Quick Gameplay Thoughts: August 15

Hi folks,

Usual Disclaimers

These posts will often contain talk about future work we're doing, or planning to do, that isn't yet guaranteed to ship. The nature of the work could change or, depending on what we discover, projects mentioned may get delayed or even stopped. If you'd like to see a Tweet whenever a new one of these posts goes up: https://twitter.com/RiotMeddler

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My role at Riot and these posts

As you might have heard a few weeks back Ghostcrawler has moved to a new role at Riot (Head of Creative Development for Riot) and I've taken on his previous role as Design Director on LoL. My day to day work has changed noticeably, my intention is certainly to keep doing these posts however. They'll probably change at least a bit though. The first thing is that there'll be at least the occasional post from others instead of my regular ones, RiotScruffy who's taking over as Gameplay Lead especially. The second is that I'm going to try and find chances to talk at least a bit about things we're working on, or thinking about, that aren't just in game gameplay. Might be some other changes as well, will see how things go and keep you folks in the loop about it.

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Judging Success in Nexus Blitz

As you've probably seen by now we're trying something new starting this patch, with a playable Alpha for a new experimental mode. It's a prototype, rather than a polished release, so some things will look pretty rough or repurposed (e.g. Mecha Sion ult graphics reused as an explosive cart you push into enemy towers). https://na.leagueoflegends.com/en/news/game-updates/features/play-nexus-blitz-alpha?ref=rss

We're putting it out like this as an early test to help figure out if there's an audience for a mode like this before we sink lots of time into making it. Assuming there is an audience, we also want to gather a lot of feedback around which bits particularly resonate, and which players aren't excited by. Initially at least we're planning a 4 week run, during which we'll assess whether to keep working on Nexus Blitz or look at other possible experimental modes instead. To do that we'll be considering things like:

• How many people try Nexus Blitz
• What proportion of people who try it stick to it
• Survey feedback from people who've played it
• Whether it scratches a different itch to other LoL modes (do people feel it's providing a slight variant on existing experiences like SR/ARAM, or something meaningfully different enough to be worth spending ongoing development time on?)
• How much better we think it could become (based heavily on feedback from people who play it during the trial, including to some updates we'll make to it over the course of the trial)
• Etc

We've had a lot of fun developing and testing Nexus Blitz. At the end of the day though what matters is how you folks find it. Really interested to find out over the next few weeks.

Working on some Co-Op versus AI fixes

Not sure when it'll be done yet, we're looking into some issues with Co-Op versus AI bots not functioning properly though. Biggest issue involved is bot AI logic breaking, normally after an update to the base champion's gameplay, resulting in the bot just freezing and staying on the summoning platform.

http://ddragon.leagueoflegends.com/cdn/6.24.1/img/champion/Ziggs.png