Hey everyone.
I'm Matthew Phroxzon Leung-Harrison.
I'm the design lead of the Summoner’s Rift Team.
And I’m Patrick Petrie Noonan, I'm the product lead of the Summoner’s Rift Team
and the Summoner’s Rift Team, we own game health
and game balance and all of the major game system updates in League of Legends.
So this will be things
like the Champion Durability Update and Preseason that we do each year.
And today we wanted to talk to you
a bit about just some of our thoughts on state of the game and balance
and things that we spend a lot of time thinking about and working on.
I know an interesting one is thinking about position health.
And when I say position, I mean like Top, Jungle, Mid,
ADC and Support of course.
We look at select rates like how many people are playing it,
what do people feel and think when they're playing that?
But we also think a lot about something called position agency too.
Yeah, so for position agency, unlike champion win rates, we can't really
look at the win rates of a position because there's one on each team.
And so instead we look at something called position agency, which is the impact
of a position on the game's outcome.
So, for example, if a Jungler were to gank mid and get a successful kill,
that's likely going to be some amount of impact towards the game outcome.
And so we use a combination of some data models
to figure out position agency, as well as our intuitive understanding
as game designers
and as players of the game to see whether a position is powerful or not.
When you look at like how position agency is going across all the roles in the game
right now, is there is there anything you're seeing
that stands out as needing a bit more attention.
Throughout the year, we did changes like durability update
the objective changes in patch 12.14
the teleport changes in patch 12.1.
And these changes all tended to have one role
getting the bad end of the deal, which was Top Lane.
Both Top Laners were less likely to be able to kill squishy champions
playing in the Mid or Support or
AD Carry positions, as well as finding it harder to impact dragon fights,
which had become a little more impactful overall to the game outcome.
And so what we observed was Top Lane going down in agency
and so we tried to give some of that back in Preseason.
That's not to say our job there is done.
We do think that there are some gaps with the way that Top Laners
find satisfaction in playing the role.
And we observe that there's, you know, just a general split of players
in the Top Lane overall, there are some Top Laners
that really want to fight 1v1 and there are some Top Laners
that really want to impact the map and we want to make sure
that a lot of those play styles are viable as well.
And I know in working on Preseason, another one of the big things
we were looking at is how we could improve Jungle select.
So as probably a lot of players realize, if we don't have the right amount
of people playing all the different roles, this leads to other things like
increase in autofill, like less quality matchmaking.
And so even though Jungle is a very powerful role, we notice that, you know,
not quite as many players are wanting to play it.
So I do know that we've created some changes for Preseason
that we're hoping will encourage
some players to try out the jungle for the first time, maybe shift back over,
making it a little bit more approachable.
In this latest Preseason too, we've worked on a bunch of the new
tank items together
and kind of our approach to tank items in the latest Preseason
did represent some shift in philosophy around
kind of how we look at the mythic item system.
Yeah, so when we first started
with the mythic item system, we were generally looking at a few specific goals.
We wanted players to always be able to choose between several
different mythic items.
We always wanted mythic items to be present in your build,
and so they were generally tuned to be a strong early purchase.
But as we've kind of seen it play out over the years,
it's had a few negative effects, namely, there are some champions
who don't feel like they have a great mythic item.
And so being forced to buy a mythic
that doesn't feel right for their champion can feel pretty bad.
And also we've seen players wanting to opt in to specific legendary items
like Blade of the Ruined King
that do feel great for their champion, and so kind of our swing at the tank
mythics in Preseason kind of reflects a change in our philosophy
where we're not trying to pigeonhole champions
into buying a specific mythic item every game
and the tank items are designed so that there are some mythics
that you can purchase first and there are some mythics
that you can purchase second.
And the whole system overall is just a lot more flexible, but we still wanted
mythic items to present this kind of high fantasy, high,
you know, build power
over the game with the mythic passive.
And we think that, you know, this will strike kind of a good balance between
early purchases of mythic items and later build-defining purchases for them.
And I know we're still always looking at the different classes
and champions in the game while we are a bit looser on like,
you always have to choose between multiple mythic items because if there's an item
a champion loves, like that's fine, we want them to be able to take it.
But we are still looking for cases where maybe a champion does
want more choice in the item system and they don't have that.
Or maybe there's just a certain type of item that their champion
would really benefit by, and it's not even available as an option.
So there might be new items coming out over the next year, perhaps.
Perhaps.
But yeah,
when thinking about kind of the state of the game and balance in the game,
I know probably one of the hottest topics for players is champion balance.
Like that's kind of the main vehicle that players experience the game.
How strong is my champion?
How strong is the enemy champion?
It was really exciting to see the champion durability update go out.
We saw it live. The fights are lasting longer.
Players have more opportunity for strategic decisions.
It's exciting to see that this doesn't seem to have impacted bloodiness
or amount of fighting or kills.
That was something we were worried about.
And then we've also had a chance now to see this play out
at the highest levels of play and professional play and at Worlds.
I think overall, like you said, we were very nervous about
you know, increasing the durability of every champion in the game
and how that would impact bloodiness. However, we've kind of observed that
there were some surprising outcomes from the objective changes
in particular. We intended to make objectives
a little more tanky, so there was more tension around fights and to make them
more rewarding to take in compensation for that.
And what we've observed is that especially in pro play,
engagements around these objectives have been very high tension.
The team can't just burst the dragon and then run away.
Instead they have to,
you know, kind of think carefully about how they're committing their resources.
You know, maybe there's a bit of back and forth and it's allowed for a lot
more of this back and forth between teams and high tension engagements,
which has been really exciting to watch overall in the pro player stage.
Yeah, it's been exciting watching that at Worlds, but
now that we're kind of focusing back in on live play
and like the rest of the player base and what champion balance is like,
we do still think there's opportunities to improve our current approach
to champion balance.
Yeah, for sure.
So our champion balance framework that we did a few years ago,
it served us pretty well.
The game feels like it's in a pretty good spot,
numerically balanced-wise, but moving forward,
I think there's a lot of opportunity in making sure that champions feel
good to play, that they're satisfying their gameplay fantasy
that the player signs up for when they lock in their champion.
And so even though a champion might be numerically balanced, it doesn't mean that
they necessarily feel the most satisfying that they can be to play.
And so we want to have a kind of heightened focus on that
moving through this year, as well as kind of
making sure that all champions fit a strategic purpose in the game
alongside that. There are few other deficiencies
with our champion balance framework that we've observed.
So a champion might be "balanced,"
but they might be on the weak side of balanced
or the strong side of balance for an extended period of time.
But it doesn't result in them being changed.
And so we're kind of making sure that champions, especially
when they've been in a certain state for a long time,
either too weak or too strong, but not quite strong or not quite weak
enough to receive a direct change that those champions will be looked at.
And so we think that there are many other small changes like this
that we kind of need to investigate
and see if they're going to be good to put into practice.
Great.
So speaking of a good state of the game and the start of the new ranked season,
any recommendations for the players out there to start their rank climb?
So I think the jungle is going to be a vibrant place
for champions of all types to at least go in initially,
we think the jungle pets are going to be meaningfully improving
champions' jungle clears and their ability to perform in the jungle.
Some other stuff with the tank items I think is going to be super exciting
and yeah, we're super excited to see how that plays out.
Yeah, I'm excited to hopefully take my Singed back into the jungle.
We'll see how that works out.
But anyways, yeah, it's been a pleasure talking about
our thoughts on the state of the game and we just want to wish all the players
out there best of luck on their start of the ranked season and happy climbing.
Yeah, good luck.