alaskadotpink

Unlocking new champions via blue essence wasn't meant to get harder.

This is a joke, how can he even say this? They removed so many many ways to get BE/Champ shards and replaced them with hardly anything to compensate. Like it doesn't take a genius to have some foresight here?

I misunderstood a line.

Changing BE access to champs wasn't a goal we ever discussed internally. Digging in right now to understand whether any increased difficulty there is the result of something being bugged, miscalculation(s) somewhere on BE income or something else along those lines again.

alaskadotpink

Okay, thanks for clarifying. I misunderstood the original text so I'm happy to be wrong. Sorry!

All good and you're welcome

Jeremithiandiah

What do people think of swift play? I actually quite like it because it feels like a normal summoners rift game but you just get to late game faster. It doesn’t feel like an accelerated normal game but it is.

Very glad to hear that you like it, happy to answer any questions/discuss it with people here, I was one of the devs that helped get it out the door.

Sweprolle

How was the matchmaking for you? Every game so far me and my premades have gone up against people level 10 to 30..

Matchmaking was bugged at launch, should be fixed now. If you played games already you might need to play a few more to get into a more ideal MMR state. Sorry about that.

nikkicocoa7

played it once to try it but you can't make eternals progress so probably won't really play it much unless a friend wants to

All forms of progression were not functional at launch (challenges, etc), should be largely resolved. I think just eternals might not be fixed yet but they should be fixed within the next few days.

Dapper-Welcome-5286

Big fan of the casual, comeback heavy nature of the mode so far, kudos to y'all for the hard work! When y'all were workshopping swiftplay, was it always the intention to use the quick play champion pre-select system, or did you explore other queue styles before settling on the quick play format. (This is a long-winded way to beg for blind pick back)

From what I recall we always used the champion pre-select system when working on swiftplay. Never explored blind pick from what I recall, unfortunately.

Jeremithiandiah

My only concern is that I remember years ago that draft pick was removed from some regions. I think everyone should have access to an experience that is exactly like ranked for practice reasons, or so new players understand how the game really works in a competitive setting, without risking lp. The way swift play works, it could have completely different meta than the original game and may evolve into a quite different experience in the future.

A reasonable concern, unfortunately when draft pick is removed from a region that is generally because of player population as we dont want to spread players out too thin between different queues. I'm not too much of an expert on queues though to answer your question more in depth I'm afraid.

Wrevellyn

Can you elaborate on this? I tried a game and just got obliterated, enemy team was way out of my league. Some of my teammates were really good too, but I am *not good* at the game (trying to get better), and I just had no shot. Been maybe better after some of my friends teamed with me, but I have yet to have a good experience after 4 games which is about all I can manage in the time frame.

Can't really get too specific related to matchmaking and MMR but we didn't fully take into account your skill level from other queues to help inform your swiftplay rating when you first played.

Kingofthered

I really want to like it, but I was under the impression it was going to be tuned to be much faster than a regular rift game.

I'm happy people are liking it, but I've been surprised with my 25-30 minute games so far. Doesn't really feel like it's significantly different to a draft game, aside from the time saved queuing up.

Game pacing is something we are keeping an eye on. I think 20-25 minutes is both ideal and realistic, our main concern is the occasional outlier game going 35+ minutes. Honestly I don't think we would make the game be that much faster than it currently is (the core Summoner's Rift experience starts to get unrecognizable at that point) but we do want to come closer to guaranteeing that when you pick Swiftplay, you aren't running into the possibility of being in a game for 35-40 minutes or more in some cases. So less about "really fast games" (they should still be faster) and more about "we assure you that this experience in total will not be more than 30 minutes (rough estimate) from start to finish"

We have a few options of how we go about that, including sudden death, but we are still waiting to see what exactly game time looks like first.

Dapper-Welcome-5286

I figured, since the quickplay system cuts down on the interstitial time between games so much, but thought it worthwhile to ask! 

One more question, if it's cool with you! What kind of balance support are we going to be seeing with swiftplay in the weeks and months ahead? Is the plan to implement mode-specific nerfs a-la ARAM or Arena, or to essentially let it ride as a mirror of summoner's rift? 

We are gonna use ARAM and Arena style balance, using direct champion modifiers to abilities as well as general % buffs. So if for example we though Kassadin was too good we could nerf his R cooldown directly and also apply a -5% damage dealt buff to him.

BuizelNA

Lobby UI is atrocious. It's like trying to do champ select on ⅓ of the normal size. Champions Sort by: Mastery would be great.

For swiftplay itself, some elements of summoners still feel so sluggish. Why do we still have to afk for nearly 2 min before minions spawn?

Death timers also feel really rough. Having to afk for 65+ seconds at 20 minutes is awful

Definitely noted feedback, appreciate it

HaxorViper

Would making objectives and waves come up in less time help with this? I was thinking something similar to Wild Rift which has really quick games. The accelerated gold is neat but I also feel like getting full build quicker doesn’t necessarily make the game faster, especially if a full build is tanky.

You run into an issue where all you are doing is fighting objectives if we reduce their spawn times. Making objectives give more powerful rewards is a more likely direction.

crazydavy

Yea I played 4 swift matches this morning and every game was between 28 and 36 minutes long. I feel like we need more damage to structures of even 3 less towers per team. Maybe even start us at level 3 or 6. I love the concept of a faster game and more even gold generation. I just want it to actually be a shorter game lol.

28 minutes is far above the average so that is quite surprising, but either way we will definitely look into cutting down game time on the high end. Average game time is still hovering around 20-25

Sent1k

Have you considered having the nexuses (nexi?) coming alive and moving towards the centre of the map to attack each other. Pretty cool idea imo.

Haha not out of the picture but any sudden death would likely be slightly more serious than the one from nexus blitz.

KingKangst

Hi Galaxy!!! how are you i hope that you are fine!

Swiftplay is good addition, i had fun playing some games and the fast pace.

Would it be possible for you to experiment with a new "slot" for games that go beyond 30 minutes or something like that? like a new slot for another item that only unlocks after certain amount of time or objectives? It could be filled with a new item, or a powerfull elixir, or maybe a dropable item when you are killed?

maybe this would help with those games that go beyond 30 minutes.

Having 7 item slots (6 normal, 1 for trinket) is a bit of a core foundation for our game. Changing it is probably quite complex and would only be reserved for a massive update to our game. That being said, I wouldn't rule out any additional changes to gameplay that are specific to swiftplay.

Salty-Hold-5708

Some spells might need adjustments in their CD's, i understand that the game is meant to go faster but there's been times where in order to keep a solid pace and scale, I don't really have a chance to retreat and purchase items and refill mana. Makes it incredibly punishing if you have to use resources to even contest your enemies when they are resourceless. Since all they need to stay relevant early games is d shield + second wind, makes it almost impossible to not lose gold/xp to stay relevant.

Will be submitting some balance adjustments for Swiftplay soon, including in future patches https://x.com/RiotPhroxzon/status/1877822985421402230

LifeAsSoph

Do you know when/if swiftplay is coming to OCE, alot of my ARAM only friends are excited to use it as a way to ease back into summoners rift

Definitely something we want to do, but it has to make sense given OCE's player population and the distribution of ranked play versus casual. When you say ease into SR do you think you'd want to play only Swiftplay or would you use it as a bridge back into Ranked/Draft pick

Arnotts_shapes

Hey Galaxysmash, do you know when it’s arriving in OCE? There’s been zero communication and we still have quickplay?

Swiftplay currently will not be enabled on OCE per the patch notes.

JoshQuest1

In my head it's just the clash sudden death where the outermost structures slowly burn when the soft time limit starts guaranteeing a Nexus hits 0 by a hard time limit. (which would need to account for respawning Nexus turrets now too.)

most likely that would be what it looks like, at least in the short term.

Arnotts_shapes

Do we have a timeframe for when? It doesn’t say in the patch notes.

There is no plan at the moment to enable Swiftplay in the future for OCE. That is of course subject to change.

MuggyTheMugMan

Hello! Thank you for your work! I wanted to ask on your thoughts on removing(/reducing) the 1 minute 30 second window of dead time at the start of the game with this mode, feels kinda weird when you go right into loading screen and its supposed to be faster

Not something we are actively considering at the moment but definitely not out of the question.