LoneLyon

It sucks we don't get new events in blitz with each new run. Riot then wonders why modes fall out of popularity.

For this run of Nexus Blitz, we're starting it knowing it didn't get enough attention, but that will be taken into account when looking at the data. We, simply, ran out of time but changes are still planned.

Nexus Blitz is not one of the more popular modes to begin with (OFA and URF are the current reigning champions there), at least in terms of % of people played or how much folks are playing. For every release so far that has been true. But it's also not unpopular so we are interested trying more on it. :)

SuperMrBlob

Hey Reinboom, any chance you could comment on whether your approaches to PvE modes has changed or remained the same? (e.g. not doing them as too much effort for too little engagement etc.)

They have. I won't go into much detail here, but the short of it is that it'll likely be awhile before we return to PvE modes and if/when we do, the approach will be something pretty different than Star Guardian or Odyssey.

Oh woah! This design space is wonderful and had not been considered yet. Awesome idea, /u/gramineous :D

graybloodd

Ascension coming back confirmed???

Ascension is unlikely to come back in the form you're familiar with. If it's coming back, it'll come back on a different map. Currently, we've actually considered modifying the Nexus Blitz map for it (given how rounded the Nexus Blitz map is). If you notice the changes to terrain in the center "arena" area of Nexus Blitz, these changes are meant to help support much more interesting gameplay for other ways we can use that space. :)

The Crystal Scar is dead. Like so dead. Like omg dead.

The renderer for League's environment is completely different and new from what existed when Dominion (and so, Ascension) was made, meaning that a lot of what was made for that map is unusable and will need to be rebuilt. All the environments you see now were either built initially for the new renderer (Nexus Blitz or any of the TFT environments) or were rebuilt (SR, Howling Abyss). Keeping a map has to overcome the cost of that rebuild. :(

Bl00dylicious

Since you are adressing things anyway I have another thing that comes to mind: the current health damage from Botrk on the DPS dummy isn't capped or reduced, so you deal well over 2500 per hit. It's not uncommon to do over 150k damage during a single event.

Considering Brand and Vayne's max health damage is reduced it doesn't make a whole lot of sense that Botrk's damage isn't. The damage is only the first problem, the healing is also quite insane due to the damage you do.

Thank you for bringing this back up!

Awkwardly, the reason the HP is as high as it is is to avoid an awkward damage timing bug. Also, champion damage is easier to isolate than item damage is.

But. We actually now have tech to solve that particular bug correctly now, which in turns lets us lower the HP. That is certainly something we can address now (albeit, for next run).

Djinn_in_Tonic

Hey Reinboom!

Any chance that data like the game-winning impact of the various rewards might make it into some Nexus Blitz design article at some point? That's the sort of data that fascinates me and, I imagine, many others.

Hope all is well!

Hi Djinn!

At some point, I think that would be a great design article. In addition to other articles about modes that I believe are overdue at this point. The team and our strategies has changed quite a bit in this last year, so that is something I'm hoping to talk more about eventually as well.

Asteroth555

I actually think elder needs to be removed as a reward. Most other rewards are good, but not game breaking. Getting an elder as a losing team because of a bullshit event is ludicrous

Yeah, unfortunately addressing Elder was something we were hoping to get to for this round but ended up running short on time. :( Definitely on our docket for next run, though.

Interestingly, in terms of "game winning impact" (how likely you are to win the game based on getting this reward, for a given event round), it's about right in the middle of all the other rewards. Buuuut, that doesn't really describe how frustrating it is or how those games actually play out.

That's definitely not great.
We'll be looking to change the per-champion mode balancing system to exclude summoner spells and potentially items, but it will need to be sometime after this run of Nexus Blitz.

Battlemagi

Interesting, yeah and as far as the information I have found goes, it still works

Focused testing won't arrive at quite the rules at play, though /u/DoransLab 's work is delightful to look at where it gets close enough in some parts :) . Both who you target with your attacks is important, and what other actions are occurring is important.

Most pertinently for the minion-champion swapping: It doesn't reset your current crit tracking value. Instead, there are two values: one tracked for "vs champions" and one tracked for "vs minions". So you can't build up against minions for usage against champions.

If the actual solution is discovered though, as a caution, that would be a significant prompt for us to change it. :P

Awkward. Veigar was named after someone.

ItsCrossBoy

I love absolutely everything about this but I have had one thing that is slightly bothersome since I saw it first.

I personally prefer having the extended tooltips on. It makes it super easy to see exactly what's going on. I have one minor quip about it because of this. It's hard to see exactly what the final number will be when it's just ratios. Could you include after all the ratios and such the total number of damage, healing, etc that will be done at the end? For example:

50 (+1.5 AP) (+.01 AD) [96] Physical Damage

That way it's easy to see both the source of the number AND what it will actually do in the end.

One other very minor thing that I haven't really decided if I would prefer or not: percents. Would it possibly be less confusing to see the percentage of AP rather than a decimal? For ex from before:

50 (+150% AP) (+10% AD) [96] Physical Damage

Not totally sure which I prefer, but I think the second one makes it more clear it's a ratio and not just +.01 ad to the total.

Thank you so much for this, I have been hoping for these changes for such a long time! I'll definitely play more with these and see what I think.

So, I'd just like to say that I love that idea and representation of it. We've played around with other things similar to it, but hadn't gotten a display that made sense.

We wouldn't be able to get something in for 10.18 (it's too late in the patch cycle, especially since we'd need to localize the display), but I think something like what you wrote here is certainly worth exploring in the future. :)

Infinitesima

tl;dr: Soon^TM, not yet or maybe never.

Btw, don't you remember how long did it take for Riot to deliver Practice mode?

I do! I did a lot of advocacy for it and was part of multiple prototypes for it. I remember it quite well. :)

From the point that development actually started on practice mode was not that long to the point of ship. The team and individuals who got to work on it knocked it out impressively fast (and safe, cheat interfaces are always inherently risky).

TomiMan7

Yeah i imagine its a lotta work since they hardcode every number into the tooltips instead ofusing variables to get the right info. Still it would be nice to get some progress update.

Variables aren't hardcoded into the game tooltips.

The difficulty with coefficients is more like: The tooltip says "Deals @f1@ magic damage". The champion's scripts on the game server calculates how much damage it should deal and then uses that to both deal the damage as well as send the value of what "f1" should be to the client.
This means that the game client only ever has the result, never the coefficient and has no understanding of how things got to where they were, they just are. That's not hardcoded values, but it is a process that makes coefficients rather difficult.

The newer tech looks pretty different from all of that. It's instead, a League specific formula is authored that directly drives visuals and script can ask for the result for. This is actually where all the strange "{{ qdamage }}" stuff you see on the League website comes from, as those are the placeholder tokens for that system, we've just yet to build a visual writer for them into non-Game places.

nizzy2k11

it's probably better for performance to simply read the tooltip rather than reference variables and concatenate it together.

Perf concern is negligible for that kind of thing, as /u/TomiMan7 mentioned. Parsers for that kind of replacement system can operate pretty linearly.

TomiMan7

Ah i see. Is it how every dmg value calculated tho? The reason why i thought you guys might hardcode these is when you hotfix stuff, sometimes the numbers arent updated till the next patch, on the client side,but it actually deals the buffed dmg.

Most of those kinds of patches only go to the server. Since LoL is entirely authoritative, this works out other than a numbers appearing wrong on the client.

The older "@f1@" style of value replacements that I mentioned earlier actually doesn't have this issue (since the server pushes the value out), but it can't be used to drive displaying ratios or similar.

/u/Shynkr0 did the design for these way back when they were an intern (They're now a non-intern Rioter). This has been out for awhile, actually. :)

There's also a fun bit of tech design story to these that's a good example of "building something right" to get more gameplay space:

We avoid syncing quite a bit of data when relating to minions since they are quite frequent and there's just a lot of information to cross the wire. With item inventory in particular, every character CAN have an inventory, but only champions and towers ever had it fully synced. This was mostly just to avoid the overhead of anything else.

Well, we actually found some success of people finding the tower icons when they were just starting to get more into the game and that helped to subtly seep the more nuanced mechanic information out there.

When we started looking into it though we didn't want to take the perf hit with syncing inventories.

But why does the server even need to know about these items?...

Jlocke98

Do you guys have a blog or something about how you actually architect your code? The number of interactions and edge cases seems crazy. Wasn't there a bug that affected other champions that only occurred when Lulu was on the map? (Something about auto attack modifications i presume)

There's an tech blog here: https://technology.riotgames.com/

The most significant one I can remember involving Lulu wasn't really a lulu bug in particular. It was a series of bugs that Lulu was just best equipped to unveil.

For most of those ones, those have to deal with how character stats actually works. AD, AP, etc.

Every 0.25s (minimum), a character's stats get rebuilt from nothing. Everything on them gets reset, then the game readds character base stats, character per level stats, all items, all script based stats (e.g. from buffs), and then there's an optional "conversion" step (e.g. for Pyke). This process is pretty fast, it's all pretty straightforward number-y stuff, which computers are good at. The reason it was done that way primarily though is because it prevents "leaky" stats from happening. It's a lot more difficult to get in a situation where something needs to add a stat and later remove it, but forgets to remove it.

Unfortunately, "the script based stats" presen...

I_AM_A_MOTH_AMA

I freaking love playing simple champions Reina.

<3

[deleted]

Options like this often get overlooked in many game

no they dont, they just try to spin it positively that they went 10 years without basic options. Fucking shitters with bullshit pr talk

Ah, let me be more specific. That quote wasn't meant to be "look what we're doing special", it was "look, we did the thing that a lot of good games do and we really should be doing, but a lot of folks gloss over."
Options like this often get overlooked by a lot of players of games. A wonderful number of games have these options. Pretty much every FPS game opens with a (sometimes cleverly disguised) gamma slider, for example.

When writing up the patch note, I'll make sure to word it more intently to that. Alla something like, "These are options that are easy to overlook but they are present in a lot or even most major games elsewhere and for those of us who need them they are critical." Or even taking out the overlook statement altogether.

Thanks for calling that wording out. :D

_Psyki

pee matches "speed" in the item stats and poo matches "spooky" in the item active description, I would imagine

This is accurate!

The item shop’s behavior can be recreated with a bit of data. Notably: http://ddragon.leagueoflegends.com/cdn/9.24.1/data/en_US/item.json and http://ddragon.leagueoflegends.com/cdn/9.24.1/data/en_US/language.json (or as appropriate by patch and language).

This is a reflection of some of the data the game uses. We’d just need to combine it a bit.

The League item shop makes a “searchable key” out of: An items name (“name”), colloquialisms for that item (“colloq”, which you’ll notice is often “;”, this is important), adds a “;”, and then goes through each tag (“tags”) of the item and matches the localized name for that tag (found in the language json above), as well as the colloquialisms for that tag (e.g. for Armor, there’s also “armour” as a colloquialism, or for Attack Damage, there’s “ad” as a colloquialism). There’s also a step to add the “hat” tag to boots if you’re Nami. This is very important.

Then it does some transformation to that key. Such as removing di...