UngodlyPain

Is ravenous hydra becoming a mythic or are Goredrinker and stridebreaker becoming legendaries then?

On the Shojin thing, I guess that's fair.

I think some fighters should be tankier. And yeah people need to be brought off Duskblade. I just don't completely agree with this methodology. Like couldn't you have done +75 HP and no change to AD? And you already nerfed duskblade?

Or maybe just buff the more durability centric fighter items like Deadmans, FON, Steraks, Death Dance, or something else?

Cause unless you're making new mythics for the lighter fighters? Or are you gonna just say lighter fighters lost 2 mythic options? Is Riven now gonna be balanced around triforce or sunderer?

Tldr: my issue is largely this is targeted at half the mythics.

Ultimately it's tough to get exactly a mythic item that fits not only the combat pattern (Do you like Sheen? Do you like attack speed?) and also the durability profile. That's definitely a key flaw with mythic items.

For now, Eclipse is a pretty reasonable light fighter item. I do think the tankier side of champions are a bit underserved but it might be that we just have to wait a while and even though tankier fighters are a little underserved we may not want to shift stat lines around.

As a secondary benefit, though, top lane becomes less snowbally and the game as a whole becomes less bursty if fighters on average build into more HP and less AD

PKTrash12

Yeah, I bet all those challanger Riven mains on Korea must be trolling.

You cant go hydra every matchup, considering there are some juggernauts that just one-shot you without gore. Plus, considering she is one of the only top laners in this day and age without ANY form of penetration, you should always build a bc as second item, so hydra build take very long to go online since you delay your mythic so much (third item). Those factors mean Riven should indeed build gore in many games.

Please, talk to someone who plays Riven on the balance team, if that person even exists

I mean even in exactly Challenger in Korea, it's still 50/50 Goredrinker and Ravenous 1st item. You can't really apply win rates with so little a sample, so I won't bother. If you zoom out enough to get a decent picture, (e.g. Master+ worldwide), Ravenous is more common and statistically significantly higher win rate.

You're right that there are going to be matchups where a champion must build tankier. But on average, Riven is succeeding with the items meant for her.

Disloyaltee

Then my last question would be: What is the most/least time it took to come up with a champions kit?

From my time on champs, I think Briar was the least because of several things that design will go into on the devblog for Briar. Also August is quite senior in craft soooo expected for him to work fast

Disloyaltee

Thanks for the answer, that makes it more understandable.

So then is it fair to say that redesigning skins is taking longer than the development of the rework itself? And are new skins just prioritized over the redesign of Skarner's already existing skins?

No unless it’s an ultimate ( eyeing that SG Udyr). Skins is easier to throw people at them to make. Several can be in parallel. Base champ def take the biggest bulk of time. Udyr was a slight outlier because we made it hard on ourselves by making so many forms while not that every skins is equal to 4 skins… it was still quite a bit of added load.

tknitsni

sounds like insanely good 1st item and even now Shojin 1st is probably the best option to do

Yeah Shojin is a great Hecarim item. Ideally I'd like to bribe him off of Manamune and Duskblade so he's less one-shotty.

UngodlyPain

Yes I know it's a gold efficiency win... But not all bruisers value beefiness equally.

Like yeah Garden going stridebreaker is gonna be really happy. Or Goredrinker Illaoi.

But someone like say Fiora or Riven? Not so much.

Similarly (but not as drastic as) Xerath compared to Brand or Ryze or something when talking about the value of the HP on random mage items.

Edit and gore/stride are mythics so they should cater to heavier and lighter fighters... And Shojin is almost exclusively a lighter fighter item. And not intended to be very defensive.

Fiora and Riven already have Ravenous Hydra as an aggressive high-Haste option.

IMO Shojin is too narrow by being only slightly different from Ravenous. I intend to give more mid-sized fighters a solid selfish option that's not a) too light on durability and b) only viable 3rd+

On average, I think fighters need to be tankier than they are now and bribed a bit to back off of items like Duskblade. Note, this is on average. Fiora, Riven, etc. are meant to be on the squishier side.

Macaulyn

With all due respect, specially because I know that these decisions aren't exactly in your hand... I call bullshit. We used to get more stuff than this, I cannot possibly believe that there were years in which we got multiple VGUs and champion releases and nowadays the former is literally not happening this year and the latter has been drastically reduced in number.

We made Asol CGU, Jax VU and multiple midscopes this year. There have been some reprioritizing to help with new modes and preseason from the champs team. We also helped trained up a bunch of folks to fully staff up Modes and SR team in the future :) Have some cool stuff we are also super excited to share with everyone at a later date too! Our work generally stretch over months and sometimes a whole year. So it does take time to see the fruits of our labor. But just like you, I personally can’t wait to see more.

Disloyaltee

I know you guys are doing your best, but you have to look at things from our perspective.

All you are saying is "It's hard to make it work" and "It's not as easy as people think" but you give zero reasoning for why it is harder. From our - the consumers - perspective, you released 5 entirely new champions while working on a single rework. Many people (including me) are dissatisfied with the pace, but not because we hate Riot, because to us it seems absolutely unreasonable for this to take longer than 5 entire champions.

Also, going back 10 years, you used to release 20 champs a year, of course not as high quality as nowadays, but that doesn't help the case.

I'd greatly appreciate if you could tell us more about WHY it isn't possible to do quicker, maybe even a behind the scenes YouTube video comparing the development process of reworks vs new champions, might be interesting.

I realized I didn’t touch on the why in the first reply. Process for making a champion is much more iterative rather than known space. If we use a regular skins (non legendary +) as a comparison, a skin is a know space once you concept. There are no new technology, no big problems to solve and no need to make something, play with it, see if it works, try it against a few more champs and try again. Thus, their development can be very much more waterfall. Aka: do one thing after another because it’s defined. Making a champion or rework is less defined. It sometimes is about trying a bunch of things by throwing them at the wall and see what sticks the best. This means implementing, reimplementing, trying and retrying until we get it right. We don’t have a blueprint of what good looks like, we define as we go. This can get faster as people get more experience because there might be things they tried before that they can quickly filter through.

Disloyaltee

I know you guys are doing your best, but you have to look at things from our perspective.

All you are saying is "It's hard to make it work" and "It's not as easy as people think" but you give zero reasoning for why it is harder. From our - the consumers - perspective, you released 5 entirely new champions while working on a single rework. Many people (including me) are dissatisfied with the pace, but not because we hate Riot, because to us it seems absolutely unreasonable for this to take longer than 5 entire champions.

Also, going back 10 years, you used to release 20 champs a year, of course not as high quality as nowadays, but that doesn't help the case.

I'd greatly appreciate if you could tell us more about WHY it isn't possible to do quicker, maybe even a behind the scenes YouTube video comparing the development process of reworks vs new champions, might be interesting.

It’s not a completely fair assessment to say that we released 5 champions since working on a rework. Let me explain this. New champions takes almost a year to make. Udyr was completed last year, and we started on Skarner around a year ago after Udyr released. Large reworks generally takes more than a new champion (make the champion + all of the skins). Any of the champions on the roadmap have been started prior to Skarner with the exception of the cute creature marksman. Naafiri was actually started by Reav3 around when I first joined the team that was almost 2 years ago.

Pe4enkas

Some day Riot will understand that people don't like building Gore because it deals no damage, not really because it's not tanky enough.

Aatrox, Riven and other champs that want Gore build Eclipse instead because it gives them more damage, simple as that. Gore is an item that kinda works ok as 1st or 2nd slot, but scales like shit.

Riven is the exact kind of champion we want building items like Ravenous Hydra. Players should build Goredrinker less and those that do are trolling anyway.

Eclipse is a pretty reasonable fighter item. It's certainly very aggressive, but it's explicitly meant to be viable on them.

The stuff that's really rough is the fighters going ER/Collector/Duskblade as common builds. It means they don't care about durability enough and they just become assassins.

I think there's meant to be a spectrum to fighter items: Some are ultra-aggressive (Ravenous, BotRK, Kraken) that make sense on skirmishers, then there's aggressive-bent ones like Trinity Force that make sense on the next tankiest tier, and then there's more durability-first fighter items like Death's Dance, Sterak's, and where I think Goredrinker should be. To be clear, Aatrox and Riven are not close together on this spectrum.

Ultimately there are champions who are meant to have a lot of durability an that's how they get their job d...

BurrStreetX

I hear you

No, yall dont. You have had MONTHS knowing about this. And waited till now to say anything.

Yall promised transparency and to be proactive, not reactive earlier this year. This is none of that.

I completely agree we should've talked about this earlier

LordRycho

I am completely okay with you guys doing things that make you more money in the long term investment (Like the erasure chroma, it's not important to me or valuable to me because it's a recolor of the jhin skin, iiwii), but I feel like one of the biggest issues, especially from the small community that has collected every skin in the game and put a lot of money towards Riot. Is that we feel you guys are doing more and more each day to squeeze more money out of that top%. Loot roll out calendars not being easy to see, sometimes you guys do release prestige skins on the days you say and sometimes you don't, leaving us rerolling permanents and other thing. It kind of feels like you are limiting what people at the upper end can get despite us being the biggest supporters of your game. It's discouraging when you spend *that much money* on a company only to see them change systems out of your favor without any real beneficial incentives like an orange essence shop. And utilizing a gacha system like this only works if you combine it with the potential of earning *a standard amount* of that gacha currency, it's why Genshin Impact and other gacha system MMO's are doing so well is they give you free access and means to the content while also incentivizing you to spend money on the off-chance that you *do* want it.

That is definitely not our intent - to frustrate the biggest supporters of the game. I agree on the orange essence issue. Thanks for your feedback I appreciate it.

AobaSona

I know this isn't your fault, but "there's not enough time if we're doing it right" doesn't feel like enough when, a few years ago, Riot was able to do like 4 VGUs a year, while also releasing 4-5 champions.

Instead of accepting this situation as "this is just how it is", I think Riot should be looking at how to make that pace possible again, or at least half of it. Cause we didn't just go from 4 to 2 per year, we went to 1 or ZERO.

While the poll might have been a bit of a mistake, let's remember that in the first or second VGU poll we had TWO WINNERS and Riot managed to get both out without significant delays.

I know you've also said that it's not as easy as "just hire more people", but with the news that some of the champions team got put into gamemodes, that does seem necessary too. I personally don't mind getting less new champions for more gamemodes, but the way that it hurts VGUs (which are already on a bad situation) makes me sad :/

If we were getting many ASUs I wouldn't mind it as much, cause the gameplay part isn't the main thing for me, but the pacing for those is also super slow. The number of outdated stuff in the game has always hurt for those of us who care a lot about the art/lore/state of champions, but in recent years, I think seeing so many champions getting updated for Legends of Runeterra, Wild Rift and concept art/design guides (whatever those are called) has made the issue painfully clear to everyone.

We are def re-evaluating the levers we can change to make more possible atm!
I can't promise anything yet but hopefully time will show our sincerity for maintain the quality of the cast of league champions :)

wolfchuck

People want to be able to EARN rare content - not purchase.

Prestige skins were better when they didn’t come to the shop. Granted, you still had to buy the pass and then play X amount of time.

Icons are the only thing that have “rare” status since so many can no longer be obtained.

Having to beat Odyssey with 2 augments for the final icon means you had to invest time into the game and earn it before the mode left.

The difference in “rare” items in games like MMOs are that they have rare drop chances, but you can keep spamming the dungeon/boss until you get the drop. Whereas this is just gacha, where you swipe until you get it.

Why not release skins for champs for X amount of mastery points?

Why is a $200 a chroma? If you’re trying to make a piece of content the most rare in the game, it better be epic. At least with TFT the Mythic Boards and Mythic Chibis add an entirely new element to the game.

I hear you - that is true for many many players. The majority of League players don't spend at all and earn many skins for free. Icons being the only 'rare' thing is part of the issue, for players who are looking for something rare there are no options other than through play (which again is great for most players) which was the feedback we're responding to.

GrumpyShisa

Why don't you do open voting for skins then? I think it would be cool with the community. A Thematic and a Legendary skin vote, while you guys can't add more ASU/reworks/VGU.

Hihi! We work very separate from the Skins team! I'm not the best person to talk to about skins. I can speak to champions, reworks, midscopes etc :)

Spideraxe30

Hey Brightmoon, I want to be candid and talk about this in good faith. We get it, Riot is a company and needs to make money, but this still feels like the wrong approach for creating rare premium content. The effort to pricing here quite frankly does not feel worth it, the current system does not feel prestigious since it’s gated by both time and money, money being the only way to acquire this content for up until a year feels atrocious. Having alternative paths to this content would at least make it feel better.

hey Spideraxe, There are players that aren't interested in earning skins only through engagement, which has become more and more clear to us the more surveys and player outreach we do. Now maybe this isn't the way, which is why we're trying it with a mythic variant of a skin that is already available, but having alternate paths defeats the rarity goal for those players.

Xanhomey

Hello Brightmoon, I appreciate being transparent and taking your time to discuss this with the community.

I have 3 questions that I hope we get clarifications on.

1. If this monetization method didn't flurish or meet internal expectations, what will be the next method?

2. Aside from Jhin's skin, are there any planned skins rn or is it just this skin in the meantime?

3. Have you discussed any different method before landing on this?

I know some of these questions might sound "intrusive", but I'm trying to get a better picture of the whole thing here.

Again, I appreciate taking your time to address this.

Sure thing, 1. There isn't a next method planned, it would depend on what worked / didn't work about this offering that would inform what we do next. 2. Nothing I can share now, we're just looking at results for this skin. 3. Yes we have discussed many potential options to better serving players who are seeking rarity, but the feedback that Prestige wasn't cutting it for those players is something we've heard more this year so explorations are still early.

Mathemuse

Is there any way you can provide a more precise date as to when it will be eligible for loot? I think having an exact date as to when it'll be available would help.

I want to say "This time next year" but we honestly don't know for sure just yet. We wanted to put a harder date in but its extremely hard to call a date a year out from anything development wise. The safest language we can use is just "next year". Not trying to be sneaky with it or anything just the reality.

cydon1999

Do Redeedmed Star Guardian Xayah and Rakan fall under this new variant system or will I be able to buy them normally.

Please say normally, me and my duo have been waiting since March for them. :(

They are not part of this exploration no

CptDecaf

It's so obvious to anyone who understands how these companies work that there are probably about 33 Jira tickets for Skarner's redesign and every single one of them is marked at the lowest priority below things like, "border on store purchase icon is 1 pixel too large on medium screens."

The work on Skarner isn't unfinished because it's hard. It's not done because they are barely working on it.

Actually, we have a dedicated pod for Skarner! They work sprint to sprint on Skarner! In general, Champion team is decoupled from PIE(Skins team) and other teams. We solely focus on new champions, reworks, midscopes etc.
We do chip in to fix champion related bugs, prepping for new modes and new seasons as well on the side!