BurrStreetX

So they came back to work yesterday, since you know, they get some time for the holidays. Yall give them a day to get back to work, then they say this and yall are all butthurt?

It says:

Tomorrow it should be also in the client and on the website.

Can't wait for you all to meet more of the dev team next week in the Season Start 2023 videos!!

Sounds like yall just need to relax. Besides in past years the cinematic has come a day or two before the season start.

Good god yall can be exhausting.

The way the dates fell this year is making things a bit weird - usually the first day back isn't literally Jan 2nd. We can't ship a patch the next day because it's too risky without QA time and we want to make sure we can get changes in for season start. We always do Season start hype about 5 days before the start of the season, but I agree it feels later than usual from how the calendar falls.

Xerxes457

Isn’t the patch also the same day? So we get the patch and then the season starts?

Yep!

the team is very excited & nervous - it's a big day!!

RussellLawliet

Why wasn't it released in November then when it was actually relevant...?

It takes time to edit them and capture all the gameplay footage and then localize the script for all languages.

Spideraxe30

Are you gonna still be doing gameplay blogs or are you gonna do LoL Pls vids now that you're EP

I'm not sure yet... Maybe both for awhile! We're all kind of pitching in on things right now as we get through the holidays / folks out sick

TittieSeduction

Heya Brightmoon!

I had a small question, do you know when the personal customization will be out? I would like to flaire up my stuff and I keep closing and reopening my client.

So sorry it didn't make it into 12.1 patch - it should be available in 12.2 but we'll make sure to post an update in the patch notes

bz6

Morning /u/RiotBrightmoon

Awesome video updates I love these @ the start of every season. Thanks for the clarification first of all. Secondly, I am surpirsed nothing was mentioned about game ruining behaviour and the progress that is being made in that space.

Lastly, how reinforced does the LoL PC team compare to prior years? Feels like across departments the resources have been thinning out. Slowing down on champs and a smaller than usual pre-season can be seen as indicators of that from the outside looking in.

We’ve been doing a lot of behind the scenes work in the player behavior space (more on that in one of the blogs soon) but we are discussing shifting our focus this year towards promoting positive play (maybe through Honor maybe not).

The LoL PC team is really well funded and isn’t shrinking, in fact we’re growing and hiring more than ever. A lot of the slowdown you’ve felt is the past 2 years of the pandemic - everything is a little harder and a little slower than it used to be - but I’m still really proud of how much the team has done and very optimistic about what we can do this coming year.

ThisIsSnake

Thank you Brightmoon. I feel that the mid scope reworks and item adjustments have been absolutely carrying the updating efforts the past year and have really contributed to keeping League fresh with a new thing to look forward to every few patches. Items as well, I know it was catching up after preseason 2021 but its been fun to see item changes every other patch, it greatly increased the fun of theorycrafting I used to get when playing card games. Would love if you guys could add a new legendary item and intentionally adjust low pick rate items every patch or two, if you haven't considered it already as a goal.

ASUs were a great surprise too, but a lil sad that it seems like there is only 1 a year (Ahri) at this moment judging by the video?

Thanks for the thoughtful reply! We do have some legendary items (there are always a few constantly in design and testing) but nothing concrete to share now. But what you said is why we do it so we’ll keep at it. ASUs is still a question of how many we can do and how fast - we learned a lot from Caitlyn and hope that over time we’re able to them faster each time.

ThisIsSnake

Thank you for your time. P.s. Could you comment about the VGU cadence? It seems like Reav3 may have implied we are going down to 1 a year going forward?

VGU cadence is a frequent topic internally - each one requires a ton of effort particularly when redoing champions with large skin catalogs. And most now have large catalogs which is why it’s taking us longer and longer. But we aren’t setting 1 a year as a goal - we want to do more and are working on ways to speed things up. In the meantime we’re doing ASUs and more VFX and SFX and mini gameplay updates to more champions this year

papu16

Hi there. Whats your oppinion about toplane? RN this position feels pretty weird, especially with recent TP changes. You have any plans for this lane?(also what happened with Sterak/Maw/DD changes?)

I think the Gameplay lead designer is better suited to answer this, but I will say that the TP changes are very fresh and we’re monitoring what impacts that has. We’re not looking away from top lane I promise

Unfortunately we record these in November, so I couldn’t say much about current state of gameplay other than what we were doing for Preseason. For non-Redditors this season start video gives them the broad overview of what to expect this season. But we have multiple upcoming dev blogs this month that will give more on what we’re doing in the gameplay space!

ThisIsSnake

Hey /u/RiotBrightmoon, could you consider making a post with some 'windows of time' and titles for these gameplay devblogs? A post would tell people that what they want to learn about is coming soon. Feeling really down with how little there was in the main 2022 season video on these topics otherwise.

Yeah that’s a good suggestion - any gameplay update is inherently a snapshot in time (and wouldn’t be helpful to read later as things change) so more context on timeline makes sense

These are excellent! I think you captured his voice really well. You’re right we do have fewer minutes of voice than some of the champs we did in 2015-2018. It’s not because we care less (or have shifted resources to something else) it’s because we found there were diminishing returns on adding more lines that most players never hear and made the character less clear in game. For every one additional line of dialogue we have to script out the interaction and record it in multiple languages. And we got a lot of feedback that champions were talking too much in game and had too many variation lines that would push out hearing the more impactful / character defining ones. Now I can’t claim we’ve hit the sweet spot of how many lines yet, so it’s something we will talk more about.

[deleted]

His voice over is really well-done. I love how silly it sounds and it really fits the ridiculous way that he walks around and things. The champion was really well put together from a thematical standpoint.

edited for clarity.

That's really nice to hear! Creating a thematically cohesive champion is always a top goal - I think Ivern, while not everyone's cup of tea, is a fully realized character.

Dalganoth

Who was lead designer on him? His kit is super fun and rewarding

Blake "Squad5" Smith was the designer, but it's always a team effort from about 15 folks including animators, writers, engineers, sound designers, etc. Blake really designed a super fun and unique kit. I hope it encourages more folks to try Jungle who normally wouldn't

[deleted]

I completely agree with that notion - Ivern is a fully realized character. Did you do any of the work on Ivern? One of the themes that I like that was well done with Ivern, is that his personality isn't incredibly complex, when compared to some of the other champions that have been created or reworked.

Either way, his entire theme, design and kit are really well done.

I am one of the development managers for the champion team so I work on all of them to some degree, but I didn't work very closely on Ivern. I'll pass your feedback on to the team - thank you!

This is so good! Well done!

You captured the spirit of ARAM very well! Don't worry about it going away, ARAM has a dedicated playerbase that loves it - as do I!

The_Cactopus

Godspeed, summoners. To pay respects please everyone attempt at least one game of garen jungle in ranked. The resulting spike in the winrate data will confuse the balance team and this will be my true legacy.

Is it too late to fire you??? But seriously we miss you already :(

RiotIAmWalrus

Definitely something we're working on! We don't want your trophies to drift off into nothingness either.

I like this suggestion :)