Red Post Collection: QGT: 9/1, Updated Honor Rewards & More

Today's red post collection includes this week's Quick Gameplay Thoughts on Zeri & Yuumi, an update on Honor rewards, and more!

Table of Contents

Quick Gameplay Thoughts: 9/1

Here's Riot Phroxzon with this week's quick gameplay thoughts - "Balancing Zeri and Yuumi."

"Welcome to Quick Gameplay Thoughts! We wanted to let you know that QGT’s will be going on hiatus for a while as we focus on preparing for Worlds and the upcoming Preseason. We’ll be using this break as an opportunity to reboot this series to focus more on relevant gameplay topics that are important to players. Thanks for reading and we’ll be back better than ever! 

Today we’d like to share our thoughts on 2 pretty controversial champions: Zeri and Yuumi. Both of these champions are difficult to balance because of 4 values that often contradict one another:

• Perceptions of fairness and counterplay
• Champion is exciting to play and has “high moments”
• Performance in Elite/Pro play
• Performance in Average play 

Zeri has some amazing high moments. Whether you’re kiting out your opponents to secure a pentakill or surprising them by coming in over a wall with a massive W to secure a double kill, Zeri can be an incredibly fun champion. Every champion needs to have exciting high moments or else they risk feeling boring to players and don’t end up getting playtime. Having said that, high moments often conflict with an opponent’s perception of fairness, because flashy and cool moments for one player can often feel frustrating for their opponents. 

Using Zeri as an example, she has 3 awesome moments: infinitely scaling mobility from R, W poke, and setup/large map mobility movements with E. However, when these are combined and optimized we do not believe they offer her opponent’s sufficient counterplay opportunities. 

Of these, her W tends to be stronger for average players (albeit frustrating when too powerful), while hyper optimizing R and map mobility are stronger for Elite players. Long term, reducing her ability to “go infinite” in teamfights while maintaining her ability to make plays around the map is where we’re looking to optimize her. This will take time to explore and implement, so for now we’re taking her out of the limelight until we can land on a healthy and sustainable direction. 

Looking at Yuumi, she has been very synergistic with Zeri, Twitch, and Sivir in the meta and we’ve had to nerf her as a result. We wanted to tap down some of her multiplicative, team focused outputs from her E and have her success be more dependent on taking aggressive action (like poking with her Q). Longer term, we think Yuumi’s laning phase performance should be more important to her success. Reducing her strength on fighters in favor of marksmen and reducing her coordination burden will put Yuumi in a better state long term while retaining the aspects of Yuumi that her players care about. 

Hopefully this helps give some more context to the changes you saw in patch 12.16 for these 2 champions. While we’re busy getting ready for Worlds right now, we want to reassure you that we will be working on new ways to deliver the gameplay fantasy Zeri and Yuumi players have come to know and love. As always, thank you for playing and see you on the Rift!"

Updated Honor Rewards

Hey players, TimTamMonster, your Product Lead for Behavioral Systems, here with an exciting update. Last we talked, I kicked off our new approach to Behavioral Systems, shifting our focus to the 95% of players who are only occasionally disruptive. Though the vast majority of players usually behave well, the occasional times that they do act out make up the bulk of player feedback reports. 

So far, we’ve seen a lot of success in this approach—more than you might think, given we haven't been particularly loud about the changes we've been making. At the same time, there’s a lot that we’ve been surprised by and we are continuing to learn to apply to future updates. 

Recent Changes 

With Honor Recall, players are able to celebrate their hard-earned honorable behavior in game. As a result, we’ve seen improvements in sentiment on player behavior, particularly in positive behavior experienced in games. Yet we didn’t see a change in the way players use Honor (which we expected). We know players sometimes use Honor to reward good play rather than good behavior. We were hoping that with a clearer link between the system and the reward, players would be encouraged to use it as a way to show their appreciation of good behavior. Our hypothesis is that players have been more inclined to behave positively to receive the recall, but because the reward isn’t directly tied to how a player honors others, honoring behavior hasn’t changed. 

With opt-in for End of Game chat, players aren’t exposed to chat unless they want to be. We had worried that this may result in players not communicating at all in End of Game, even if they wanted to. But we’ve seen similar numbers of players using End of Game chat, so players who want to communicate are still doing so with the added bonus of not requiring others to get involved if they don’t want to. 

Updated Honor Rewards 

On to today’s exciting announcement—we want to ensure you continue to feel that your efforts to behave positively are directly recognized with appropriate rewards.
Three Honors SkinlineYou’ve told us more times than I can count that the rewards for reaching the highest level of Honor are stale. As promised in my last post, I’m thrilled to share The Three Honors Skinline and its 2022 entrant: Three Honors Malzahar. 

Grey Warwick and Medieval Twitch 

We also wanted to touch on the other rewards you get for Honor. Historically, we have added a new chroma for the Medieval Twitch and Grey Warwick skins each year for players to choose from when they reach Honor 5. The Three Honors skin line is replacing these new chromas. Honor 5 capsules will still contain the token you can redeem for Twitch, Warwick, or their previous chromas. 

How is Honor calculated? 

We know Honor is a relatively opaque system, and it can be hard to know how well you’re progressing toward the next checkpoint. This is intentional because making Honor too transparently "completable" draws focus away from positive behavior as a mentality and instead toward gamifying or min-maxing the rewards system it's attached to. 

Rather than creating a feature that would allow you to directly track and gamify your Honor progress, I wanted to provide some insight here on how we calculate Honor to help your journey to Honor 5. 

Behaviors that positively affect your Honor score 

Honor progress per game gets faster the more consistently positive you are. The rare slip-up won't kill your momentum, but flip-flopping between negative and positive behavior will slow you down a lot. 

In addition, if everyone on your team honors someone, each of you gets an extra increase to your honor score, even if you weren't directly honored. The best League games are the ones where all five teammates are having a great time, so if you see an ally struggling to stay positive, help them out! 

Lesser-known fact: You receive extra honor from matchmade teammates over premade teammates. This is to prevent honor trading between friends from being the dominant way to progress through Honor. 

Finally, game mode also impacts the amount of honor you receive: Ranked Solo = Ranked Flex > Normals = ARAM = Event Modes > Co-op vs AI. This reflects the stakes, as well as amount of social interaction, each queue offers. 

Behaviors that negatively affect your Honor score 

Whether or not you get punished for the behavior we detect, all detected disruptive behaviors will impact Honor. The impact can result in a decrease in your honor level, a slowing in your honor progression, or both. The more severe the behavior, the more it will impact your score. 

Looking Forward 

We’re working on exciting updates that will allow us to evaluate text live in-game, preventing you from being exposed to the detected inappropriate text and muting those players for the rest of the game. We’re also finally going to be adding the ability to report players in-game, as soon as the disruptive behavior happens. We’ll be adding a pre-made chat channel, allowing you to maintain communication with those you’ve selected in your team without needing to be exposed to potentially disruptive chat by randomly matchmade teammates. And we’re working on improving your ability to play again with those you’ve enjoyed playing with in the past by providing easy ways to create parties with players you’ve honored or have honored you. 

We’re committed to continually improving this space with all of you. We know how critical it is to your League experience, you’ve told us as much. To all of you who took up my call to action in my last post, I want to personally say thank you. Staying calm can be hard, and it may not feel like it makes a difference each game, but on a wider scale and over time, it does. We've seen slow but steady improvement in recent times, and it is making a real impact on this community we’re all a part of. Thank you for coming on this journey together with us."

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