Vesh

Lyte

boourns

Recent News

Vesh on 1/21 Renekton PBE Changes

Vesh has commented on the Renekton changes that hit the has commented on thechanges that hit the 1/21 PBE noting that they are a bit off and that we will see more changes soon.

"Hey guys, just a reminder that the numbers on PBE are not final. Sometimes weird stuff will go out but that's why it's the beta environment. This was a snapshot of an earlier iteration and you will see more changes soon. All of this feedback and conversation is great though and I really appreciate hearing your perspectives."

"All of these things can (and are being) tuned. Renekton will get a stronger late game to compensate for losing some of his early game sustain."

"Yes. the Ratio on Q is just flat out wrong. Really really really wrong. Please remember that PBE is a beta environment and some weird stuff comes and goes on there all the time."

Auto Smartcast Abilities

Boourns

"The decision to make an ability auto smart cast is a very conscious one from the champion designer. It's generally done because they believe that is the best way to use that ability effectively and the most fun (karthus q for example is supposed to be spammed and has low cost and cooldown). Or Riven's q, you need to be able to cast it quickly in order to have it be effective. The decision to make something auto smart cast is not taken lightly, it's pretty uncommon in champions.

Here's my 2 cents: I would like to see forced auto smart cast respect our smart cast with range indicator settings. The reason why it doesn't has to do with how auto smart cast is implemented, because it is a special case kind of thing it doesn't hook into the keybinds in the same way is my guess. Having said that, I don't think it would make sense to allow normal cast to override the smart cast behavior. I trust our champion designers to make good decisions, and I wouldn't want to disregard their design intent."

New Player Features and bot AI

boourns

"Actually, we do care a lot about the new player experience. There is a team dedicated to improving it! We're experimenting with a bunch of things like a landing page for new players with some (hopefully :) ) relevant information about the game and having a different set of free to play champions for new players so we don't have someone really complicated like Lee Sin or Jayce for new players.



I like your idea of having bot games start on purple side as well as blue, although I know there are a bunch of implications on the bot AI side because of how they're created. I'll mention it to the team, but can't promise that we'll have time to do it."

"Not really my specialty, but I know there are folks working on bot AI. I do not think harder custom game bots are part of the plan though. The custom bots are actually much "dumber" than the co-op vs. ai ones from what I understand because we can't be sure what combinations of human/bot players there will be"

Lyte on Team Builder

Lyte

Lyte : Agree. It's one of the most common feedback points we get internally as well, and we're working with our sound engineers to fix this as well as improve the music transitions as you progress through Team Builder.

Lyte : Point taken, we didn't notice this!

Lyte : During testing and probably the first few weeks of Live Beta, the estimated wait times will be inaccurate until the system collects enough data to tighten the estimates over time.

Lyte : We agree it'd be great to offer players a visual indicator for how much demand there was for certain roles. We're thinking about ways to do this, but want to make sure we've finished the core features. Is this something that would be needed before we do a Live Beta? Unsure.

Lyte : There's currently no ceremony when a match has been found :( We're working on this, and probably will do some kind of count-down timer and music transition to signal the start of a match before it jumps to loading screen.

Lyte: We tested prototypes where we offered the solo player some insight into the team, but it greatly increased the time it took to get teams formed and into a match. Basically, right now there's a one-way check where the Captain sees almost all the information and makes a Yes/No decision. Because Solo Players can just hit the "Find Me Another Group" button if they don't like the team they joined, we were OK with it being a one-way check for now since it greatly increased the speed that teams filled up.

Lyte : We thought about allowing reactive strategies according to the enemy team, but in the end we wanted to focus on the core Blind Pick ruleset. If we were to adopt Team Builder into Ranked, we would add all of the counter- and reactive strategies in drafting to the system.

Lyte : With regards to #2, we purposely hid Summoner Names for the initial decision in accepting a player into your team. We then reveal the name and allow them to chat with the team and figure out the team strategy; however, if Captains decide to look up a player via a third party website then boot him based on their statistics or recent performances, we actually will punish the Captains for this behavior on Live Servers.



Initially, Captains will get an increasing cool-down timer before they get a new player suggested to their team. If the pattern of behavior continues, Captains will receive a temporary ban from using Team Builder.

Steel Legion Garen E Particles Missing

RiotTroyzilla

"This should be fixed in the next patch."

This morning's red post collection featurescommenting that the recentPBE changes where not final and that we'll see more changes for him soon,responding to some of the community's feedback on Team Builder, a note that's E particles will be fixed next patch, anddiscussing the new player experience & bot ai.Continue reading for more information!He also commented on the Q ratio, saying:, a UI designer , jumped into a thread regarding abilities like Yasuo's Q being defaulted to smart cast controls ( automatically firing off when you hit the hot key instead of being up a targeting particle ), noting that such a decision is usually left up to the champion's designer:also fielded a question about improving the new player experience, noting Riot's recent addition of low player specific landing pages, champion rotation, and more in patch 4.1:He continued , mentioning that there is work being done to improve bot AI:Now that the team builder has wrapped up two more days of PBE testing, Lyte has jumped on the PBE community to answer a few questions and respond to the community's feedback.For the sake of clarity, I've organized these responses into a little bit of a Q&A. All the answers are fromand originate from this post. :Music is very nice, a bit too loud. Some little mute option would be lovely. Or a volume control!:No way to hop out of initial champ select without choosing champ. When you're choosing a champion to queue with to get paired into a team, everything else is greyed out, meaning you have to select a champ/skin, then hop out of queue. It'd be a bit more streamlined to make the middle top dialog box open again with the little cross box so you could hop out at this point.:Approx/actual time needs fixing, although i'm sure this is already on your radar.:Percentages of people queueing up for which lane when choosing would be neat addition. So we could gauge what to go for. Also would make neat stats. If 30% of people queueing up were going for bot lane and only 10% were queueing for jungle, that might sway me for what to queue if I was in a pinch. Or failing that, how about the names of the lanes when choosing a champ change colour dependent on relative queue size? Red for a long queue, blue for a short one or something.No sense of occasion for when a team is finally formed and joins the queue. It just quietly sulks into the loading screen with no notification. A little fanfare or something would be nice when the gang finally gets together.:Give a small insight into the team when you're a solo player and a match is found (How many top mid bot jungle). So you can save everyone time by just choosing decline instantly, instead of getting into the team, finding it's 5 mid and deciding you don't want part of that and jumping out again.: A look at the enemy team after our team has formed, but before the loading screen, coupled with an opportunity to change runes and masteries would be a lovely addition in my eyes. i've seen some games on team builder which could have gone the other way with different runes/masteries on certain champs.: The ability to look up your teammate's match history after he/she enters the lobby via websites like LoLKing. Since I know the usernames of my teammates, I can just view their recent performances and judge whether or not I want to kick them based on those results. If I see my teammate hasn't been doing too well on his/her past games, I can just substitute them for somebody else and not give that person the chance to play. This cycle can continue and the individual will keep being booted from every lobby he/she joins because each captain deems the player as 'bad'. A solution to this would be keeping everyone's username (except friends--if the captain invited any) anonymous until the loading screen.It turns out that the particles for's E have gone missing!Never fear!, a senior VFX artist, has commented that they will be fixed soon: