matches competitive and fair), and whether or not matches are compelling to participate in (are they satisfying, do they deliver on player intent, and do they offer a sense of progression). Ultimately, we want to bring everyone a competitive game filled with opportunities that match their individual intent and expectations. 
To do this, we try to create experiences in the form of different game modes and mechanics that match your play intent and expectations. For example, Solo/Duo Queue is all about creating a competitive environment to prove your mastery of League at the individual level, while Clash is there to test your mettle as a team. Both experiences have their strengths and weaknesses, but are generally going in the direction we’ve been targeting. Let’s dig in. 
What’s Happening Now? 
We have some clear issues with our overall matchmaking and queue health that we want to address early in the season. These include the following updates:
  • Revival MMR: We’ve found that our current systems aren’t as accurate as we’d hoped in maintaining the expected MMR of players that have taken a break from the game, be it a few weeks or a year plus. As such, we’re implementing a more dynamic approach to Revival MMR and MMR decay across all queues that should provide those players with fairer matches in their first 5-10 games back as they rediscover their muscle memory and game knowledge.
  • Boosting Evaluation: We addressed some boosting issues late last year, but we’re still not happy with the current state of the game here. Looking at Ranked Flex queue in particular, we saw issues with low MMR and high MMR combined premades that abused MMR discrepancy and account sharing to rapidly boost accounts to where they didn’t belong. We addressed this in the short term by restricting the top tier players to only playing with other accounts at similar ranks. We acknowledge there’s a lot more we should do here, and we plan on working directly with our anti-cheat team to identify solutions that will hopefully improve the integrity of Ranked Flex queue.
  • Challenges Launch: We’re getting close to the launch of Challenges. Its been a complex project with its own unique challenges (pun definitely intended), but we are happy with how expansive we’ve been able to make it and are excited to roll it out to players globally. We’re currently planning for Challenges to go live in patch 12.9!
That said, the launch of Challenges is just the beginning. We plan to continually invest in leveling up Challenges so it lives up to our vision as a robust progression experience for all League players. 
Ranked Queue Health and the “Premade Problem” 
From a high level viewpoint, Solo/Duo queue is currently in one of the healthiest states we’ve ever seen. Autofill is at its lowest ever global rate hovering between 0.5% and 3% of player games. Queue times are at a 2 year low in many large regions and hovering firm in our small regions. Lastly, MMR accuracy is strong, where 99% of players are playing with those within a maximum of 2 divisions of their rank with a steady win-prediction accuracy to back it up. 
That said, we do see issues with Solo/Duo Queue that consistently point to our accommodation of premade duos–this directly adds quality and population volatility into the matchmaking mix. It causes games with duos of imbalanced MMR to impact our autofill/secondary role rates (sometimes double the chances), queue times (~10 second increase for players per game on average), and most importantly-game quality metrics (upwards of a 10% win-rate spread in both directions). 
On the flip side, we’ve started to see a significant decline in the health of Ranked Flex queue where queue times (~7 min on average for 3 person parties) and match quality (2-4 division discrepancies between teams) have diverged significantly. The ironic thing here is that the total population in Ranked Flex remains healthy, but the premade distribution and make-up of that population has shifted to a point where it’s difficult to make matches at a quality bar we’d like. 
The root cause of this is the high number of 3 person parties that want to play together, with not enough 1s and 2s to fill them out as these solo/duo players can just opt to play a different game mode. This can cause those matchmaking envelopes to expand to a point where queue times and quality expectations cannot reconcile. 
Additionally, the difficulties making quality matches for our most popular premade size amplify the impact of disruptive actors in the queue like boosters (who queue as duos with their boostee) and account sellers (who queue as solo) such that the queue itself overall becomes unhealthy, especially at the top level. 
To put it simply, our inability to match premades in a compatible way is a detriment to the system that doesn’t have a path to get back to being healthy without significant change. 
In the past when we saw this, we attempted to resolve these issues by merging both queues together dynamically. With learnings from Dynamic Queue (which we won’t be revisiting) and a deeper understanding of player intent now, we know that’s not going to work. So what do we do? 
What we’re investigating:
  • Solo Only Mode: In order to match player intent and provide the healthiest competitive individual queue possible, we’re re-evaluating our take on Solo/Duo and exploring a world where solo players play in solo queue and premades play in Ranked Flex or Organized 5’s modes.
On paper, the system health and quality indicators look really good. For example in Solo Only Queue:
  • We would expect an even further decrease in autofill and secondary rates
  • Queue times could decrease by up to ~5% for 99.9% of players
  • Winrate advantages due to team disparities would vanish completely
  • Boosting would be eradicated
  • We would expect between-team and within-team MMR for 99% of players to be within one division’s rank of each other during peak hours
In addition, we would likely see the following for our Ranked Flex queue:
  • An increase in queue population
  • Drastic improvements to match quality
  • Significant decrease in queue times for parties of 3
  • Increase in overall match quality and competitiveness
  • Increased opportunity for group/organized play
All that said, we absolutely want to be confident that our duo population, which is fairly significant in size, can still find a competitive environment before making any large changes to the current systems. This means re-investing in Ranked Flex queue integrity with our anti-cheat team and finding a natural way for Solo play to connect with Ranked Flex/Clash. 
We’re approaching this topic seriously and with care, and will provide an update further on in the year on if it’s an area we can realistically move forward with. 
Additional areas of focus include:
  • Re-evaluating our queue portfolio: We believe a healthy competitive system is more than just ranked modes. It also includes the other game modes like normals and ARAM. This means that in order to keep the game healthy, it’s also important to continually re-visit your other game modes on a regular basis.
We get to ask ourselves “what do changes that make our non-ranked queues as healthy as possible look like?” 
Opportunities like:
  • What does blind pick look like if we guarantee you can get the Champion you want to play and not have to fight for it in Champ Select?
  • How do the compelling and strategic aspects of Clash expand to something that’s readily available and accessible for all players, yet still engaging for those that like to play with a premade 5s team?
  • How can we better connect esports with the general public’s play aspirations? How can efforts like Champions Queue be integrated into the core game for the larger player base in the future?
  • Further Expanding Progression: With the launch of Challenges coming soon, we’re hoping to take stock of the health of our overall progression systems. The intent here is to evaluate the impact of how a broader progression system affects the health of the game. Our expectation is that players who feel that they have meaningful progression options outside of ranked won’t be forced to take part in competitive queues when they otherwise don’t want to. If we find that play patterns for players include more variety for the majority of players, then we can start to focus more on perfecting exciting new features for specific subsets of players that creates a stronger and more unified set of game systems long term.
What you might expect to see are progression options that span into rotating game modes, exciting annual events, and potentially even other core games like Teamfight Tactics.
We’re excited to take a deeper look into our League systems and queues to provide the healthiest long-term version of League that is both competitive and engaging. 
As always, see you on the Rift."

 

New LoL Merch

Three new League of Legends figures are now available in the merch store  including Kayn, Warwick and an XL sized Ornn! Each of these items also include a summoner icon!


Miscellaneous

"The war in Ukraine has caused an expanding humanitarian crisis. Since it began, we’ve heard from players around the world that they want to help—and so do we. 
From March 5 to March 12 all proceeds from battle pass sales for VALORANT, Legends of Runeterra, Teamfight Tactics, and Wild Rift, as well as the new Bee skin line in League of Legends, will be donated to support humanitarian relief efforts in the region. 
In addition to the player supported fundraiser, Riot will be donating $1M across three humanitarian nonprofits:
  • International Medical Corps
  • Médecins Sans Frontières / Doctors Without Borders
  • Polish Red Cross
All proceeds from both Riot’s donation and the player fundraiser will directly support humanitarian relief in Ukraine and other affected areas."

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