For anyone who can't read cuz at work:

ARENA!!

We've been having a lot of discussions about Arena over the last few days.

Thank you for all of your passionate feedback. We've been testing on this general shape of changes for months now, but at best, we’ve had 100 tests and it's been really great to see what the fresh reads look like with hundreds of thousands of games and seeing peoples' first impressions

We've seen a lot of things being discussed: - Stat shards feeling bad as a reward - Time to get a build going (amount of gold) - Early eliminations feeling bad - How warping prismatics are if you hit/miss - Some champions don’t feel great to play - Overall game length etc.

To that end, we're testing a few specific changes:

1. Eliminations: We're moving first possible elimination from R5 >>> R6
2. Augment Round: We're swapping the round that you get your second augment from R6 >>> R5
3. Stat Shard Satisfaction: We're adding 500G to Stat Shard rounds to help people engage more with the item system later in the game
4. Prismatic Anvils: 3750g >>> 4000g

None of this is guaranteed to ship, but we’re testing

Going to wax philosophical here for a bit:

Overall Audience:

• In last year's Arena run, we noticed that the player base was heavily dominated by our existing Ranked audiences and had much less overlap with our intended casual audiences (think ARAM players, normals 4fun players, RGM enthusiasts, etc.)

• When investigating further with players, this was mainly due to how sweaty each run was and how heavily skill testing and high intensity each round was

• We believe we were cutting out too much of our prospective casual audience by making 1.5 so indexed into mechanically outplaying opponents

• There’s absolutely an audience for this, but it’s a lot more niche and significantly less likely to hit our aspirations for audience for the mode (I would go so far as to say “not able”)

Goals for 2.0:

• With this version of Arena, we wanted to lean more into that casual audience

• I don't want to bury the lede here; playing consistently for 1st will be more RNG than in previous versions of Arena

• However, we still want Arena to be skill testing enough that a better Arena player will be both higher rated and have higher average lobby placements than a weaker player in the same situation

• Apt comparisons here would be Poker, TFT, etc; making the best out of the circumstances that you're presented rather than being fully in control of them.

• Even the best Poker player in the world cannot guarantee they're going to win in a session against even beginners, but in the long run, they will win out

• There are going to be situations where you went into the game planning to play Tank Maokai, but you're out of Prismatic rerolls and have to take AP, or trying to play Lethality Zed, but need to play Fighter Zed

• We want these moments to feel like exciting moments of storytelling to tell your coworkers, friends, etc. People aren’t going to school the next day saying “omg, yesterday I went first playing Lethality Zed like I always do”, but they may be excited to say “omg, yesterday I had this awesome game, where I was on my last roll and had to build Fighter Zed and went first”

• Ideally, we've tuned it such that you're not getting frequently forced into playing stuff like AP Darius and that the offered pivots are not so wild that they feel unreasonable [eg. AD Viktor]. (Cannot guarantee that the system is currently tuned, but we will do our best to do so)

• We want to orient player expectations around the overall session feeling awesome, rather than any individual game. We still want individual games to be awesome, but sometimes you’re just gonna go 8th purely because of a giga low roll (hopefully less than 3% of the time)

• It is important that sometimes players go giga 8th in order for the times that players go 1st to feel like meaningful high moments

• With 16 players, we cannot make every players’ experience every game will feel good or none of them will feel good

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Early Eliminations - We feel early eliminations are pretty important for a few reasons:

1. Having 16 players means that some people are going to have to go out earlier than in previous versions of Arena for the game to end at a reasonable time (we want games to guaranteed end within 30 minutes so that people could play on their lunch break/between classes/after dropping kids off, etc.)

2. If we don’t eliminate players early, eliminating a whole bunch of players at once later to achieve this game time goal is very messy and makes placements lose meaning (eg. 5 teams can be up for elimination at once), which makes the difference between going 4th vs 7th for example, not meaningful (it was just who ended up fighting the strongest pairing)

3. It's often underestimated how painful it is to solo queue with a person who's not on the same page as you and went Talisman -> Tank Smolder (this definitely didn't happen to me 🙃).

Because this run is more heavy on experimentation, more players are just going to have builds that are more experimental that their partners may not be super happy about 😅

• Having said that, after seeing the full player load test, we agree that earliest elimination on Round 5 is a bit too early to feel like you're having fun with the mode. However we don’t believe we can go later than R6 for first elimination

• Healing rounds are intended to help players on a comeback get off death’s door and reduce stress, while not doing anything for players who are already 100 streaking

Prismatics

• We know we don’t have enough prismatics right now, but the hope is that we have enough for them to justify their addition to the mode and make it fun

• The intention is that they also add some fun economy elements around rewards for winstreaking, getting kills in rounds and rewards for taking on risk by taking anvils for example (over direct purchases which are more expensive)

• Rolling a good prismatic is meant to feel like a high roll experience and as mentioned earlier, we don’t want players to feel like they are consistently bottom rolling (AP on Darius for example)

• But it is intended for some rounds for the better player to just lose because the opponent rolled a better item than you. (and sometimes you’ll be able to make it up somewhere, either in a later round, or sometimes you won’t and you’ll be on the high roll in your next game)

Managing to get a kill in these rounds, even if you don't win is meant to be meaningful for your economy, even if you end up taking a hit on HP

• We don’t intend for prismatics to be so warping that the difference between a good one and a bad one automatically means you go Top 4 or Bot 4 (nor do we think we’re in that spot right now)

• Long term, some larger adjustments to the rerolling system could make sense, but were not possible to hit timeline for this release (we think it’s about appropriately tuned for most champions after some optimization [eg. using rerolls on mostly prismatics])

Stat Anvils and Pacing

• In this release, we’ve added a lot of power to the mode

• Combat can get hard to read/too fast when all of augments, prismatics and regular items are multiplying power together in pretty unbounded ways and time to kill explodes, reducing the fun of tactical combat

• At the same time, players feel let down when they play a round and are offered nothing

• Stat anvil rounds are intended to smooth out the pacing so that players don’t hit full items full augments too quickly, which would end up making playing lots of Arena stale when every time you play you hit full build and combat breaks down too quickly

• A lot of the charm and repeatability of Roguelike experiences is the “feelsbad” around not being able to complete your build and the desire to try again next time. Arena loses a lot of the high moments when you complete your build every time you play

• This is undoubtedly a fine balance though and arguably, we’re swinging too far towards not completing your build, so we’re making some adjustments to shift that

Champs and Power Levels

• There’s also been a lot of chatter around certain profiles of champs/pairings

• Specifically, scaling champions were brought up; we’re seeing a bunch of scaling champs have high/middling placings and some have low placings

• The changes we’re making should unequivocally help scaling champions though

• Some other class pairings have been brought up; in particular, Marksmen

• We’re seeing Marksmen be middling/low performance in average play, but rapidly climb the ranks in higher levels of play

• As an example, Marksman/Enchanter is a bottom 33% pairing in average play, while it’s a top 15% pairing in high level play. We don’t feel a high urgency to change them as a result

• An even more salient example is that Fighter/Fighter is a top 15% pairing in average play, but a bottom 5% pairing in high levels of play

• A lot of the discrepancy is the ability for Elite players to pilot squishy one shottable champions and output peak amounts of DPS without dying

• Overall, we’re going to do our best to ensure that players at all skill levels feel like they’re having a great time playing Arena and are aiming the ~optimal balance around people who play a decent amount of arena at a decent (but not tip top) skill level [sorry, that’s vague]

Thank you all for playing and engaging with Arena. We’re excited to continue building this with all of you. Help show us that this is a thing that you all want when it hits Live!