"We've been considering a mana cost reduction to Golden Aegis as well, though not sure off the top of the head how that change has been testing. Definitely under examination though, agree it can be sometimes be pretty punishing pushing that button when it's not ranked."

"Malphite's still got some issues as a design certainly, give his ability to spam a click to hit spell on you in lane and/or burst, CC really hard as a tanky melee mage. What we're looking at here as a result is whether there are other areas of his kit it's appropriate to buff instead, give him a bit more power in healthy areas (passive CD late game's one of the things we've discussed for example, given him a bit more poke resistance in sieges)."

"Right now we're looking at buffing a few top laners that are underperforming (in addition to J4 and Rumble Malphite's also under consideration). I'm sure at some point in the future there will be cases where nerfs are the appropriate choice again too of course though."

"No fixed plans yet. We're keeping an eye on a number of top laners that are strong at the moment. Depending on the champion in question and how they continue to perform/how other top laners do might be appropriate to nerf them next patch, 3 patches from now, next year or never."

Vesh on Soraka Rework

Morello

Vesh

Vesh

"This is a really really well done analysis. Like seriously. It's true that a dedicated heal spell cannot really be interactive. However, maybe there is some cool space to make a heal that is somehow enemy-interactive. Nami's does this to some degree, and I tend to think it's one of the better designed heals in our game.

I actually think your older idea for her passive had a better direction. Damage reduction feels really shitty for everyone involved and is incredibly powerful for how unappreciated it is.

In general we want to create interactive gameplay patterns. It's acceptable for a single spell to have little to no interaction provided it is a part of an interactive pattern. Currently Soraka's W is not this.

I'm working on a couple of different pattern directions currently and have tried a few others that have failed.

Your goals for starcall being important to the overall pattern are good, but also remember that starcall by itself has low overall gameplay/counterplay. There might be something cool we can add to the rest of the pattern that makes a simple heal an integral part of interacting with enemies. Gonna test some stuff today and if any of it shapes up to be promising I'll share some of the results!"

Vesh

"In general having a character that is most successful by being "passive" doesn't promote any real gameplay. Interesting multiplayer gameplay is the result of meaningful interactions between players."

"One thing I would like to maintain is the overall mechanical simplicity of the character. If I can find cool mastery points that doesn't make her targeting paradigms more complex then I would prefer those type of solutions. Not sure if this will be possible, but I think starcall can maintain its auto-target provided that it creates followup gameplay that does have interaction."

Vesh

"We could do this, but if the goal is to preserve Soraka as our true "healer" champion then this won't work because we'd have to take away power from the heals to accomplish this in a satisfactory way."

Vesh's

"Wish is a great spell. Wouldn't change it unless it was getting some new interaction, but in general it's already awesome."

Vesh

"His previous iteration had her passive giving her increased regen to allies as Soraka casted. Regen auras aren't really appreciable either, but the idea of selfish team power over negating enemy power was sound.

Another approach is just to allow Soraka herself to scale up by saying something like "every spell that hits a champion grants Soraka X bonus AP for Y seconds, this buff stacks up to Z times."

Then both her heals and damage become more threatening in a way the Soraka player can personally appreciate. This is more of a tank pattern, but I could see a world in which Soraka has a passive similar to this."

"In both cases, the real question to ask is "where can we get gameplay out of heals?" Both a sustained healer and a burst healer fill different functions, but what we really need is a way to give heals gameplay. Soraka's current W does this to some degree because it grants massive amounts of armor which is only useful in combat but also causes the enemy to re-evaluate their targeting decisions. Unfortunately, for the armor to be powerful enough to matter, we had to take away raw healing power. I believe that players who want to play the healer character probably want big heals. The problem I'm solving now is how to give them the big heal moments in a way that causes interaction with the enemy."

The Tribunal and Chat Restriction Experiments

Lyte

"This is actually the main problem. Tribunal in its current form is having some technical issues, and we're assessing what we're going to do with it long-term.



Specifically, we've learned a lot about how a system like the Tribunal works and what the disadvantages were (i.e = we've openly acknowledged speed as one of Tribunal's weaknesses, and how it's lacking feedback for players who report). We've also learned a lot about how we would create a better system to promote teamwork and reduce negativity in Ranked Mode but it'd be pretty difficult to do with the current Tribunal system.



For the short-term, we may close Tribunal temporarily and try some experiments where we aggressively hit players in Ranked Modes with severe Chat Restrictions using some of the more advanced detection models we've been building in the last few months.



But, we're still debating the right steps to take. I'm curious to know if players are interested in us pursuing the aggressive Chat Restriction experiments--even if they are automatically given to players that are flagged by some of our newer detection systems."

Lyte

"This is a good point, but one thing to consider is that Chat Restrictions are a "lighter" punishment than bans. A 10% false positive rate in Chat Restrictions might be OK, if the player is only getting 3 games of Chat Restrictions; however, a 10% false positive rate in bans might be completely unacceptable.

We have to determine what the right accuracy thresholds are, but I think we can be a bit more aggressive with Chat Restrictions than with bans."

"Banning from Ranked only is a possible approach, but a bit more extreme than starting with some Chat Restrictions.

If Chat Restrictions in some automated form does not greatly improve the Ranked experience, we could always try bans from Ranked Queues specifically, and figure out some way for players to "earn" back their Ranked privileges."

"Nothing is set in stone yet, there's actually a lot of different approaches we could take.

For example, in Team Builder we use sophisticated language models to determine the quality of communication--was it positive or negative and how much in either direction? Theoretically, we could use the same models to assess a player's use of language and if it's too negative, automatically apply a Chat Restriction.

We could also support the above with accurate reports from players to "confirm" the language model's verdicts... lots of possibilities. The question is whether players would be open and supportive of the experiments."

Lyte

"Totally agree, the long-term goal is to make being sportsmanlike the path of least resistance--if we make being good the right thing to do and the easiest thing to do, players tend to be good."

Lyte

"This is definitely an 'obvious' thing we should do, we were just focused on Team Builder for awhile so never got around to it."

He continued , mentioning Golden Aegis' mana cost is also under consideration:As for, he shared a few ideas they are throwing around:When asked if these top lane buffs for, andwill lead to buffs for some of top lane's strongest picks, he noted When pressed for specifics on champions other than the ones mentioned, he replied As mentioned a few days ago byis currently working on a rework forkicked off today's discussion by replying to a summoner's lengthy analysis ( check it out here ) onWhen asked if "being passive really that bad?",In response to feedback that mashingQ while trying to use other abilities isn't exactly engaging, he commented When asked about givingheal a dual use like her E,As forthoughts oncurrent ultimate Wish, he replied also spit balled a few ideas based on the summoner's suggestion for Soraka's passive:He continued ventured on to reddit to answer a few questions about the Tribunal and see if players are interested in experiments to hand out more Chat Restrictions. continued , commenting on chat restrictions vs bans:He continued , fielding a question if being banned from ranked queues was on the table:When asked to elaborate on his "even if they are automatically given to players that are flagged" comment, he noted also replied to a summoner who commented on the parrallels between chat restrictions and sportsmanship:When asked if there were any chance for summoners to receive notifications when someone they've reported has been punished,