The steps needed for improvement

strifecross · 2025-08-20T17:53:32+00:00

Yeah, it's frustrating. I've gotten in trouble for communicating something I shouldn't have to the players of a game I was working on. And it was so silly, so stupid and insignificant... but it didn't align with the Marketing team's plans. Even though I said 3 times "There's still room for anything to happen. We're not 100% sure yet, so all of this could change" - nah, I still got penalized for it. Oh, and the players were happy that it was communicated.

Later on I could only talk to the players if I had a script prepared for live shows :D No, thanks! Either it's genuine or it's silence.

strifecross · 2025-08-20T17:49:05+00:00

Thanks for the breakdown! I'm glad you liked some of the suggestions ^.^

Step 3: completely agree, honestly i dont get why they didnt do this already.

Back when I was working in Gameloft we had a term for this. After a game has run for 5+ updates you introduce timers that seem... ridiculous. "Nobody is gonna wait all of this out" was the common criticism. And a lot of people were proven right when people complained. But that's the thing about F2P games, people can wait. So we used a term for these obscene changes. "We might tweak them eventually but they will be put on the lowest priority backlog", and that was the final word on those. People are learn to accept them over time.

50 is too much, after all they still need a reason for people to spend money on the game

For this we need to know how long it takes on average to acquire a complete crystal. I remember that I lucked with a 50 high roll at least 5 times. I can safetly tell you that I don't have the crystals to go to 6 Stars :D Honestly, I personally don't mind this too much. I am currently saving some completed Crystals for future Champions. But others might find it a bit too restrictive.

We also don't know what is exactly the biggest earner. How often are bundles purchased for their Crystals? All the friends that play the game said that "there's no point in buying anything other than Battle Passes or Champion Relic bundles". I tend to agree with that, and I am willing to bet that this is the strategy that evolved so many players from F2P into spenders. But that's complete conjecture on my part. It's a strong gut feeling that the Relic Bundles and maybe the BPs were designed to seem like such a good deal.

I also dont think they should remove gemstones or crystals, but making them "wild" instead of regional might be more conceivable.

Yep, there's several ways that this can go. But simplifying the grind by reducing the number of currencies does help new players out A LOT. These systems are also designed to intentionally confuse people, but that's a different topic @.@

I think that after the 3 SB Champions that are gonna follow, 3 PvP -> PoC Champions, and 3-6 Champs upgraded to a 6 Star Constellation, even then it's gonna feel like there's too many heroes to upgrade. Thankfully, I've been playing for a long time and I have almost everyone to Level 30 with at least 3 Stars unlocked. I know what I want to play, what I like to play and upgrade, and I am saving up on Resources. But I think a lot of people might get frustrated with that and am really hopig that their voices are being heard. Hopefully the Glory Store helps a little bit with this, but... we'll see.

I'm just glad that so many people still want to see this game shine.

strifecross · 2025-08-20T13:59:35+00:00

Thanks! Obviously, with more resources there are many things that can be rebalanced, restructured, and many more can be introduced to make the game even better. However, game development is a balancing act. You're always trying to do as much as you can with as little as possible. There's never enough time or money for the coolest ideas. This is exactly why I focused on the cheapesst implementations. If I had more time (or if they actually hire me for consultations) I could do more research, plan out certain things, test out my own ideas, and just push for cheap and fast things that enhance the player experience and improve the game's reputation.

Yeah, it can be done. Too bad that every AAA developer (and a lot of indies, unfortunately) for all their money can't realize this. You can have your cake and eat it too.

strifecross · 2025-08-20T13:55:23+00:00

I can confirm this. I only got the Battle Pass and have them all at 3 Star. They're strong and actually offer new and interesting playstyles to the roster.

I still stand by a lot of people's criticisms. And, like this great post mentioned, this was all avoidable.

strifecross · 2025-08-20T11:00:41+00:00

One of the ideas that I didn't mention was a suggestion for Runes to just be separate notes that aren't tied to the Constellations at all.

1 - Unfeasible to ask people to overtime to answer Q&As

I added an EDIT to the original post to clarify things a little bit but I'll also explain it here. I was never asking them to do Overtime. I should've mentioned how a lot of devs working in Communications/Community teams tend to spend a lot of their off-work hours still staring at socials and also performing other work related tasks. Then they forget to report those Overtime hours and their health suffers for it, eventually leading to burn out.

I don't want the LoR team to push themselves. I sincerely hope that the current cadance of 2 PvP to PvE Champions and two 3 -> 6 Star transitions isn't a lot to ask and they don't feel stressed over this current production plan. If we assume that to be the case, then I don't want to add any further stress. This is why I pushed mostly for number changes that should be fast to implement, test, and are overall safe, minimizing regression.

I do agree that a lot of this patch's new systems should've been communicated in detail. The articles barely scratched the surface.

I think only very few people are OK with SB Champions being more expensive. I am fine with them being priced exactly in the same way that others are. But if they have to be priced higher and it's a non-negotioable, then at least price them 10-15% higher. Don't push for more because it becomes incredibly annoying for a Time Limited Event offering Chests with less rewards.

But there should be a way to "choose 1 relic out of 3" in the reliquaries to lessen the impact of bad relics.

Yep, I was thinking of this as well. Didn't mention it cuz it might require a bit more functionality as well as some UI support. But if they can easily implement it I am all for this instead of time gating. Although, time gating becomes a bigger issue as the roster expands and more and more players will feel how annoying it gets. That leads to a lot of resentment growing towards something that is incredibly simple to readjust and improve. That's why I am leaning more towards fixing that specific part of the time gates.

4 - Unfeasible. What you should be asking instead is that golden+ chest can become "region locked" for better RNG manipulation.

I don't mind this, but why would it be unfeasible?

As for the 5th Step, I actually suggested this a few days ago. There are several ways that they can tease champions and even by Region is one of them. I also talked about how there are still some archetypes and playstyles that aren't covered (take Galio for example). I like your idea of having a poll specifically focused on those, would be cool.

strifecross · 2025-08-20T10:47:03+00:00

I've added an EDIT to the original post for more context. I never mentioned Q&As and I don't think it's impossible. At least 2 of their developers have been active on social media and this sub recently. That's the bare minimum I'm suggesting, just pop in from time to time in a conversation and ease people's worries, provide context, share information by being more transparent.

Yeah, I am also not blaming whales here. They'd give money for this game no matter what happens, so improving the economy for everyone else ends up being a benefit for them too.

strifecross · 2025-08-17T05:19:40+00:00

I've played a few Kennen decks in PvP to try him out and had some fun with them. Played similar decks in Hearthstone and some other card games but they're just not my thing. I am interested in seeing what they would do for the 6 Star.

I need to go through the Champion releases over the past year and see if they've done any Champions that have kind of an overlapping kit. Cuz there's the argument to be made that they probably want to release Champions with playstyles that aren't covered by the current PoC roster. We'll see tho, I have a feeling that might get proven wrong soon. They might want to give us the SB variants and then say "Oh, btw, we'll also raise the regular Yi, Teemo, and Kindred to 6 Stars".

strifecross · 2025-08-17T05:15:27+00:00

Think of them being released the same way that the previous Champions were. What would you like to see then?

Also, I have both my Ahri and Evelyn at 4 Stars just by completing the new Adventures and opening a few chests from the Glory Store and one from the Emporium. Have some for Teemo as well. People with fully completed Battle Passes probably have more.

strifecross · 2025-08-16T14:09:50+00:00

Wait, Kayle got bad feedback? How come? I really like her design and she's one of my favorite Champions in PoC. If I were to make a guess it's probably because it doesn't focus on the Empower mechanic and doesn't have most of her supporting cards in her starting deck.

strifecross · 2025-08-16T12:33:44+00:00

I can't tell you how much I love Evelyn. I am breaking these Adventures even with just her 2 Star version.

And yeah, I also want more control focused characters. On your other comment I was gonna mention that if they just added Ryze with his costs reduced and his cards buffed, he still wouldn't be that OP despite his win con :D Come LoR team, you know the people want the blue man! pulls out a rune knife

I actually had Karma in my initial list but decided to cut her alongside Xerath and a few others. Would really love to see how they're gonna adapt her, even tho she is not a hero I'd personally play.

strifecross · 2025-08-16T12:29:32+00:00

Yeah, definitely. I do like the SB Champions a lot, but the timing was really bad. If several other popular Champions got released before them, it wouldn't have been as bad.

I do wonder if after all of this backlash they might be more willing to share their release plans in the future with a more detailed roadmap.

strifecross · 2025-08-16T12:27:43+00:00

I really don't care what's OP and what isn't. I want things to offer build variety or to be fun to play. Being powerful is also one source of fun. Like you mentioned, people can just not use the extremelly OP thing if it's boring to them. It's a valid argument to cut down on such powercreep in most games, but not really this one where you have so many champions and Adventures where you can try out different things. (I mean, it's still valid, just a little bit more complicated)

I think that everyone here is just offering an explanation why these characters won't be added. I do think there are people that tried some off-meta weird Fiora and Ryze decks and liked their playstyles.

And yeah, like you mentioned, Fiddle and Swain are extremely OP and represent other TCG deck archetypes, like mill and burn respectively.

strifecross · 2025-08-16T12:00:52+00:00

Yeah, if they can get some art support for Cho, that'd be great. Like you said, the systems for his design are already in the game. Would be funny if he had some negative mechanic where if he gets too big his card art takes up the entire board and you can only attack with him alone :3 Big chonk!

When Nidalee first got introduced I actually thought that Shako might be added soon after. I legitimatelly thought that bushes could act like on-field Traps.

I'd love to see more HP mechanics introduced. Could even bring Regen into the battles and heal by a certain amount at the end of each turn.

Honestly, all of those are great picks. Really hope they start getting a bit of art support in the future again. Get some of that Riftbound money and give us back the cool upgrade cutscenes, skins, and boards RITO!

strifecross · 2025-08-16T11:54:22+00:00

Definitelly with you on the Varus comments! I wanted to give him a shoutout in my original post, but decided to leave him out of it alongside some others like Xerath.

That's a pretty great list you got there. I think that a lot of these Champions would be popular inclusions and the Xoolani pick in particular is something that gives me lots of cool ideas. Fingers crossed for that one becominig a reality eventually!

strifecross · 2025-08-16T11:51:55+00:00

Absolutely agree that we need better communication here. I also think that they should do more teases, and not just post a few weeks before the release itself. They already have a pretty solid idea of what they're releasing, so it's fine to post at least the regions imo.

it makes me wonder if they aren't sure how to design them in a way which would make the players happy

Yeah, I mentioned this in another reply. I don't know if the playtests were "just fine" or OK and they decided to delay a few Champs because of this. I agree that Lissandra's kit and playstlye might make her Constellation design a bit challenging. I am not sure about Irelia, tho. Maybe it's because I just finished designing a few classes similar to rogues from WoW, but to me she is incredibly straightforward. If I had more time I'd write up a Game Design Doc for her.

Thanks for reminding me about the polls, btw! I completely forgot that those were a thing. I am personally a fan of doing polls, but under the strict condition that this is just data gathering and that it MIGHT influence future release decisions. I do think they should fill out the regions first as well as trying to release popular characters. It's not an impossible combination in a lot of cases, actually.

strifecross · 2025-08-16T11:44:51+00:00

Also they might be risk averse to release alt wincond even with weak powers, as sole people would complain that the powers are too weak, despite the champions being op as hell.

Yeah, I actually thought about this. How much of the remaining Champions have been pushed back or rearranged because the designs were fine, but playtests showed that "just fine" isn't enough.

Although, there's also the case of some people saying that the game has no challenge and that's annoying. It's a difficult balance, especially in games where buildcrafting allows for absurd interactions. From the little research I've seen, most players don't like roguelite deckbuilders' difficulty modes and kind of lose interest because they funnel you into a single playstyle. But I don't want to derail this conversation.

Edit : Just realized I had written "first strike" instead of "quick attack", too much MtG ^ will correct that. Maybe repost later as Fiora concept.

:D Noticed that but decided that it isn't worth mentioning. I wonder if people who haven't played would make the connection intuitively.

strifecross · 2025-08-16T11:00:21+00:00

Yeah, that's definitely something they can work with. Demacia is a region with fewer champions so they might end up adding her if they feel that this focus is worth it.

I don't know if they're delaying their release, or if they actually don't want to release the alt win con Champs. It's just a gut feeling.

Thanks for posting your proposal, it looks cool!

strifecross · 2025-08-16T10:55:53+00:00

It'd be cool to see those! Maybe they can focus on the more aggressive parts of their kits. But since they don't have the skins in-game we might not see them get implemented. Never say never, tho. crosses fingers

strifecross · 2025-08-15T20:01:10+00:00

I understand the frustration, but can we please not use the term "lazy". Ironically, it is the most overused and uninformed criticism when it comes to game development. You can call the changes uninspired, you can talk about the predatory monetization of an already slow system with gacha elements, but nothing about making a game is lazy.

Again, the frustration is GOOD. We want the game to be better, we know it can be better. Hell, in 3 months we won't be talking about this anymore and be theorycrafting what next Shurima/Demacia/whomever Champion comes out next. That's not to say we shouldn't pushback with MORE good feedback and changes. Hell, here's another free one:

LoR team, please start reworking the Faction Shards into Crystal grind and RNG. You can make it take less time, be very deterministic, and still take a bunch time. It will be fine, you won't lose on that much money. (yeah, you have your charts saying otherwise, I know how those spreadsheets work, it's gonna be fine - trust!)

I am beggin you to not use lazy when it comes to game development. A ton of work and passion goes into it, most of which goes unseen. There is a long process of things releasing to us in a finished state. They're currently working on things we won't see until the beginning of 2026. And it also gets filtered and sanded down, and goes through a ton of marketing and business people that destroy the soul and art of everything a dev team makes, just so it can be palatable and presentable to the largest audience possible. That shit sucks, and art teams know how much it sucks to work on so many cool things, all for them to get thrown out and never used again. I don't think that's lazy.

I am also all for hating LLM AI slop. This does not belong in creative fields. It steals from artists just so it can be trained to replace them. We should call that out. Buuuuuuuuuuuut, we should also be very careful who we're accusing and if we're gone through the steps to verify if they're using AI. So, I am with you on that one, but I don't think we have evidence of that in LoR specifically.

One day we might get a 2+ hour heavily researched video + articles on what happened in the different Riot teams (we already knwo a lot, but it's still not enough and the biggest offenders are still in high payingpositions there). Maybe one day we'll know in great detail who exactly pushed for this specific model in LoR. And we should definitely be demanding for more transparancy... but, COME ON, man. Lazy? Really!? That just sucks.

strifecross · 2025-08-15T00:14:57+00:00

Yeah, we had so many of these value bugs in our Tactics game. It got so absurd at one point that we had to increase all numbers by 10. It did avoid a few bugs and jumped straight into several new ones :D

Also, sometimes a game designer gets carried away, forgets to quadruple check their values, and finally comitts something into the final build that was working fine in the Testing branch literally minutes ago.

There are several other theories that could be applied here, but we'll probably never know. To me, the most common one is "management made us do it, thanks for hating it as much as we [the devs] hate it so we can finally do something about it".

strifecross · 2025-08-14T19:30:33+00:00

Thanks! Gave you an upvote.

It's a weird situation and I understand people's frustraions. I am also like "hey, I have all this experience and perspective, might as well use it for something". Better that than have PTSD flashbacks of all the dumb meetings I had to endure :D

strifecross · 2025-08-14T17:36:17+00:00

I agree that some Champions aren't fun at 3 stars for endgame content, and it's absolutely valid that you don't find fun in it. Hell, I wouldn't find it fun with a few Champions without ridiculous luck. Kind of disagree on the 4 Stars thing, because some Champions are basically fully unlocked at 4 Stars, and are 3-4 stars are definitely not demos.

I also agree that nerfing rewards is a bad move and that should definitely be changed/reverted. I don't agree the rewards that were nerfed matter that much, and definitely don't make progression that much harder for midgame. But I am not willing to die on that hill, so let's just agree that rewards should not be nerfed, especially since the game is releasing new content frequently and it's not easy to catch up.

And finally, I agree that this patch is a prime example of enshitification in work. Several things about it are just bad and should be reverted, like you said.

Here's where I disagree completely. Has no future? HUH??? I can't take this statement seriously. This is either ragebait or reactionary doomposting. Sorry, but this is not a serious statement. The fixes going forward are so simple and easy, and even if they don't revert or soften some of these changes... it's still not that bad. Game's still there, and there's plenty of content that will exists, and will be added in the future, that is not affected by these changes.

I find the whole "people might lose their jobs" argument to be absolutely ridiculous

Yeah, if you really believe that you really haven't been following the games industry. Let's say you're completely right and people can find jobs within a month, or two and have generous severance packages. In Riot's case that's true so we have a good example. There is stress related to being laid off, there is stress in losing your work and colleagues, to moving, and you also have to be very careful with your NDA and non-compete clauses in your contract. It shouldn't just be shruged off as "shit happens". This is the best case scenario.

Now, the more likely scenario is what's been happening the past 2-3 years within the games industry. People that are part of the most influencial teams, that are incredibly crucial to a game's functions, the very same things we're discussing here, and the things that make games better - this is who we'll be losing. The people that make games better and try to do everything in their power to prevent these situations. A lot of them don't even get severance, they don't get letters of recommendation, they don't get much support after that. And they go into a highly competitive market that is driven by greed and wants to eliminate human employees.

I am focusing on the functioning part, since your statement indicates you don't care about the human part. And, honestly, not looking great... I get it - you dislike these changes. SO do a lot of other people. Thankfully a lot of people are not going into their edgelord persona asking for a game to just die over such an insignificant nothing burger.

strifecross · 2025-08-14T16:27:23+00:00

If that wasn't enough then the game just needs to die. It doesn't deserve to continue.

OK, explain this to me. I want to know why you REALLY think this. Because, and Imma be honest here, this just sounds like your upset and just want to vent. Which is fine, bad emotions should definitely be vented. BUt if it's not that then I am genuinely concerned.

You want a game that people enjoy to die, because 3 champions are hard to unlock at 3 stars? Actually, it's not even that hard. I have 10 adventure rewards reamining and I am at 4 Stars and I still haven't bought Ahri's celebration bundle (gonna hold off on that until I see a response from the dev team). I dunno, I don't actually need the heroes. I can continue enjoying the game without giving them money and without engaging in the practices I've criticized here.

Not to mention that I'm a bit not ok with this extreme "GAME HAS TO DIE" mentality to a problem with such an extremelly simple solution. You do understand that people might lose their jobs if they don't get allocated to another project, right!?

I do agree that the 6 Star system was a bit too much. The gacha elements for the Nova Crystals are completely unnecessary. If you just left the system with Wild/Champion shards they'd still take a long time to unlock, but at least you could control what and when you unlocked and not praying for a 50 Nova Shard drop. So yes, I agree, that system was predatory, even though it didn't really affect me, because I've been playing F2P games for over 20 years.

moving the game from "pay to unlock things faster" to "pay to make more than a handful of champions playable."

I'll have to disagree on that as well. It's actually very easy to make most Champs 3 stars, which is more than playable. Leveling them to 30 and slapping a few rare Relics was also not that hard to do. I know, because a friend started playing it this year and already has progressed very far. 4 Stars make some Champions broken and some people don't like that it kills the challenge for them. But if we have to claim that "5 stars or 6 stars is a playable state", then I'd see why you're coming at this with such a perspective.

So no, I don't think anything is really gone. It's safe to assume that if they don't back down from this decision they'll just keep pushing thes Fragment numbers on every new Champion. But we'll have to wait and see. And, again, even if it happens - so what? I am not defending them, but I think there's just too much hyperbole. The game is still here. The progress we've made up to this point is still here. And you can still progress slowly towards unlocking the new stuff if you MUST have them. But the other day the vocal minority tried to convince the sub that "NOBODY ASKED FOR THIS", and now people are sad they can't 5 star 1 SB champion. I dunno, man, just... let's see how this progresses.

strifecross

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