Hey everyone, Joe here again on behalf of the League dev team.
A lot has happened since the last Riot Pls so today I want to get straight
into it and talk about the state of the game.
We know there’s been a lot of change over the last few months
from the jungle changes, to how much carry potential an individual player has
to the big shakeup in botlane.
From some of you we’ve heard excitement about how fresh the game feels and how
much more open the champion pool is now.
But from many others we’ve heard that the rate of change has felt
overwhelming and we’ve ALSO heard your specific concerns about individual changes.
First of all, I want to let you guys know that for the rest of the year
we intend to let things settle and make fewer large changes.
I also want to talk though the major changes one-by-one
so you know where we stand on things.
First of all - are we happy with how the jungle changes have landed?
Overall - we are happy with these changes.
Our primary goal here was to reduce how often early lanes were decided by junglers.
Based on early gold, XP and kill participation trends
we do think we achieved this goal.
As a secondary benefit, these changes have helped drive more interaction
between junglers and create room for more early game lane action overall.
We also believe the scuttlecrab objective is in a good spot.
Important enough to demand attention, but not so valuable it deterministically snowballs one side.
As of now, we have no additional big changes planned for the jungle this season.
How about the state of individual carry potential and overall game pace?
Towards the end of last year, we started hearing more and more feedback
from you guys that - over time - solo carry potential had been nerfed too hard.
After looking into it, we agreed individual agency was too low
and in March, made changes to tower and shutdown bounty gold in response.
These changes accomplished our goal of increasing individual agency.
At the same time, the rate of snowballing had increased and so we've
needed to dial that back over time.
We’ve made further changes to the bounty system, reduced gold from early towers
and lengthened the Baron encounter to give more opportunities to contest.
Since 8.14, the rate of snowballing has improved significantly
and we'll be monitoring this to make sure it remains in a good spot.
One thing we weren’t excited to see was how prevalent gold funnelling as a
strategy became, especially in pro play.
We’ve already made a number of fixes to address this issue.
Are we happy with the state of botlane?
While we are happy that whole new classes are seeing play bot lane
it was not our intention to get there in a way that made marksmen non-viable.
We know we missed your expectations around the role
and we're committed to fixing these issues.
Crit ADCs in particular were hit hard as their power spikes got pushed back
just as the meta shifted towards games being decided more quickly.
Over the last few patches we’ve been focused on restoring their viability.
To date we’ve shipped individual buffs to Trist, Jinx, Twitch, Varus and Caitlyn.
We’ve also buffed crit items like Brawler's Gloves and Stormrazor.
And in 8.15 we’re doing more work to shift their power up from late game
to early and mid game.
As we’ve said in the past, it is a goal for us to support more classes in more positions.
But we know we can do a better job landing these changes
in a less disruptive way.
Our goal is not to change the game for change’s sake
and if it feels that way to you, chances are it means we haven’t done
a good enough job with the changes themselves, how we released them
or how we communicated about them.
We acknowledge that introducing this much change in the middle of the season
over multiple patches wasn’t a successful approach.
Many of you expressed frustration with this clearly
and I want to restate that for the remainder of the year our plan is to reduce the amount of change overall.
Please do keep sharing your thoughts around this topic with us.
They really do influence the decisions we make.
This week we released an alpha game mode we’re calling “Nexus Blitz.”
With this mode, we’re trying something different.
Nexus Blitz isn’t a Featured Game Mode.
This time we’re shooting for something that could last longer
and be a permanent addition to League.
To support that goal, the way we’re building the mode is new too.
Rather than shipping Nexus Blitz as a finished game mode, we’re putting it
out there as an “experimental alpha”, which means it’s basically a big open
playtest on the live servers, no invitation needed.
Nexus Blitz features a new 5v5 map with one and a half lanes
and a compact jungle designed for duos.
Compared to SR, Blitz is meant to have an overall shorter game length
with constant action and unpredictable events that encourage wild team fights.
Nexus Blitz also features unique gameplay mechanics like an “on fire” buff
that you receive for 4 consecutive kills.
Our hope is that this mode is a great choice for when you want to have
a quick lower stress game with your friends.
The whole point of how we’re developing this mode is to make sure
we're onto something you guys are looking for, so let us know what you think!
We’ve heard you when it comes to issues with the client experience.
These issues have been a bit difficult to pinpoint, so currently we’re adding
instrumentation to the client to give us more precise data on how and why
these issues manifest.
We will fix these issues, and as we make progress we’ll keep you informed.
As always, we want to get to as many quality of life changes as we can.
After 8 years, we’ve modernized the in-game cursor, but don’t worry
you purists can still use the old cursor if you want.
At long last, you can now tell where all those summoner icons
you've earned over the years came from
and you can see how your CS stacks up to other players on the new stats page.
It’s been a while since we updated our mobile app, but recently we added news
and notifications so check it out and let us know what you think.
We’ve kept a number of the improvements to ARAM from the Bilgewater event
and we’ve made changes behind the scenes that improve the experience of playing over wi-fi.
We hope these changes improve your experience with the game.
If there are other quality of life features you’re interested in, please let us know.
Before I go, a quick update on Clash.
As you all already know, Clash had major technical issues and as a result
we had to postpone launch.
I’ve already talked in depth about what went wrong in a dev blog
which we've linked below in case you missed it.
We’ve made some good progress on the technical improvements needed to launch
Clash again and we’ll be testing these on PBE in the near future with broader
regional tests towards the end of the year.
Once again, we apologize for the delay. We’re very eager to get Clash up and running
but want to make sure we’ve fully addressed the issues.
As we head into the final few patches before Worlds, we’re looking forward to
seeing how the meta settles and what new creative strategies come into favor.
We’ve also got some new content to share soon that's outta this world.
That’s it for me.
As always, thank you guys so much for playing.
We’ll see you on the Rift... and maybe beyond.