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Running off for now

Always more stuff to do :) Throw in any questions and I’ll try to get to a few more tomorrow! Thanks friends!

What is your advice for someone who seems to lack motivation to actually start making games? What is your favourite part of League and what do you like to work on the most?

Make something very small and get people to play it. Don’t think you need to build something brand new to get good experience and figure out what you do well and what you can improve it.

My favorite part of league is the whole thing. No individual element particularly fascinates me more than others. The interconnections are the exciting bits to me, where small changes to a system here dramatically changes how certain champions experience the game, or how multiple parts of the game can be revitalized and improved by adding new foundational tools or content.

Nearly a year since they came to the PBE, how successful holistically do you feel runes Reforged has been

I’m personally very happy with the project as a whole. Runes have been a lot of fun for most players, much easier to continue working with and improving, and we’ve found that they can be helpful to improve class balance and broad tuning.

That doesn’t mean that there haven’t been lots of smaller problems, but I’m very proud that the team build good stuff and a system that allows us to constantly fix the problems and make it better.

What's the oddest outside-of-work experience that ended up contributing directly to something that ended up in the game?

I’ve trained in martial arts for a few years, and even taught for quite a while, and one of my proudest contributions to games was that I got to do mocap for the attack animations of Alpha Protocol.

Any details on the new champ you can tell us about?

Convenient reminder opportunity: I don’t work on champions, and won’t every intentionally spoil another team’s work.

If you could be friends with any champion in league who would it be?

Honestly, I just want to run around with a scuttle crab or ride on the back of Elder Dragon. I haven’t been really attached to a particular champion in quite a long time.

What should I do to celebrate 3k followers?

Twitter is about to hit a bit of a milestone. How should we celebrate?

Will Nexus Blitz come back? (Please it was so much fun)

I’m not able to talk about Nexus Blitz really, right now. We’re still getting results back and evaluating. I’m very happy that so many folks enjoyed it though and we’ll definitely let everyone know if and when it will be back.

What implications you'd see in making systemic splits in how certain stats function in different champion pools, like the adaptative stats Dawngate had? I've been pondering of this on crit for a while (function split based on character range type, melees working it like Ashe) and got curious in what a professional has to say on the concept.

These are examples of what I refer to as “interpreted stats” where the game can give you some amount of a stat, and some other element of your champion or kit tells you what it will do with it. I am broadly a fan of this form of stat, and feel that league would be better with more forms of interpreted stats. For example, I’d prefer an item system where Warmogs gave you 100 Fortitude, which means it gives tanks 300 health, but fighters 250 health and some flat DR or slow resist or something. The goal would be that players not interested in complex systems knowledge can trust that Fortitude makes you tankier, but the game can ensure that different kits with different needs or desired strength profiles don’t all get the exact same stats.

We’ve basically done this with champions like Pyke and Jhin, although in very dramatic ways, but those champions make clear that having differentiated ways to look at items is a pretty rich way to make a champion or class feel very different and exciting to certain players.

Let’s do a Q&A, friends!

Office Hours are open! I’ve been off of Summoner’s Rift work for a bit, but let’s talk league of legends, game design, or whatever. Let’s chat!

#league of legends #lol #game design

Thanks for all the questions!

If you have more to sneak in, throw them at me and I’ll see what I can get to. :)

What are good ways for us to give feedback on NB(or in general)? What are the best ways for feedback to be useful? Will there be surveys? I love surveys!

We are doing random surveys, but you can’t really opt into those. If you have feedback, we are watching boards, we are watching social media, and we’re especially watching how folks play.

What characteristics made Nexus Blitz be considered a permanent game mode as compared the other game like URF, Ascension, Dominion, and others.

Well, for one, we built it from the start with goals around being permanent. That meant creating a lot of game to game difference, having some more accessible strategic depth, and having a strategy around how we could maintain the mode and make sure it didn’t hit the decay issues that other modes have had. We also got to learn from the successful elements of things like URF and Dominion, hoping to capture some of the experiences players really loved, while dodging elements that hurt them for the long run.

At this point, we have no idea how well those things worked, but fingers crossed?!?

Why is Nexus Blitz called "SLIME" internally?

We needed a code name, and Zenon came up with the “Split Lane Interactive Multiplayer Experience.” It was originally “Single Lane” but the prototype changed a bit.

Are there specific staples of League that are locked into making a new game mode (I.e. Nexus win condition, towers, lane, jungle)? If so, is there a desire(from players and dev) to see a game mode that doesn’t fall into the Destroy Nexus to Win category?

Nexus Blitz started with the premise of adding a bunch of excitement and wackiness to a much shorter, but still very familiar version of SR. Future modes will likely target spaces a fair bit more differentiated or unique. No idea what that stuff might look like at this point, though.

Will the snowball event be removed? It brings matches to a slog and is pretty dissatisfying.

Right now, we’re working on changes that should speed it up, make it feel a lot better, and hopefully get it on par or better with our other events. If we can’t make it better, it’s likely to be removed in the future.

Nexus Blitz is really fun so far, any news/data on how popular it is? Will it be a permanent gamemode? or on the rotating schedule

Very much too soon to tell for us. We want to see if players want to keep playing, not just how much they play in the first week or so. We don’t want to get encouraged by early excitement and making something permanent if it isn’t fun for hundreds of games.

*Whispers*

...Go play hundreds of games...

;)

...Or even better, tell us what would make you excited to play thousands of games.

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