Hey all, it's Jess, Executive Producer on League of Legends.
You might've noticed the title of this video is a little bit different than usual.
It used to be called Riot Pls.
We've tried this format out for about four years and obviously since then
we've launched a ton of games and so what we want to do is
still use this format or this venue to be able to talk to you about what's coming up but
also be able to give more dedicated time to each of the games so we can actually give
everyone breathing room.
Today, we're going to be focusing on LoL PC the MOBA and cover three topics.
First is going to be the state of the game, second is going to be the client,
and third is going to be game clarity.
Now I'm going to hand it off to Andrei who's going to talk about state of the game.
Hey folks, my name's Andrei and I'm the game director for League of Legends.
We're going to be talking today about how the preseason item update went
and the overall state of the game right now.
Looking at items, first off, we think we've got in place a system that should allow some
good increases to choice and diversity for most champions.
At the moment, though, individual item balance is often overshadowing what could be interesting choices.
Items like Sunfire or Goredrinker have been universally good choices for the damage or healing they bring.
And so one of our first priorities has been chipping items like that down so they're not just dominating
in terms of raw stats.
On the other side of things, we've then also got some items that just haven't been delivering.
So we've been doing work on things like Chemtech Putrifier
which we've been broadening the feasible uses there.
In addition to that stuff, we're also looking at adding some new non-Mythic items to fill in some gaps.
A couple of examples of those are an enchanter item we're trying that's meant to be good
against dive or anti carry-heavy teams.
Or a tank item aimed at countering split pushers so that even if you're not a split-pushing champion yourself
or able to 1v1 a split-pushing trend or whatever
there's still a good item to turn to in those situations.
Let's look at Mythic items in a bit more detail.
One of the things we particularly want to avoid is when champions are hardbound to a particular Mythic.
We're defining hardbinding as when a champion buys that item in 75% or more of their games.
Sunfire is a good example of that, with a lot of tanks buying Sunfire in 80%+ of their games.
Post nerfs, that's down to about 45%, which we think is a lot healthier.
Fighters and assassins are also purchasing a pretty wide range of options in most cases.
And marksmen are in a fairly reasonable spot with all three of the Mythics aimed particularly at them.
On the other end of things, enchanters and mages, by contrast
we think need some more work on their Mythic items.
Both in terms of the satisfaction from purchasing them and some their actual choice architecture as well.
Let's talk about a hot topic this year now, the amount of burst damage in League.
Our goal with the preseason was not to increase the amount of burst damage in the game.
Some of our initial tuning and design of items, however, did result in burst going up.
As a result, we've gone back and we've removed a bunch of that systemic front-loaded damage
making changes to things like Duskblade, Lich Bane, Luden's Echo, etc.
We're still monitoring and talking about burst pretty actively.
We think it's probably acceptable though very much on the high side
but might end up taking more out of the game in the moderate future.
And on a related topic to burst damage, we should talk a bit about systemic healing in League
you know, healing that comes from items and runes.
We do think healing has an important place in the game.
Without sustain, some of the lane trades can end up being so punishing that you get forced back too easily
and the game snowballs massively.
But we don't want it to be invalidating a lot of play and decision-making like it can when overtuned.
Some of our item changes ended up introducing more systemic healing than we felt was healthy for the game.
And that results in things like Grievous Wounds feeling too mandatory and champ damage just not mattering.
As a result, we've gone back and we've hit some of those sources of healing.
Things like Moonstone, Ravenous Hunter, Goredrinker, Ravenous Hydra, etc.
For some straight nerfs, for others, we've wanted to shift some of that power to durability in other forms.
Let's shift gears now and talk about role strength in LoL and how that's going at the moment.
We want to ensure that all the different positions have a meaningful impact on the outcome of the match.
Some positions will be more about scaling or roaming or vision control or whatever than others
but every position should be relevant.
When we first launched the preseason, though, marksmen and enchanters were in too weak a spot.
So we've gone and made some changes to give them more early impact.
Junglers, on the other hand, were in too impactful a spot, overly deciding games by themselves
and so we've gone and removed some gold and XP.
Finally, let's talk about snowballing rates in League.
Whenever we do a major update like a preseason, snowballing is something we track particularly carefully.
From what we've seen, looking at the metrics we track, snowball rates before and after Preseason are very similar.
So we think we're doing okay there.
Having said that, this is also one of the things we'd like to focus on more in the future
get to an even better spot, if possible.
And so comeback mechanics, especially, are one of our potential focuses for this year's coming Preseason.
We particularly want to address cases where you're behind and it just feels a bit hopeless,
it's unclear what you should do to get back in the game.
Or it's clear but it's basically just wait for the other team to screw up.
So, we're exploring ways to give a losing team plays they can try and make when things aren't going their way.
Thank you for watching, folks. Here's Jess again.
Alright, let's get into the client.
The client's obviously been a pretty long-standing pain point so in the beginning of 2020, the first
focus area that was clear to us was actually how much memory it was taking to load each one of these screens.
We then basically optimized each one of those screens and was hoping for an improved overall navigation experience.
But champ select and end-of-game screen continued to be pain points for players
and so we took a special look at them.
What you should see at the end of the day is a significantly faster client compared to the start of 2020.
Now, a bunch of you have mentioned the social panel is still an issue for you.
All those issues that you see with friends not showing up, things like that, we're going to be addressing that this year.
The second thing that we're going to be looking into is stability.
We've seen the crash reports that players have been sharing with us so
we want to take a pretty firm stance and actually do a full burndown on all the crashes
and so we're going to be addressing a lot of those too.
Next, I want to touch on game clarity.
Game clarity is one of those things that all the teams work on in a more evergreen way
for any of the content that they make.
But, we want to bring up this topic right now because it's been over ten years
and we've pushed a lot of champions and skins to the game.
And so what we want to make sure we don't betray is that level of competitive integrity where now
characters might be unreadable or hard to understand what they do or how do you play against them.
The first input into that framework is the silhouette.
It's the foundation for all of our champions and we want to make sure that each and every champion
has a distinct silhouette.
So for example, take Senna.
Senna's one of those champions that her silhouette is kind of defined by her ginormous gun.
And so you can understand that that gun is her source of power.
And what we can do is kind of stretch all the other elements that surround her abilities
because at the end of the day, the enemy knows that it's all going to be coming from this gun.
I'll also give a counter-example.
Lee Sin is a pretty tough character to actually make skins for.
Not because he's a complex character by any means, but actually because he has
very few distinguishing factors about him.
But his animations are what makes him really Lee Sin.
And so when we were creating Dragonmancer Lee Sin, it was actually pretty tough.
What ended up happening is, when the skin reached PBE, people were starting to notice that
they couldn't really recognize that this was Lee Sin.
And that was a little bit hard for them to play with, play against.
As we saw that feedback come in, we made adjustments and Dragonmancer Lee Sin is better for it now but
that's the kind of problem that I'm alluding to when we're describing the importance of working around
a silhouette of a champion but also being cognizant of each of the pieces and how they
contribute to the readability of a champion.
Next on the list is a new thematic called Space Groove.
Space Groove is this kind of wacky, retro-futuristic thematic that we've been really excited to see come to life.
It also includes a new champion that will be joining that skin line.
This is the infamous top lane skirmisher that you may have heard of at Season Start as well.
Lastly, we're going to have One-For-All actually join in with the event and so for all the One-For-All lovers
who have been asking for this, it's your time to shine.
The game mode will be up and that's it from me.
Thanks for watching hopefully this provides more context on what we're working on
and what we're looking to improve.
Feel free to give any feedback for all of it and see you on the Rift.