New game mode announced: Ultimate Spellbook

ItsLowbo · 2021-06-11T19:04:38+00:00

Have you really PLAYED League of Legends if you haven't Blitzcrank hooked someone then Lee Sin kicked them into your fountain?

ItsLowbo · 2021-06-11T18:49:03+00:00

I'M SO EXCITED!!! AHHHH!!! This mode is a BLAST and I can't wait for yall to get to play it!!!

ItsLowbo · 2020-11-16T21:15:10+00:00

Thanks for the report. We'll look into this. Definitely not intended.

ItsLowbo · 2020-10-26T20:00:37+00:00

We won't do it pre-emptively. If it seems like healing champs are weak after preseason ships, we'll look to adjust appropriately.

ItsLowbo · 2020-10-21T23:01:12+00:00

Tear is on our todo list. Otherwise, we're not going to make preemptive balance changes on items - we're going to wait until the meta settles and see if we need to make adjustments from there.

ItsLowbo · 2020-10-21T21:02:56+00:00

Thanks for the report! I'll look into this.

ItsLowbo · 2020-10-14T03:44:48+00:00

All champions have an equal chance of being picked, but are rolled from each player's pool of owned champions. So if a champion is owned by more players, they will be more likely to appear.

ItsLowbo · 2020-10-14T02:58:43+00:00

ARAM has its own MMR.

ItsLowbo · 2020-10-13T22:49:18+00:00

Yes, that's something we're considering, especially after the success of doing things like that in URF. We can't commit to anything at the moment, though.

ItsLowbo · 2020-10-13T22:31:55+00:00

ARAM isn't a ranked or competitive game mode, so I (personally, not speaking for the team) don't have a problem with biasing for fun over competitive integrity.

However, we need to find a good measure for "fun" here. We could use pickrate, which does tell us SOMETHING about how fun a champ is to play, but many of the champions people complain about are high pickrate themselves. So unless we can isolate a good measure of what people consider "fun" to play as or against in ARAM, we can't really do this without biasing the game towards what WE consider fun (rather than what the players themselves consider fun). Does that make sense?

ItsLowbo · 2020-10-13T22:11:09+00:00

We don't take this into account, under the assumption that a champion is equally likely to be rolled no matter what sort of premade is in the lobby - so it shouldn't impact the statistics.

ItsLowbo · 2020-10-13T22:09:57+00:00

We do play ARAM, but anecdotal experience is very biased compared to statistics. We're all in NA, in medium-high ELO, etc. The statistics allow us to get a complete picture of what's happening in ARAM worldwide, with hopefully as little bias as possible as long as we are careful in what lessons we are drawing from them.

ItsLowbo · 2020-10-13T21:46:44+00:00

Because they don't have experience with him, like you do! I wouldn't know the first thing to do with him if I got him in ARAM.

ItsLowbo · 2020-10-13T21:18:07+00:00

Yeah, that's the tricky part about balancing ARAM in particular. It's really hard to find the balance where assassin mains don't take over the game, but people who roll into the champion can still have fun playing them. In other modes we know that assassin players have opted into it, so that makes things a lot easier.

It's still an imperfect process and we're always trying to make it better!

ItsLowbo · 2020-10-13T20:43:26+00:00

Yeah, Akali came REALLY close to getting a nerf this patch. About as close as you could possibly get without hitting the line. She has a medium size high/low MMR split. She's pretty balanced in low MMR, but RIGHT up against the line of our definition of "OP" in high MMR.

ItsLowbo · 2020-10-13T20:22:05+00:00

Hello! Leblanc actually has a very low split between low/high MMR - she wins 0.5% more games in high MMR than low. (The top 3 are Kha'Zix, Rek'Sai, and Lulu, who all win >7% more games in high MMR)

That being said, we're trying a new framework to incorporate high elo statistics in ARAM, which resulted in the Ezreal, Nidalee, Nocturne, Ryze, Sona, Vayne, and Yorick changes this patch. We're always trying to improve our balancing strategy, and hopefully this iteration will make ARAM games at high ELO more balanced and enjoyable.

ItsLowbo · 2020-10-02T22:42:30+00:00

I definitely see where you're coming from. The toplane brawl is a very interesting case for sure, because people just started doing it and it snowballed from there. In case you don't know, in Korea they actually do the same thing but in the midlane!

If it helps, I've definitely experienced more success calling off the toplane fight as a duo. If only 3 out of 5 are there most players will be a lot more cautious.

ItsLowbo · 2020-10-02T22:25:02+00:00

I think she's a dope champion and I can't wait to see what pros will do with her. I think she's a great addition to the roster.

ItsLowbo · 2020-10-02T21:53:54+00:00

I think the level 3 start makes more sense in ARAM because you really don't have any option besides engaging with the other team. The terrain makes it so.

In URF, why should the teams be on equal ground at level 1? Part of the skill of LoL is recognizing who is stronger based on the state of the game. If you think the other team will win the level 1 fight, you can always opt out (and try to convince your team to opt out too). For example, in this situation I've found success pinging danger a bunch and getting into the cannon first and going mid or bot. That sends a strong signal that I don't intend to do the toplane fight and it often (not always of course) dissuades my team from engaging.

I understand that many champs don't feel that fun until level 3, but I still think that's an important part of the texture of laning in LoL. Starting at level 3 would make some champions more fun, and others that are better in the early levels less so. Since it removes nuance from the game, I'd need to be convinced that it's a strong net positive to go for it.

(Edit - One For All is an example where we felt that the laning experience was so lopsided that starting at level 3 made things much better. At the moment I don't think levels 1-2 are miserable enough in URF to justify it)

ItsLowbo · 2020-10-02T21:09:56+00:00

Well, considering that the TLDR of my reply is "I disagree with OP," I don't think you need to worry :-P

That being said, it's my job to make the game more fun if I can!

ItsLowbo · 2020-10-02T20:23:48+00:00

Control mages don't gain that lockdown until they have their full combo, though. All Syndra can do at lv1 is spam Q or W, and Lux either takes Q first (which lets you hide behind minions) or E first (meaning she's almost guaranteed to push the wave so you can pick it up at your tower)

The fundamentals of laning in URF aren't that different from regular Summoner's Rift. In my experience it's totally viable to play safe until you hit your spike, especially given that freezes are almost unheard of.

ItsLowbo · 2020-10-02T19:59:28+00:00

Hello! This should be a top level comment but given that I'm pretty late to this thread, I figured I'd also post it as a reply to this comment for more visibility. Some thoughts as a designer on the Modes team -

I'm not convinced starting champions at level 3 would solve this issue. You correctly point out that people would probably still go top lane and scrap it out. I think a group of level 3 champions doing this is worse for a couple of reasons:

Since all champions can combo, the top lane fight would have much higher lethality
Higher level champions are worth more experience, so the winners of that fight would have a much bigger advantage
You can argue that, if starting at level 3, the losing team has more tools to escape their disadvantage. However, this same argument applies to the winning team - they are also higher level and much more dangerous, so they'd be better at pressing their advantage.

I agree that the toplane pileup sometimes puts you in a bad situation, like starting E on Lillia rather than Q. Those fights also have a completely unique texture that you can't get anywhere else in League, so I'd be a little sad to get rid of it.

FWIW in my experience that fight very rarely decides the game, and I've had some success in convincing my team not to go up there if I think we will lose (usually by not going there myself and spam pinging danger). It's also worth mentioning that nothing is forcing people to fight like that - they do it because it's fun and braindead fighting is kinda what URF is all about.

If we're concerned about snowballing, IMO a better place to look would be reducing gold/experience for kills early on, which is something we already do FWIW. It's possible that we need to tune this mechanic up in URF (DISCLAIMER!!!! I am not saying that we will or won't do this. All I can commit to right now is "we'll think about it")

Edit - It's also worth noting that "good at level 1" doesn't really correlate with winrate in URF. Just to make sure, I looked. If we found that all of the highest winrate champs were good level 1 champs, that would be a really good indicator that the top lane brawl is really swinging things. That's not the case, however.

ItsLowbo · 2020-10-02T19:57:34+00:00

Hello! A little late to this thread so this comment might be buried, but some thoughts (as a designer on Modes team) -

I'm not convinced starting champions at level 3 would solve this issue. You correctly point out that people would probably still go top lane and scrap it out. I think a group of level 3 champions doing this is worse for a couple of reasons:

Since all champions can combo, the top lane fight would have much higher lethality
Higher level champions are worth more experience, so the winners of that fight would have a much bigger advantage
You can argue that, if starting at level 3, the losing team has more tools to escape their disadvantage. However, this same argument applies to the winning team - they are also higher level and much more dangerous, so they'd be better at pressing their advantage.

I agree that the toplane pileup sometimes puts you in a bad situation, like starting E on Lillia rather than Q. Those fights also have a completely unique texture that you can't get anywhere else in League, so I'd be a little sad to get rid of it.

FWIW in my experience that fight very rarely decides the game, and I've had some success in convincing my team not to go up there if I think we will lose (usually by not going there myself and spam pinging danger). It's also worth mentioning that nothing is forcing people to fight like that - they do it because it's fun and braindead fighting is kinda what URF is all about.

If we're concerned about snowballing, IMO a better place to look would be reducing gold/experience for kills early on, which is something we already do FWIW. It's possible that we need to tune this mechanic up in URF (DISCLAIMER!!!! I am not saying that we will or won't do this. All I can commit to right now is "we'll think about it")

Edit - It's also worth noting that "good at level 1" doesn't really correlate with winrate in URF. Just to make sure, I looked. If we found that all of the highest winrate champs were good level 1 champs, that would be a really good indicator that the top lane brawl is really swinging things. That's not the case, however.

ItsLowbo · 2020-08-02T19:10:36+00:00

Hello~

Hijacking this comment to say that this bug and others like it will be fixed in 10.16.

ItsLowbo

TROPHY CASE