Quick Gameplay Thoughts: November 7

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

Reflecting on Odyssey

We've been looking back at Odyssey a bit recently and reflecting on how it went and what we can learn from it. A few thoughts from that:

• There's clearly some interest in PVE within LoL as a substantially different experience, not just as an emulation of PVP play (Co-Op versus AI style). Being able to heavily modify a champion's capabilities and raid style encounters were called out in particular as a lot of the appeal.
• Most people tried the mode, and a meaningful proportion put quite a lot of games into it. Digging into it both the mode's gameplay and the mode specific missions mattered quite a bit for people who engaged heavily.
• Friction trying to find a team who wanted to do the same missions you did was the most common source of frustration reported by an enormous margin. We should avoid creating those sorts of conflicts again, via things like changing mission designs or helping players group together with common goals.
• We'll keep an eye out for another opportunity to try more PVE like this at some point. It's not as inherently replayable as PVP is, but is certainly worth exploring in the future.

We should also have a dev blog that runs through some stats from Odyssey in the next month or two, covering things like popularity of the different champions, difficulty completion rates, augment usage etc.

Nexus Blitz

As we mentioned a few weeks back we're planning on bringing Nexus Blitz back for another test run from 8.24 onwards:

https://nexus.leagueoflegends.com/en-us/2018/10/dev-up-next-for-nexus-blitz/

We're now well into the work on that so wanted to share a few details about how it was going:

• We've got a couple new events we're confident in, including one that's especially focused on smaller skirmishes rather than teamfights, in contrast to many of the existing events.
• We'll be taking out Snowball Fight. While it had its moments, feedback on it was overall noticeably more negative than other events.
• On the rewards side we'll be cutting a couple unsatisfying / frustrating ones like Blessing of Caitlyn and Cursed Minions,and adding some more fun and memorable replacements.
• Reshaping of some of the map walls and jungle camp locations is looking promising, giving a bit more of a distinct laning phase and jungle path variety.
• The map itself should also end up looking noticeably nicer/less like an early prototype. Not currently expecting it'll be as polished as something like SR for this test, but you should see a fair bit of upgrade aesthetics wise compared to the first version.

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Preseason

Is still on track for patch 8.23. We're working on some final polish at the moment, including likely taking a bit of sustain out of the game overall to avoid laning phases becoming too defensive and safe. Also testing keeping minion spawn at its current time, rather than getting minions and the jungle onto the map earlier. Main point under discussion there is how to assess the value of that time for the invades and action it sometimes offers, which can be strong high moments, versus the larger number of games where it's unused time spent afk/alt tabbed until laning starts.

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