BlackBiospark

Wasn't one of the main selling points for being able to ping ally ults is that it's faster than typing it?

Yes, and unfortunately sometimes ease of communication is not the only factor in our decision-making. Sometimes we make things that cause more harm than good. Speaking as the designer for the ping wheel, I have ... regrets. I wish I could go back and tell my naive past self that '?' is not the correct icon for MIA. Y'all get so creative with the tools we give you and that extends to expressing your frustration as well, and that was not something we anticipated at that time. When I was designing the system for Wild Rift we chose a different icon and that worked out much better. I think it would be much harder to remove in League, because of how expressive '?' has become and how accustomed players are to using it, but in a new game we could just change it from the start and MIA BM was almost eliminated, while the MIA ping was still very highly used.

I wasn't involved with these changes, but I'm pretty sure they had strong evidence that ult pings were overwhelmingly being used for bm pu...

I poked the designer for this and they say it should have been fixed via micropatch earlier today.

nho0101

Single sword for normal kill, 3 sword type for killing sprees

Sword stabbing down for a shut down

This comment is correct. Source: this was one of the first systems I worked on when I started a Riot... a long time ago! I am impressed by the longevity of this system and we carried over something similar on Wild Rift as well.

To give you a look behind the scenes at the design intent, the meaning of these icons never needed to be obvious to players. The primary information we needed to convey was that a kill happened and whether it was good or bad for your team, plus who died, and who got the kill. Secondarily, kill participation was valuable so that you could feel some recognition for assisters and also understand where assist gold was going especially for supports who may not be visibly doing a lot of damage, but may be buffing/healing.

The kill streak and shutdowns were all things that we already message in other ways (especially shutdown bounties in the chat) so it wasn't necessary for it to be super clear here. We included different icons for these states to be complete, and ...

_ziyou_

The problem is that this very often happens when money becomes more important than wanting to continue delivering a great product. Several game companies have this issue where at some point they stop improving the game and experience and just release new content for people to buy (= milking it). This is usually the point where the game goes downhill and LoL has been going in that direction for some time now.

There are so many things LoL on PC needs, but those improvements will not instantly manifest themselves as more players playing or buying stuff; instead it will show over time. Instead, it seems like Riot just wants to retain players with half-assed "events" and milk the existing player base to spend the money on things other than this game (how many projects does Riot have running right now? Like half a dozen? :D)

Just a simple example: when Arcane came out many many people found new interest in LoL because the show was so well done. Instead of having a bunch of improvements for new players and new great features to benefit from this new wave of new and returning players, LoL had...nothing. Absolutely nothing. And the new player experience is getting worse and worse with bots in ranked in low elo by now. This has been going on for a while now and I have not seen Riot do anything about it, release a statement about it, etc. .

I think you're assuming here that value == player money spent. That is not how we think about it. Value == player value (i.e. things that players will actually enjoy having and will keep them playing the game). Obviously we do need our games to bring in money so we can get paid and pay the bills, but that is very rarely a factor in these kinds of features conversations. Example, on Wild Rift we might be trying to decide between creating an elemental rift specific scoreboard or an improvement to the ping system. None of that is going to directly make money for us. However we'll probably choose the elemental rift scoreboard because it will make the elemental rift dragons easier to understand and we think that elemental rift will be fun for our players (based on experience with League PC) and result in more engagement so we think the work is high value. Ultimately that's going to be good for our bottom line, but it's impossible to assign any kind of monetary benefit to an individual feat...

Professional-Ad3101

FUN FACT:

THIS IS ON WILD RIFT

Also Quick Chat beats LoL on PC too

RELEVANT STORY: I had proposed this when I was working on the champion select redesign on PC, but my initial design was a bit too complex (you could trade positions and champions) so we shelved it. I moved to WR not long after and seeded the idea with our designers working on champion select on WR. They did a great job of simplifying it and making sensible limits so it was shippable. It's always been our hope that we could experiment with some new features in WR that were riskier on League and inspire some changes if players enjoyed those features on WR.

You might ask... why you be dumb and not just do this on League PC first? The answer is not actually spaghetti code. It's really more about the opportunity you have when rebuilding the game from scratch for a new audience. When we are looking at features we often use a value/cost lens. You want to do stuff that has a high value to cost ratio. Consider this pick order features:

On PC you have a champion trade feature already and let'...

MuhammedAlistar

It's because if you decline and there is an AFK he gets put out of queue as well. If your decline canceled it instantly the AFK would get another match and waste more time for other people.

And the decline button exists so people wouldn't complain that it doesn't. It's just easier that way.

It's because of this reason. You are also likely to hit the queue pop with the same people because of how matchmaking works (you're all similar skill, you've been waiting long enough to be at the front of the queue, and if you your lobby gets dodged we try to get you a match more quickly). So it makes sense to get all AFKs out of queue in one go because it's likely you'll just encounter them on the next queue pop.

gorothefly

Why not make it so the queue disappears for you as soon as you decline it but stays till the end for the rest of the people who haven't pressed any button? This way the decline button does something while still filtering out the AFKs.

I advocated for this when we were originally designing the system, and implementation concerns were serious enough that we just went with the simpler behavior of keeping everyone in AFK check till everyone accepts/declines/times out. The hazard is that our queue times are so low in popular queues that your queue could pop in a new match before the old AFK check expires which would necessitate a lot of logic to handle that correctly and higher risk of bugs that could be hard to find and fix. That part of the game flow was never designed to pull individuals in or out of a match.

MiskTF

Pardon me for asking, but with you working on the HUD and controls .. Which software background do you come from? A UX design background with a bit of programming here or there, or do you come from a computer science or software engineer background? Thanks.

My background is Industrial Design (design of physical products), but I also have a partial software engineering background and previous experience. I don't use the programming skills as much anymore though, but it does come in handy when engineers don't have time to do something that I really care about and can justify doing a lot slower than an experience developer.

otakarg

Can't imagine how hard working on HUD for phones has to be. Do you guys get limits as to how many buttons you can use to make everything work?

We are constantly keeping an eye on the complexity from having more buttons (for example we have 4 abilities when most mobile MOBAs have 3). There's no hard limit, but every time we consider adding a function that requires a new button we look very hard at the value we get from doing so vs. the cost of a more complicated interface that covers more of the game space. We also look at comparable games like PUBG mobile and playtest extensively to judge whether we have too many controls.

Netsuko

Kudos to you for trying to work out comfortable Mobile controls. I feel so many games fail at this horribly because there’s no tactile feedback from a touchscreen like there would be from a key/button obviously.

Having said that, this looks promising. :D

Good visual feedback is one technique we use to try to overcome the lack of tactile feedback. Keep in mind that your mouse doesn't really have tactile feedback either for positioning, but you've gotten really good at putting it over a minion to last hit them. :D So tactile feedback isn't the only way to good feeling controls. I do think that movement controls are the most challenging ones to adapt to because you don't have the physical sense of where your thumb is relative to the center like you would with an analog stick. But you can always play on console if you want that experience!

heifai

on a computer and reconfigure the controls so he will actually play with mouse and keyboard against mobileplayers lma

For the love of God, please make it support controllers.

The console version will use the controller :)

Forgotten_Poro

Sooooo... can we link our accounts to get the champions and skins we have?

From the website FAQ:

"So basically, we rebuilt the game from scratch (like… the whole thing). Refreshed models, animations, game systems and more—but keeping true to the core League of Legends gameplay you already know. We didn’t want to just port League on PC 1:1—we want to make sure Wild Rift feels like it was designed for new platforms, and use that opportunity to make a bunch of improvements to the game. While you won’t get your unlocks from League PC, you’ll get some cool rewards for the time you’ve spent in the PC version. More to come on that in 2020!"

Forgotten_Poro

Ok... so please, for the love of god Boourns, give the owners of X champions on PC a discount to that respective champion, it's all I ask.

I mostly work on the in-game HUD and controls so I don't have much visibility on our plans for this, but nothing has been finalized yet.

DisastrousZone

I was saying Boo-urns!

It makes my day when people get the reference :)

TheWorldisFullofWar

Isn't this game just an Arena of Valor reskin though?

No, developed completely independently!

Kyrond

Imagine it like cooking at home vs takeout.

Engine-light is like cooking at home, the engine (restaurant/market) does as little as possible. For the most part you have to do everything yourself to create a meal (the game).
All the sauces need to be created from basic little ingredients, meal has to be properly cooked and spiced.

Engine-heavy is takeout. You just choose which food you want. That is great if they have exactly what you want, otherwise there are problems.

At the time this was getting decided, they were in the middle. To continue the analogy: They ordered burger patty, it was done from one side, then they had to manually do the other. The salad was cleaned, but as whole head(?).
That meant, you had to order from the restaurant - which needed all the equipment and took resources to make everything; at the same time, you still had your kitchen all dirty and spend time on making your own meal.

I'd compare it to something like Blue Apron. You have a selection of dishes to choose from which come with some level of prepared raw ingredients, however you still need to do some amount of cutting, assembling, and cooking. This is great because you can improvise more and maybe create something better than the stock blue apron meal. Turns out home cooking is pretty hard, and even though us designers have pretty good taste in food, we're not always great at cooking it. We could all take cooking classes and become better cooks, but actually we have a bunch of bomb-ass michelin star chefs to help us make our culinary dreams a reality.

depressiown

Hmm, nope, didn't help me. Incognito or no, I just downloaded a file named "5" that has some html/js in it.

Ah poop, maybe I just got lucky on incognito and it's a bug with a different root cause

some_clickhead

Instead of giving me a result, it automatically downloaded a small html file that I can read if I open notepad. It's called 3, which I assume is the 3rd type of tilt? Idk.

Had the same problem. Try doing it in incognito mode, that worked for me. I think ad-blockers may mess with it.

lkso

Helpful tip: When positioning the mouse, be sure that your elbow is away from your torso; i.e. arms out. This will limit the amount of forearm rotation (pronation) which causes strain and potentially carpal tunnel syndrome. The mouse pad should be placed farther to the side of your body. The same applies to the keyboard; it should be placed to the side, not in front, which reduces pronation movement.

More detailed explanation: when your arms are positioned close to your body, your forearms have to rotate more to hold the mouse and keyboard. But as the arms move away from the body, the palms naturally face downward. This reduces the amount of pronation to hold the mouse and press the keyboard.

EDIT: drew a diagram of this to help visual: https://imgur.com/a/CduKUJD

Also consider a vertical mouse, it keeps your wrist in a a more neutral position (less forearm pronation). I use this one: https://www.amazon.com/Anker-Ergonomic-Optical-Vertical-Buttons/dp/B00FPAVUHC/

It takes some adjustment and is probably not as accurate for twitch movements, but it should help reduce the strain on your wrists if you're having problems.

ohanse

Genuinely curious - what does "gaming the honor system" look like?

I have smoothbrain and can't think beyond the example of someone not being "genuine" in their positive conduct. And I'm like "I'd rather have someone fake being nice in my game versus a really sincerely delivered toxic flaming. Like I can really tell that for this 30 minutes, they truly hated me XD."

Well, that probably means we did a good job! As we were testing early iterations of the system we would actually ask the players how they would imagine gaming the system. One sign that we were in a good spot is when most of our answers are what you said.

However, when you first start looking at the problem you might do some really obvious stuff like directly reward people for giving honor, give players flat BE for each honor they get, or give really exclusive and desirable content at high levels. Because people respond to incentive, right? If you go too far you would start seeing things like begging for honor, boosting, honor trading, players threatening to report you if you don't honor them, etc. There's a lot of stuff that is counter-intuitive that we do to reduce the potential for people to game the system. Like we don't tell you who gave you each honor, even though on the surface you would think that would help promote closer bonds between players.