Hi, folks. I'm Andrei and I'm the lead gameplay designer for League of Legends.
We've recently just put out our pre-season patch for the year
and pre-seasons and mid-seasons are the times
where we can make bigger changes to the game
sort of improve things long-term or
address issues that are too disruptive to be dealt with during the year.
The removal of Aegis aura for example.
And recently we've been receiving a bunch of questions about
how we feel this pre-season's gone.
What's been good. What's missed.
And I wanted to share some thoughts with you
because that's a great question about the lessons we've taken away from pre-season.
This pre-season gave us some valuable lessons around how we communicate stuff to players.
Let's say a new champion. A good approach can often be to start
gradually...revealing information slowly.
Sort of teasing, here's a comic, here are some ability details.
Here's some backstory. Here's finally them on the PBE.
And that can be a pretty fun journey for people that
are interested in and engaged with that concept.
By contrast, for say, broader gameplay changes
such as plants or masteries or whatever.
We think it's much more important in retrospect
to give people all the context they need to understand
how this thing works, what its impact will be, etc., right up front.
And in retrospect with plants, we didn't do a great job of that.
Our initial communication was pretty light on the details
talking more about the removal of smite buffs
than plants themselves and
how they work, what they're meant to do, etc.
which left a number of people uncertain or pretty doubtful of them understandably.
So what we'd like to do in the future is
find better ways to give people the full context
all the details about some of our changes
when we're doing things like plants or masteries or whatever.
Maybe that means videos of full playtest games
you can actually get a real feel for what these things are like
in a realistic game setting.
Or maybe that means we need to get stuff onto the PBE
really shortly after it being talking about or revealing it initially.
But doing things like that should lead to
we think much clearer discussions and do a better job on our part
of giving you guys the context you need to understand what we're trying to do at least.
Another thing I wanted to talk about was the class updates
and what we've learned from those
both in the assassin update itself and looking back at some of the previous ones.
Something the assassin update really reinforced for us was
the value of what we've been calling thematic resonance.
Basically the changes we're making to a champion's kit
is really important that they reflect the theme and the personality of the character.
That's something we've put a lot of focus on with new champions already.
And this has really driven home to us the value of keeping that sort of focus
when we're updating existing characters, even in a small way.
Things like the wall-jumping on Talon
or the blade pick-ups on Katarina
as both really well tied in
with their theme, their personality, the sort of feel you get off them.
Make those feel much more natural and intuitive
in part because I think in some of the past ones
especially the older ones, we sometimes miss that.
You know, going for novelty or distinctiveness
at the expense of things that felt right on the champion.
Skarner's crystals probably being the strongest example of that
of something that does create distinctive gameplay
but doesn't really feel right for him or how he plays.
Another thing the assassin update really emphasized for us
was the value of making high skill curves on champions really apparent to everybody in the game.
Katarina, for example, has a much more difficult mastery curve than she used to.
There was already a moderate amount there.
We've added some extra on as well though.
But it's been done in a way that is really apparent to
both the Kat player and to everybody else in the game
whether she's doing really well or doing really poorly.
That means you sort of, you play around it.
You can celebrate those successes
or celebrate those cases where you shut her down really hard.
By contrast in our previous update with the mages
we added some mastery curve to Vladimir, for example
but it's done in a less apparent way.
And that could make it somewhat more difficult to
make a champion both balanced and appreciable
in terms of what they're doing.
So going forwards, we're very much going to
put a lot of focus on getting those skill curves really visible
to other people in game.
In terms of the changes to support items
thinking Redemption and Knight's Vow primarily
there's a couple of things there that are big takeaways for us.
The first is the value of support items that have really apparent power.
This is something we talk about internally quite a lot, anyway
the difference between invisible power and really appreciable, visible power.
But say Redemption is a great example
of how much better something that's really concentrated and well-communicated can feel
than say, an invisible aura that, while it may be as powerful or more powerful
doesn't feel anywhere near as good.
The other thing that was reinforced for us was
the value of items that are really tailored to what you want to be doing as a champion.
Knight's Vow is a good example of that.
If you're buying that on somebody like Braum or Alistar
it lets you soak even more damage for your allies.
And then lets them help you out at the same time.
Similarly, if you're playing Soraka, and you want even more healing
Redemption can be a great way to double down on that
compared to items that are much more raw stat based
harder to feel power
but also just equally good on everybody.
We feel much more tailored items
give you a much...generally a better and more appreciated experience.
So pre-seasons tend to be times when the game's balance
gets a little bit out of whack for a while.
There's a lot of stuff changing at once.
And that was actually a bit harder than normal again this year
since we were introducing a new queue
and doing some MMR resetting at the exact same time
when those gameplay changes were going out.
So that meant that for a couple of week period there
it was a bit harder for us to get a good read on
what was out of line and what we should be changing.
Because of that, we're actually going to be doing a balance hot fix
a week after patch 6.24
to try and catch some of those outstanding balance problems.
We'd originally planned for 6.24 to be the final balance patch of the year.
But it looks like there's a few things that we should address
that we won’t have in that patch.
Nidalee, for example
is probably underperforming pretty hard in the new jungle.
So we want to take the opportunity to patch that sort of stuff up
rather than just leaving it over the entire holiday period.
Something else we've also been trying to focus on more this pre-season
is making systemic changes
to items or masteries before we change champions.
This time this means looking at things like Courage of the Colossus
which has been way to strong
or Fervor of Battle, too weak
Blade of the Ruined King, also too weak
and addressing those in a patch and then
looking at individual champions that are also affected by them later.
The goal there is to not overly nerf a champion
when the item was actually the problem.
Or over buff or fail to buff a champion enough
and we should've been addressing that foundational stuff first.
Finally, this pre-season has also been a really good reminder to us
of the value of getting people from outside of Riot in
to playtest our content really regularly and consistently.
In particular, the right people who have
deep knowledge of the champions we're reworking or
a good understanding of the game
who can deliver that feedback in really constructive and useful ways.
Scarra on Katarina was a really great example of that.
He's played a lot of Kat. He understands the game well.
The guy communicates really well too.
And we got him in to play a couple of work in progress kits
which was really helpful both in sort of a gut check on hey where are we going
and what sort of impacts do we think this sort of stuff will have.
That's something we're going to be looking to do much more consistently next year.
It's something we've done intermittently in the past.
And I think would benefit an awful lot from really focusing on more in the future.
So those are the big things that have been on our minds
in terms of lessons from gameplay changes in this year’s pre-season.
We’re certainly not done in terms of follow-up work for it though.
We’ve both got some more balance stuff coming shortly
and then a bunch of both balance and tuning follow up early next year.
I hope this has been an interesting and helpful look at some of the stuff we’ve been thinking about.
And thank you for watching.