Hey, everyone.
I'm Jeremy, aka Riot Brightmoon.
And I'm Andrei, also known as Meddler.
So we're back as a follow up to our previous video.
We want to keep doing these.
As you can probably tell, though, they’re a little bit lower production value production
than some of the videos we've done in the past.
And that’s so that we can get these out to you faster.
So today is Tuesday, February 7th,
and we're hoping to get this out to you very soon after.
Now, of course, anything that happens after that, it's the future for us.
We can't talk about it. It hasn't happened.
So we're going to talk about the things we CAN talk about.
In terms of what we'll actually cover in these videos,
we're going to cover a wide range of topics, we think.
We're not going to touch much, though, on balance
or the state of the meta—
not because we don't think those things are important,
but because we think we've got a lot of other channels
that can cover those quicker and in more detail than these can.
Now, in terms of who you'll see in the videos,
it's probably also not going to always be Jeremy and I.
In the future we're gonna get a range of people
and also talk about topics that they're the experts in.
Before we go into our regular stuff, I do wanna note we’re a couple of weeks
out from the security breach we talked to you folks about.
We’re mainly up and running again,
but we’re still dealing with a few wobbles and rebuilding a few things internally.
So thank you for the patience on the disruption that's created.
So let's start with our first topic: New champions and champion updates.
Now, over the years on League of Legends, we've had varying levels
of focus on creating new champions or updating older champions,
and we reassess that
level of investment every year, and that helps us build out our roadmaps.
So one of the things that we have always committed to, though,
is making sure that every champion, whether it's a new one or an old one,
is really high quality and provides an evergreen experience
for players, even small niche champions.
And so as part of that, we're investing more in ASUs—
these are the art and sustainability updates.
So we've done Caitlyn and we've done Ahri, and we're trying to get faster at it.
So we're actually doing two right now, working on them both at the same time.
And those two champions that are getting an ASU right now are Lee Sin and Teemo.
In addition to putting a bit more
focus on ASUs, we've also had some folks
from the New Champions team jump over to help out with the Game Modes team.
The result of that is that we should have some meaningfully faster progress on
building new game modes and getting older game modes back in 2023.
The trade off, though, is that we'll also have fewer new champions in 2024.
Let's also talk a little bit about champion pricing,
particularly how it affects new and returning players.
League of Legends has been around for a while as a game,
and we hope it thrives for many years to come—
we want to do our damnedest to make sure that happens.
But games like League tend to get more complex;
harder to get into as they go along, as they get more content.
And one thing we've particularly noticed is that new players who find a champion
they really love are much more likely to stick with the game.
And we've heard a fair bit of feedback from you all that
our current approach to champion pricing feels a bit out of date.
So as a result, we are updating our strategy
for champion pricing moving forward.
That will mean that some champions will be cheaper in pricing right away.
It also means that champions will fall in price sooner than they do now.
We have a /dev blog that is releasing now
that will tell you a lot more details about this new approach.
On a different note,
we also want to talk a bit about the lore of League of Legends,
since it's something that a number of you folks have been asking about.
We started building the wider Runeterran universe when it was only League.
Things like Legends of Runeterra, Arcane, other games, were just pipe dreams.
But at this point, they’re reality
and we've got plans for a lot of other projects as well.
But, one point of frustration we've heard from your folks,
and that we feel ourselves, is that storytelling in different places
can be inconsistent at times; in terms of how different parts
of the story or characters of the world are portrayed in different places.
And we agree.
We don't think that makes for a good experience.
So we're going to be a lot more thoughtful, a lot more deliberate
about how we make a consistent and cohesive wider Runeterran experience.
We can't share too many details about that
just right now, which I realize is not the most satisfactory answer.
But we did want to share with you folks where we're going directionally,
what we're trying to do—so that even though it may look quiet at the moment,
you've got the context that behind the scenes
we're actually doing a lot to set ourselves up for the long run,
and be able to deliver those really cohesive stories
that I think we're all hungry for.
All right.
So let's talk about game modes.
It's just going to be a brief update
because we actually have a /dev blog that's released now that you can read
a lot more detail on where we're at with game modes.
Two things I want to draw your attention to right now is in that blog
we talk about Preseason ARAM changes, what you liked, what you didn't like.
And by and large, the feedback has been really positive…
with the exception of tower rubble.
So we're going to be working on that.
The second thing to draw your attention to is the 2v2v2v2…
2v…2v2v2v2… …2v2 mode that is still underway.
And the blog goes into more detail about the gameplay
and where things are at, and so I hope you check it out.
Something else we also wanted to talk about was moving some skins
and splash art over from Wild Rift to League of Legends PC.
We think there's a lot of cool stuff and a lot of opportunity there.
We're going to start by looking at porting over
some of the most commonly requested skins:
with Star Guardian Seraphine,
Redeemed Xayah and Rakan,
and hopefully more in the future, depending on how those go.
Now, the two games are pretty different under the hood,
so we don't yet have a complete handle on exactly
what will be needed to do that or the timelines and so on.
So we'll keep you folks in the loop, don't have an exact timeline yet.
In terms of splash art, we’re also still working,
of course, to update some of League’s older splash art;
in some cases porting over Wild Rift’s splashes, in other cases
doing some new ones inspired by some of the Wild Rift splashes.
That'll be a gradual process—the first one you should see will be Rugged Garen
a couple of patches from now.
As you may have seen in the patch notes,
due to the security breach,
we had to push the start of Clash from where we usually do it in February.
We are aiming to get Clash out to you all in March.
And this March Clash will also be the official
launch of Clash to players in Southeast Asia.
So stay tuned for more information about that.
Additionally, I also want to talk a bit about the
ARAM Clash that we tried last year.
That was actually really successful; it was a bit experimental.
So we're going to be bringing ARAM Clash back in the future as well.
And finally, from a technical perspective, we want to share some
of the upgrades that we're making on the server side of things
to address some of the pain points we've been hearing.
The first is we are increasing our usage of cloud servers,
especially when we need it most to increase capacity.
So what this will mean for you is that you'll probably see
less and less login queues when you start a game.
It doesn't mean you'll never see a login queue,
but it should be far less common than it has been in the past.
Second is that in Southeast Asia, we're working to host servers
much closer to where players actually are, which should result in a meaningful
decrease in ping relative to what pings were like at the start of the year.
That’ll happen over the next couple of months or so.
And the third, we're going through a general upgrade to the server
hardware for EU Nordic & East, and Korea at the moment, which should show overall
increased performance in those regions come the middle of the year.
So that's it for us today.
But before we go, as a reminder, if you'd like more details on how
we're changing champion pricing or on progress on game modes,
please do check out those /dev blogs
that are going out at the same time as this video.
Thank you so much for listening.
Thank you. And bye.