Runes, Expectation, and the FUTUUUUUUUUUUUUUUURE!

Hello Friends! Runes Reforged and the rest of preseason have arrived on the PBE. While we’ve got a lot for you to test, there’s still a lot ahead for Runes. Django UnJaned and I wanted to talk with you about what’s up next for PBE, launch, and beyond.

WHILE RUNES ARE ON PBE For PBE, we’re getting Runes Reforged in quite early. We wanted to get as much time as possible for bug fixing, polishing, and feedback from you. A quick warning: this changelist is going to be massive. Along with Runes Reforged, we’ve made a significant number of changes to some foundational elements of the game to make sure League still feels like League, even without the base stats we could generally assume from old runes. We’re also in the final phases of fine tuning the balance targets, and still have plenty of VFX, icons, and audio coming in hot, so expect a lot more changes to sneak in as we spend more time on the PBE servers. Most of all, we’re really excited to get feedback. A number of us will be in the PBE forums, the regular forums, Twitter, Reddit, and even getting feedback from other regions, looking at your posts and talking whenever we can. There’s still a ton of work to do, but we’ll even try to maybe get a few games going on PBE.

JUST BEFORE RUNES GO LIVE We’ll have a slightly different set of priorities as we focus on launch in the weeks just before we ship. We’ll be addressing PBE bugs and feedback, along with a lot of performance optimization. We expect that our selection interface as well as in game VFX will both have plenty of improvements to run smoothly for all players. We’ll also be polishing our visual and audio work to get everything as awesome as possible for release on Preseason.

ONCE RUNES HIT LIVE Then we hit the release servers, but even then we’ll be far from done. We know that with a system this big, going live really is just the beginning. We know that they’ll still be a lot to accomplish, especially with all the extra feedback and experimentation we’ll get once every player is playing with Runes Reforged. Along with the normal balance work, bug fixing and polish tweaks, we’re also aware that not every champion is going to have the perfect fit in our initial release. We’re likely to add/tweak/remove runes fairly quickly as we find the most pressing needs to round out the system.

We’ll also continue to work on features that we didn’t wrap up before ship. We’ll likely need to work on how Spectator Mode works with Keystones, for example, and we’ll be looking to improve how players can see their rune’s impact in the end of game experience. We’ll be adding more convenience features to make runes faster and easier to select and adapt. Current targets include better filtering options, hiding preset pages, and quicker access to making a new page in champ select. We’ll add to this list as we get feedback from the live state.

LOOKING FURTHER OUT We even have a few ideas that currently just fall into a “someday” bucket. Many of these aren’t pressing issues, but instead are spaces we’ll be watching closely, just in case. For example, we experienced some tensions in a few paths during development that point to a possibility that we’ll eventually need an additional path (or maybe even two). It might be that Resolve needs to split into initiation and protection options, or maybe Inspiration should have an evil twin with some different rules to break. We’ll also still be watching out for places where we need to add or replace a rune or two to build better choices for more champions. Additionally, we have some unfinished work for a fancier, high polish, and more computationally demanding runes selection experience. We’re hoping to finish this and let players try this out at some point. Finally, we want to add convenience features like bulk deleting runes pages, or other ways to make runes selection smoother once we can see where we have the biggest gains to make.

We’ll be talking with y’all a lot in the coming days, weeks, and months, but we wanted to give our rough ideas of what’s still to come, and when we’re hoping to bring it to you. Thanks!

TL;DR - This is the biggest thing we ever shipped, there'll be a lot to tweak and we'll be working on it well past live. We're super happy and excited to bring y'all on the journey and understand what' we're trying to achieve, so we'll be sharing a lot of stuff in the following weeks."