Caenen_

Sure wouldn't mind! Just a minute!

To quickly update on this, we found the cause and pushed a fix to live.

Thanks for your help!

Caenen_

I know this bug but I'll not disclose the reproduction or any details to prevent it from being further abused on the live servers.

I did point out the root for this issue that causes this bug to a Rioter before, guess it didn't go into the log or just sits there on low prio. Which is something it shouldn't do, for how simple/standard of a fix it is.

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Also, you should probably add a video to this thread, so people can see what exactly Brand is doing to its victims! It's a dumb bug, but looks pretty interesting in action at least!

Hello! Would you mind dming me the reproduction steps?

TheWanderingSuperman

Hey! So, my source of the "long term" modes from the Ask Riot: Events and Game Modes is the following:

That means it takes the same amount of work to bring a mode back for customs as it does to bring it back for queues, which takes us back to our previous discussions around why we’ve chosen to invest our time into developing new modes, rather than keeping older modes on rotation.

Within that link (the /Dev: State of Modes), my key takeaway (as it is bolded in the summary) is:

So to that end, the Modes Team is focusing all of our attention on improving the existing long-term game modes and discovering new, potentially long-term modes that you can play for years.

So, I admit I may be reaching a bit too far, but, hopefully that helps lay out my thought process.

Second, I'm still unclear as to whether Riot intends to release a "long-term and casual" mode (ie a separate queue for a quick mode like Nexus Blitz). Because, in October of last year, Cactopus had the following to say about Nexus Blitz in particular, emphasis is not mine:

This conversation is tough because at the end of the day people who really like NB can’t be convinced that it didn’t deserve more love. Like, if you like it and want more of it, you aren’t wrong.

So when Rioters like me come out and say “here’s the facts, not that many people were playing it,” it doesn’t feel like it’s really addressing NB fans’ point. And that point is, Nexus Blitz really DID fill a niche and it met player needs that we’re currently failing to meet.

So, look, even if the conspiracy theory about missions is totally wrong (and it is), we get it—NB offered something special. And we’d be crazy not to try to get that special something right in the future (and hopefully in a way that’s appealing to more players). That’s all I’ll say for now.

I interpret that bolded sentence to mean that Riot intends to fill that niche at some point, but, as it is a waste of money (if nothing else) to temporarily fill a niche (a la an event), the logical conclusion is that a "long term" mode is intended. But, maybe I'm so far down the rabbit hole that I'm twisting 8 month old words too far.

Because at the end of March, the Quick LoL Thoughts had the following to say:

Finally, one more event related note. A piece of feedback we’ve received regularly is that some players would really like an event game mode where you get to pick your champ that also has a shorter game time than SR/ARAM do. Makes sense as a point of feedback, especially given our last few events have been either random champ select or limited control, with Poro King, ARURF and One for All. As a result one of our goals now is to deliver an event game mode that has shorter times and standard champ select rules this year.

By referring to this game mode as an "event game mode", I'm led to believe that it won't be long-term/permanent. (And I am pretty sure they are meaning exactly having Nexus Blitz come back for an event this year.)

All of this is to say, I want to keep playing League, but I don't always want to play Summoner's Rift, TFT, or even ARAMs very much any more, nor do I want to wait 18 months to be able to play Nexus Blitz for a week or two. If Cactopus is to be believed, I'm not alone in this feeling (though I'm certainly not a majority), and Riot intends to do something to attract and retain players like me. Or not, I don't know.

Either way, thanks for swinging by, I cannot wait for Nexus Blitz to come back, and if you accidentally flip the totally real magic switch in the server room to keep Nexus Blitz enabled permanently, I'd be overjoyed.

All of this is to say, I want to keep playing League, but I don't always want to play Summoner's Rift, TFT, or even ARAMs very much any more, nor do I want to wait 18 months to be able to play Nexus Blitz for a week or two.

I totally get this, and I think that League as an organization does too (as evidenced by Cactopus and Meddler's respective posts). The main question is 'what's the best way to scratch that itch', and that's something we're still figuring out as we go along, with all of your help ^^

Thanks for taking the time to lay this all out for me. I can't wait for y'all to have Nexus Blitz back either, so it's about time for me to get back to the ol' grindstone :D

SuperMrBlob

Ah, that's disappointing. I have to say, from an outsiders perspective - I'm sure you'd agree - L4T3NCY's analysis really does seems to make a lot of logical sense. Showdown is indeed just ARAM with a win condition attached. If what you're saying is accurate - that something that seems like it should be so simple to implement is indeed so hard to do - the tech debt is worse than I realised... I vote kill it with fire ;)

If you're interested and able to discuss what emerged from that evaluation, and why it'd be so difficult, I'd be really curious to know. I'm sure it exists, but I'm really struggling to think of a technical reason why that'd be the case (mid level full stack dev)

Edit: The more I think about this, the more confused and curious I get. ARAM works, check. Customs supports multiple game modes, check. What stops y'all from literally copy-pasting ARAM, adjusting it slightly, and adding it as a custom mode? Really am interested in a response, if possible!

From a game-design / ingame perspective you're quite right; very little would need changing or updating.

The main catch is the step between clicking "Play" and getting a game loadscreen -- it's a seriously complex web of technologies and processes, some old and some new, some in need of upgrade, some currently being replaced, etc. I can't go into a ton of detail here (not least of which because I'm not an expert in this space), but suffice it to say that it's much deeper than it looks.

SuperMrBlob

Hey, thanks so much for the response.

My understanding from L4T3NCY's post is that Showdown is the one exception to the 'RGMs are difficult to support cross-patch' rule because it's just a small variation of ARAM, so nothing should break from patch to patch. He said it would be "effectively zero upkeep".. was he wrong?

I know there's the other issue of enabling RGMs that are currently live for matchmaking in customs (something to do with matchmade game modes and custom games running on different server tech - L4T3NCY refers to the problem towards the end of his post) but that's not at all what the Ask Riot article discusses.

I'm not sure exactly what data or analysis he was operating from, so I can't speak directly to that. I can say that I've been a part of some recent-ish evaluations of what it would take to bring RGMs (including Showdown) to customs, and the short answer was "a lot". Codebases also change a lot in 3+ years, particularly in cases like League where there's new stuff every two weeks, so it may have become harder over time.

TheWanderingSuperman

Hey u/RiotPopc0rner!

Thanks for taking the time to swing by. I understand that custom games and game modes aren't a "set if and forget it" type of thing (especially in a game with such frequent updates), and that overhead doesn't come free.

In that first dev blog you posted, as in other dev blogs, and elsewhere by other Riot employees, the message has been that the "Modes Team" is focusing on finding long-term alternate game modes (that Nexus Blitz tried to be). However, what is to stop these new modes from encountering that same cost/benefit trap that has killed every other custom game mode or rotating game mode? Where bugs (or dev time) eclipsed the money directly earned?

Built in monetization (like TFT)? Simpler designs that are more similar to SR, allowing for fewer bugs and thus overhead?

The reason I ask is that Riot specifically says they want long-term alternate modes, but well ... as with client fixes and toxic bans ... talk is cheap.

Hm. I don't see anything about 'long term' modes in that article -- maybe I'm missing something or looking at the wrong one?

In general, the Modes team (past and present) has been / is focused on shipping temporary modes to make events in League more special. Nexus Blitz was an experiment by another team (not the Modes team) to build a long-term alternative mode for League that was ultimately unsuccessful. The reason the Modes team is talking about Nexus Blitz now is that we want to pick up where that team left off, because we believe Nexus Blitz could have a place as a temporary mode.

Hi folks!

We've talked about custom games more recently in this Ask Riot post: https://nexus.leagueoflegends.com/en-us/2019/09/ask-riot-events-and-game-modes/. The quick summary is that making RGMs function in customs is a substantial amount of work for some subtle technical reasons, and we don't think that shipping buggy or broken custom games in the meantime is a good idea.

We try our best to be transparent about what we're working on in the future, like talking about the upcoming run of Nexus Blitz. One of the risks of this approach is that sometimes new challenges or opportunities come up, and things change. When they do, we'll do our best to be open about how and why. Either way, we want to continue hearing from you about stuff like this -- the more we can understand what y'all want, the better :)

kkchen

There seems to be various reasons that float around for why the RGM communication isn't resonating.

One base reasoning I see is the idea that setting up another RGM is "easy" since "you guys already have the for it"

It's easy to assume that supporting the RGM is as easy as flipping a switch and the only reason that you guys aren't doing it is for monetary/retention reasons. Whereas in reality there are many technical reasons for not doing so.

Perhaps some communications on the more technical difficulties (Game servers being different, scaling, constant support, etc) would help clarify not just why you guys made one decision, but why you guys didn't make a different decision.

Stretch goal for monetary cost evaluations, i.e we don't make vague skins since each skin costs multi-millions of dollars of infrastructure and labor cost.

Hey! You're absolutely right, technical complexity is the reason RGMs aren't able to just be flipped on.

The best analogy I can make is that RGMs "rust" over time. This happens in a ton of different ways: they sometimes rely on niche parts of the game engine that don't work well anymore, or systems whose code has been refactored or deleted since the last time they ran. Sometimes they were built in ways that cause problems with new or reworked champions (Sylas & new Mordekaiser ults are great examples of this). Sometimes, because of the rapid development cycle of RGMs, lots of duct tape and bubblegum gets used to make things work, and teams (including the Modes team itself!) go back and clean up that stuff once the mode has turned off, to keep things tidy. The rate at which things rust varies widely, too. Some modes, like Nexus Siege, have rusted so much that the fastest way to ship them again would probably be to start over from scratch.

Whenever we talk about shipping an RGM again ...

MountainMan2_

Well there’s where all the RGM dev time went

You caught us

This is a cool idea, but I wonder: If we were able to get the ARAM adjustments to the point where every champion had a 50% win rate, would seeing how we got there still matter?

Or, to phrase things the other way around: Would it make sense to put a similar flag on SR queues that shows all the balance changes to a champion that have happened in the last, say, 5 patches?

Honestly same. I've been spamming f5 all morning.

Thanks for your hype! I hope we can live up to it <3

Vodakhun

Please don't let the servers explode when it's released on PBE/live

We've got Backup Plans™ to keep that from happening, but y'all's hype can melt even the coldest server rooms. We'll do our best <3

Hekbeckser

I think there are a lot more people checking the statistics for SR and the players take better note of what changes are made to the "main" game.

Showing the ARAM specific changes could negativly impact the choices of those players who very rarely play ARAM and have only little understanding of the ARAM specific strategies and playstyles. However people who play ARAM a little more but don't keep the ARAM changes in mind can benefit from that.

Getting more direct now: Assuming every champion had a 50% win rate due to some changes to damage dealt or similar. Let's say a Sona main would decide to stick to the champ in ARAM and then get into game. This player would be confused because the champion deals significantly less damage and takes significantly more damage than usual. Therefore I believe it would still be important.

Having it the other way around would be quite a help for people who don't regularly read the patch notes or returning players. I think it could be useful.

To be more specific about the flag: I imagine a little icon next to the reroll/lock in button that shows the information when clicked on or hovered.

Thank you for your response and input. I never thought about turning this idea the over way around.

My suspicion is that providing ARAM-specific balance information would slightly push people away from champions that have been nerfed, and towards champions that have been buffed. After all, the game is telling you "This champion is better than usual," which seems like it might be able to change some people's minds. That's likely a good thing for ARAM (more diversity, fewer poke mages & supertanks), but I'm not actually certain how strong that effect would be.

Yomasevz

Pass along this message if you can: Add Zac or hire me so i can add Zac.

I'm a Zac main, I got your back.

Mamacrowhelps

Is the goal to eventually add all the champions in TFT or for balance reasons or another reason would you all prefer to keep the roster slightly smaller?

To expand on what the other people said, if you add too many characters at once, it dilutes the draft pool and makes it too hard to get multiples and make upgraded units.

Personally speaking, I hope that every champion will get their time in the sun eventually! We'll have to see how things turn out with the first 50 before we make any firm decisions, though

HolypenguinHere

I'll eat a handdrawn picture of a sock if a single one of the following Champions aren't available on release: Akali, Ahri, Annie, Ezreal, Lux, Yasuo, Jhin, Zed, Lulu, Teemo, Riven, Thresh, Zoe, Braum and I'll throw in Rammus in there.

I'll eat two handdrawn pictures of a sock if any of the following are available on release: Yorick, Skarner, Ornn, Galio, or Malphite.

Annie, Ezreal, Lux, Jhin, Teemo, Riven, Thresh, Zoe, and Rammus aren't available.

You got us on the other point, though :P