Hey Lexi could share more about when you’d like to drop the next roadmap, would it be like after Briar or some time for season start
Writing it now Q.Q don't know the release just yet. Need to find random things to hid in the roadmap like I did last time..though I'm not even sure anyone picked up on it hahahahaha.
Note* after I find the time to noodle on it. It will still need to go through editing and localization. So it will be a bit of time.
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!
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 :)
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 :)
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.
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.
Read moreWith 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.
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.
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 
Is there a champ that has been in development ever since you joined?
Strictly speaking, yes. But it’s also because we cancel, pause and bring things back all the time.
Hey /u/neolexical
I heard a couple of times that August will take a break or leave the champs team after Briar. That being said, I wanted to ask you a question, do you think the current champions team is the “weakest” it’s ever been? I feel with all this help the team has been doing (with Modes and shit), the team has lost many many important members. It’s evident that losing designers like that affects the team, I mean CertainlyT was a huge loss. Are new champions still gathering sizeable audiences when it comes to depth and breadth? I also do feel champions are more miss than hit these days, which sucks.
I don’t think so! August is still around. We are probably the only team that had the most staffed disciplines. Thus it makes sense for us to be the ones that pitch in to help the other teams to start up again. We are taking some highly ambitious projects though Naafiri with her dogs was a lot of tech work. Some future ones are also super ambitious. Will go into it in the next roadmap.
Yes, I just noticed you guys deleted the "Not even the blade" line from her biography.
If I could give my two cents, respectfully, I think the piece by piece bit was confusing for sure, but still made sense if you assumed the deleted line applied to "remained" and not the tearing and biting.
I think the problem was mixing this line with the dagger described as "mangled" in the later parts of the story. At least that's where my confusion stemmed from.
This was the original (found it!). The piece by piece is referring to the man and his horse! They were ...unfortunately eaten morsel by morsel :'( RIP
Jaws snapped at the man and his horse from all sides, tearing at them, devouring them piece by piece until nothing remained.
Not even the blade.
Yeah, I gotta be honest, the complaints about Naafiri being the strongest were really funny. Guy took an obvious opinion by the character as fact - it's like what the powerscaling community loves to do. I'm glad you're clearing up the dagger issue, though. I think she's an awesome concept, besides that. You guys did a good job.
:D
Glad you are enjoying her as much as we do!
Good.
This was an (pretty minor and forgivable, IMO) oversight by the writer, and I'm glad Riot is going to correct it. I wish they just owned the fuck up (I don't believe they intended it to be metaphorical, to me it's a lot more understandable if it was just an oversight), but it's still better than being stubborn
We wanted to use shattered because points to her state of mind. I think the imagery was taken a bit too far and I can see how folks can interpret it as breaking the weapon, especially since lots of regions do not consume league lore in english. Aka if its confusing in english, it's probably 10x in other translated languages. Our narrative folks are in our day to day development including the marketing assets, Hounds of Iron. We actually specifically used similar imagery and was very careful to show the whole blade as things "shatter". I think if we made a mistake its probably easier to just call out the mistake than to take this route!
Read moreHello, I apologize for the confusion. I quoted it from the League Wiki in the Early Life section and mistakenly assumed it was sourced. I'll clean up my original comment with a precision.
Thanks for your communication by the way, highly appreciate it!
Np! the original text was something along the lines of hounds consuming bite by bite until nothing was left, not even the blade.
To clarify (because honestly I would get confused by it as well :P ), we didn't explicitly say the dogs ate the dagger piece by piece, rather, after the frenzy nothing was left.
I would imagine even Naafiri herself doesn't quite understand what had happened :D
Can someone please clarify for me whether these pets or literal or metaphorical?
metaphorical as well >:D There are no random floating hands in runeterra as I know of today!
But literal irl cause pet the dog man
So looking at these comments, when did the narrative suddenly turn into "but dude it was clearly metaphorical" or "dude it's an unreliable narrator" as if it's the readers' fault for not distinguishing figurative speech in a completely literal text with absolutely no signs of metaphorical meaning?
her mangled dagger embedded within the body of each dog.
and the hounds bite into the blade, causing it to shatter
Both these stories are in third person, and there is no metaphor here at all. The text is quite clear.
and the hounds bite into the blade, causing it to shatter
Hihi! Would love to know where the second quote came from. I don't think I've seen it before and would like to clean it up if its out there somewhere.
The Reddit post in question complained about a) Naafiri being the strongest and b) the shattering of the blade.
A) was a very obvious case of an unreliable narrator being taken way too literal B) wasn’t quite as obvious, and I believe the criticism was warranted to a degree.
If I was a Darkin I would think I'm the strongest too heh.
Jaws snapped at the man and his horse from all sides, tearing at them, devouring them piece by piece until nothing remained.
Not even the blade.
"Piece by piece" clearly talks about man+horse. This only says that the blade was swallowed, not in pieces.
Some dog could have swallowed the blade whole and this still works.
One minor adjustment :D hounds might have not eaten the blade either. Its just that its not longer there. What happened? hmmmm.......
Hi Lexi!
Hope you're well, i'm just being curious about a long lasted topic for one of our beloved champions, Shyvana.
Maybe you can't answer right now, but you might the best one out of Rioters to give us a good state of where she currently stand, as you might have notice (not only on Reddit but also from previous polls) there's a big community behind our lovely dragon lady awaiting for her well deserved VGU.
Are you able to expand on that? Of course if there's details you can share on her!
We have not started working on Shyvana. Currently, the team is focused on getting Jax and Skarner out first.