By this point, the Death Recap's bogus info, constant mistakes, and lack of non-damage inputs (i.e. if someone Exhausted you) makes it an eyesore, not a helpful source of information. Yet Riot won't even entertain the notion of updating it.
Why?
RiotLes Nomerables8 votesIt's a thorny question, and depends what you mean by updating it.
If you mean the multitude of bugs, then that's going to take a lot of time, and might not be worth the effort. Rather, we need to go back and re-assess what the value of a good death recap is. We don't want to go the combat log route; raw information is rarely actionable. Likewise, I'm not entirely clear on how the existing implementation is useful outside of letting you know how much magic or physical damage you took. We'll probably update it at some point in the future once we knock out some competing UI features, but if we do, expect more of a redesign.
Angry Monster2 votesYou admit their are bugs in the program and your attitude towards this is "It MAY NOT BE WORTH IT"
Really? So fixing bugs is to much to expect out of riot? I hope you come back to this thread and try to explain this a bit better. Under no circumstance should Riot be saying we know it broken/not working right but we do not want to work on this.
This attitude is why people get mad about lee sin. Maybe you should go talk to Ghostcrawler since he said 2 days ago that the company is trying to build trust again. How is the public supposed to trust a company that admits things are broken and then the personal says its not worth fixing? I guess that why some champs do not get addressed (its not worth it).
exec34 votesLet me ask you this then. Say Sion has a ton of non game-breaking bugs. Is it worth fixing those bugs when his relaunch is on the horizon?
All he's saying is that fixing bugs for something that may need replacing isn't worth it. You'd be effectively doubling up your work fixing bugs for a system that shortly after gets removed/replaced anyway.
Cuix1 votesA valid point, but I think you misunderstood. Nome said that they would rather do a redesign than an update, not that they are currently working on that redesign. Given the way Riot has worked in the past (stealth rework, replays, etc.) and their recent tendencies (Lee nerfs, East Coast server, etc.), it seems reasonable to say that any death recap redesign is a long way off, even in terms of early PBE testing.
Since I don't think they're working on the replacement now and I don't think they'll get much work done on it any time soon, fixing bugs in the mean time would be reasonable, beneficial, and just plain professional (as Kchaosrei seems to be pointing out). I don't think we should expect that either, but the demand is totally agreeable.
Cheesesky3 votesit's a matter of priorities man. they have teams working on everything, and they have limited "power" for each problem that shows up. death recap is probably very very low in their priority least. don't take things so bad, all nome meant was that it was a low priority
Cuix2 votesI'm not taking this "so bad"; I'm saying that Exec's argument is off the mark. If they're not fixing bugs because literally all of their relevant employees are doing other more important stuff, then that's awesome! And, just to be clear, that is totally believable. The guys who do bug fixing often have little reason to announce their work, so I'm not going to make assumptions about what they're up to and what they prioritize. (Making assumptions about Riot's general behavior and policy is another matter; on that front I have significantly more experience.)
The issue is this: If there are people available to work on the death recap, and the death recap revamp is not currently taking up their time, then it's absolutely reasonable to say that those employees should be working on fixing the death recap bugs. Given that big projects like that tend to have serious delays and periods of "there might or might not be some work being done somewhere", I think it's quite likely that both of those above conditions are in fact met. Bonus evidence: Nome is only replying to shallow posts, and thus basically making repetitive shallow replies. (This is one of the strongest benefits of their "B-but you get mad when we're transparent!" backup argument, which is often disproven and rarely supported.)
exec31 votesRiot works on countless projects they don't tell us about (I could imagine someone saying what you did about a Karthus VU a mere week before it was unveiled) so I have faith that they're at least looking at death recaps.
Cuix1 votesYes, they're looking at the recaps, but what are they doing? If the answer is "mostly concept stuff and foundation work", then fixing current bugs would be entirely reasonable.
Angry Monster1 votesHow long have they know? A year or 2?
How deep are the bugs? Does Riot even know? They are no investigating so how can they? Does this information effect players? Yes so its a major issue. Players are getting shafted on this type of stuff. Are we sure even that the info is even close to being correct? How are players supposed to learn and correct there builds if the game is giving false data.
The fact that there is quote "multitude of bugs" mean that the programmers are not addressing game play functions anymore. I am not asking for pretty. I am asking for something that works. No player should have to 2nd guess what the game tells them. If it is that broken(bugged) get rid of the damn thing all together, just like Shen in pro play. Bugs are Errors. Bugs can cause crashes. Not fixing bugs can make it so when you ass new tech things do not work right.
Death recap has been the same since at least Season 1. That means they have had 4 years to make sure it works correctly.
exec31 votesI don't remember exactly what was changed as it was indeed a while ago but death recap did have some changes a while back so it's not true it's been the same for 4 years (unless the changes happened 4 years ago in which case nvm >_> ).
Angry Monster1 votesDeath recap has not changed since season the end of season 1.
It may of had changes in beta.
Cheesesky1 votesIt's about time, mate. Yeah, it came out a little bit harsh, but if you think about it, it makes sense. Riot is working on balancing the champions, and making the game feel fun again. I don't know if you noticed, but the game has been changing a lot! They introduced Essence Reaver, they introduced jungle timers, there's a new map coming, hell, there's even a new client coming! They don't have any time to work on small bugs that make no change to gameplay.
Angry Monster2 votesWrong they should make the time. Why are they making ADC changes MID SPLIT FOR WORLDS when they know things are not working?
Any player worth his salt checks his death recap and sees what the fuck happens to him. How can you believe something you know is faulty? How correct is the data?
You say small bugs, but you do not know they are small. Rengar got through 4.10 patch with double procing on hit effects.(pretty big in a ranked game) was Rengar disabled? Were people told? Nope. They kept it quite and just fixed it the next patch and then people learned after the fact that they were losing to a bugged champion. Riot has even admitted bugs like this go whole patches without being fixed or mentioned. (SHEN)
Do i even have to talk about the potential for LCS players being effected? And that is Riots big thing.
Riots first concern should be to make the game as bug free as possible. THAT MEANS TRY. Saying it sound like hard work(not worth the effort) is BS.
Cheesesky3 votesdude. Rengar was banned from LCS. that's the first thing. second thing, we're talking about the death recap, don't bring rengar up, they finally got to fix that bug.
And besides, what do you think they want here? to have a buggy game? no! they want to deliver the best experience they can! both because of money and because of pride. so don't start saying they left rengar buggy because reasons. i'm pretty sure they had a team all over that single bug.
They don't need to mention the bugs, they just don't, it's not their job! they need to fix them, yes, but they don't need to mention the bugs that aren't fixed.
about your last paragraph, i'm gonna try to make you understand. If you had a broken phone that you could fix (still usable though), but you knew you'd get one even better in the future, would you go out of your way to fix it? If you're going to say yes, imagine that the phone is now a thousand kilometers of code (because that's how it feels to them, most likely).
and btw, stop being so aggressive to the guys that brought you the game that helps you spend your free time
Angry Monster2 votesGreat rengar was banned in the LCS..... Not the 2 million ranked games that happened while the bug was out. So if people knew about the bug they either had to use a ban, pick the broken champ, or risk the other team getting him. For everyone else that did not know they got to suffer and not know that the game was being abused.(FUN). So glad they finally got to that bug.
Its not there job to mention game impacting bugs? Are you serious? If they Riot refuses to make it a non issue for everyone then Riot should at least make it know it try and to keep the game fair. Riot has a responsibility to keep the game fair. A bug like Rengar's was not keeping the game fair.
I understand coding, and you are pretty ignorant your self. Coding is done in block that call on other blocks. Bugs at the deepest blocks have weird implications at the end of a chain. Also they make it harder to add on to since data is being called on wrong. I do not feel bad for their programmers, this is their job(to fix or make anew).
Please stop white knighting for riot. They deserve to be called out for asinine comments that they expect people to just swallow.
Harbingers Mark1 votesIts not there job to mention game impacting bugs? Are you serious? If they Riot refuses to make it a non issue for everyone then Riot should at least make it know it try and to keep the game fair. Riot has a responsibility to keep the game fair. A bug like Rengar's was not keeping the game fair.
wanted to chime in a little here:
to your first point- it can be or it cant be their job to tell the community about game impacting bugs. if they do tell the community about said bug, then they have to work under the assumption that the whole community knows about it and will exploit it in game to climb the ladder (something that is explicitly against the summoners code), thus they have to disable the champion while they work out the bug. It is their job to fix bugs like this, yes, but the sheer amount of code that must be sifted through is daunting. the old rengar triple q bug (going back in time a bit) could have been caused by the aa animation, the q animation, the code making the q function, or some weird code that came out of hydra. shifting through that, finding the bug, and fixing it takes a really long time, which rengar players around the world would be really mad at riot for leaving their champion disabled for that much time (i'm guessing a few days here, but that's just a blind guess). edit: using the same numbers as below, this would stop just over 2.1 million people per day from playing the champion that they wanted to.
the other option would be to not notify the community about said bug. for the sake of simple math, let's say that 10% of rengar players know about the bug and are exploiting it in their games (taking a high estimate here). 27 million people log onto lol each day (source: http://www.forbes.com/sites/insertcoin/2014/01/27/riots-league-of-legends-reveals-astonishing-27-million-daily-players-67-million-monthly/ ), and let's say that on average each person plays 2 games (again, to make the math easier) when they log on. rengar has been picked in an average of 16.04% of games (from 6/24-7/17, source: http://www.lolking.net/champions/rengar#statistics ) so [(27,000,000 games/day / 2 games/person) *.1604 rengars/game * .1 bug exploits/rengar] = roughly 217 thousand people affected by this bug, or 8% of the playerbase every day, assuming i did my math right (this is also a high estimate). in the grand scheme of things, this is not very much, especially when a lot of those games are unranked.
This second option is much more appealing, since it allows the community to continue having fun with the champion, while only affecting a small amount of the players. At least, that's how I have reasoned it, with quite a few assumptions as noted above. Another note to consider is that the % of games that rengar is used in is skewed by a huge jump in popularity due to him being free to play for the last 3 days of the graph (7/15-7/17). Also none of these numbers reflect how much rengar was banned in normal draft or ranked, as those games are simply "he wasnt picked" games.
To your last comment about white knighting for them, i'm probably guilty of that, but I can see your point too. Using my logic above, why not fix the death recap bugs? it affects almost 100% of players! yes it does, that much nobody can really argue (other than to say not 100% of players use death recap, but ignoring that), but the point Les Nomerables was making is that it's not as game-breaking of a bug as the infinite death yorik bug (where he'd die under his ult, and instantly be revived with 1 hp, be killed, be revived, be killed, etc thousands of times over a few minutes). Would it be much more convenient for everyone if it (death recap) was fixed? yes. but riot has prioritized other fixes or new content above this one, under the assumption that those fixes and content will affect gameplay and overall experience more.
sorry about the super long post!
Ptarlorr1 votesThank you for not being a silly person.
RiotLes Nomerables4 votesTo make an analogy, consider an intricate mansion built with a poor foundation that's resulting in structural issues. The citizens find it unsightly, but still recognize the value in the property. There's a few ways for the city to address this--
This is the situation we're in--the bugs that plague death recap are deep. How deep? There's already been a few attempts to fix it to no avail! We have to prioritize redoing the feature with all the other things we're doing, and measure value that way. Maybe I'll share some of our concepts for how death recap could work in the future. We're definitely thinking about it :)
Hellioning1 votesI cannot take 'we're setting the foundations for future updates!' or 'we're working on it, please be patient' or anything like that seriously anymore. Riot's said this sort of thing about a lot of things, from character balance to replays to a new client, and they haven't delivered. Sure, we're just now getting a new client launcher, but it's been how long since people complained about the current client? If it takes two-three years to get anything done, we're looking at a new death recap in 2016.
Tobasco da Gama1 votesGood thing what Le Nomerables said was, "We've tried and failed to fix this before, so we'll have to tear it out and start fresh at some point, but not right now", then.
Sovereign Exile1 votesThey're working on a new patcher/client.
Just because you see a change to "x" that you don't like, doesn't mean that it's bad either. Riot does changes like these to experiment with different kinds of things that a champion doesn't stress hard enough, or just to give a champion more weaknesses/strengths that they lack [Look at the Lucian Circlejerk that happened at Reddit when we looked at the PBE changes and patch notes.]
Do you want replays with how the servers are? Honestly. Do you?
Stop having unrealistic expectations about these kinds of things.
ZanryuEU2 votesLet me do it :(
RiotLes Nomerables2 votesSome critique here-- This is moving more towards the combat/death log approach, which I think is less compelling on the basis that it doesn't provide actionable information. Players who die generally need one thing out of death recap--which is why they died. Unfortunately, why is never an easy answer, so most players tend to be OK with extracting the why out of the how. Combat logs explain the how, but not the why. If we were to redesign, we'd want to head more towards why.
J0HN C3N41 votesA single (single not simple cause idk how simple it would be) addition to the death recap would be to add how many friendly wards were around the players death ratious (xxxx) units. It would help players improve their game play overall since I believe that 90% of the deaths (in lower elo) occur due to lack of warding. 
Tortferngatr1 votesI guess after looking at it, I'm not quite sure what you mean on the why versus the how.
There IS some actionable information in the most recent mockup of Death Recap 2.0 (the 2.2 version)--namely, the physical/magic/true damage split [for counterbuilding and the like]. While I prefer the pie chart style Dawngate uses to show the physical/magic/true damage split and Shaper (champion) damage split (this sort of shows it--in-game you can look at what specific actions enemies/health costs did to damage you by mousing over each part of the pie chart.)
Also, how do you answer the "why" question? Are we looking for "You overextended in lane," "You facechecked a brush," "You tried to defend a Dominion capture point 1v4," etc? (What actions of yours caused you to die?) Are we looking for things like chained crowd control (or Blitzcrank/Darius hooks), burst versus sustained damage, damage types and who's hurting you hardest, how often the enemy successfully executed a combo on you? (What actions/patterns/damage patterns of your opponents caused you to die?) Are we looking for "Eve has permastealth except near allied champions and while attacking?" (What capabilities of the enemy champions are you missing or underestimating?) Are we looking for "Ashe lacks innate mobility--don't overextend if the enemy has a lot of gap closers?" (What weaknesses of your own champion are you missing or underestimating?) There's lots of answers to the "why did you die" question. What answers do we want?
Hellioning3 votesHow would an automated program figure out accurate answers to 'why did I die?' cause the answer tends to be things like 'dodge that skillshot' 'you were roaming in the enemy jungle by yourself' 'you got ganked cause you overextended without wards'. How would an automated system figure those out?
ZanryuEU2 votesSimilar to the other comments here, I very baffled how you want to address the why. There are really to many reasons and I think players would feel totally helpless if the answer would be like: The enemy towerdived and CC-chained you. To be honest, I think learning the why from the Death Recap is a big income towards the players experience with his own actions. If the death recap would tell you why players wouldn't even try were to start to think about where they failed to decide correctly.
RiotLes Nomerables4 votesI don't want to delve too much into this, as it's still a problem space under exploration. Some examples of why could be-- "You just took 2000 magic damage. You have very low MR." "That champion is several levels above you." "When you died, you still had both your Summoner cooldowns up." Note that not all of the why is directed at experienced players either.
ZanryuEU2 votesIt would be useful in addition to a "how" death recap, but I still can't see this possible/useful to the maximum as a separate system.
I understand that as a System/Game/UI/UX Designer it is the task to satisfy the needs of as many players as possible. While newer players want to see the "why", experienced players well know these "whys" and want to see the "how" in the best order and fashion; either damage wise or chronological.
Cuix1 votesIt seems like that wouldn't work in this format, so I can see why a redesign would be necessary. Would this format work?
Damage: x Physical, y Magical, z True Your Armor/MR is very low; buy more to deal with (champion name)! You had (defensive spell/active) available. Remember to use alt+(relevant button) to immediately cast it on yourself! You had (smartcast/selfcast spell/active) available. (some humorous mention to hit buttons faster)
So, like, if I'm Janna and get dunked on by a Trist 1v1, it'd be something like Damage: 2000 Physical, 400 Magic, 0 True Your Armor is very low; buy more to deal with Tristana! You had Eye of the Storm available. Remember to use alt+E to immediately cast it on yourself! You also had Monsoon available. Sometimes it's okay to button mash.
RiotLes Nomerables2 votesThis comes close to the thoughts I have right now. The statements I gave were pretty prescriptive (you X, therefore you should Y); we may not want to necessarily do that.
Tortferngatr1 votesCould we also see who specifically is doing most of each type of damage (and CC)? (for example, the right pie chart in Dawngate's "death recap")
YourtrueKami1 votesNot sure how others will think of this, but the 'why' seems more like a feature that should be added into the replay function (assuming it is still on the table) and the 'how' seems like it should be the death recap. Figuring out the 'why' is part of improving as a player, and in my opinion, the only time you should be focusing on that in game is when you are so far behind that the game is pretty much over.
I think the 'how' is better information to get while in game. I believe this information is more important while in game, because it gives you information that you can adjust to during the game to help improve your situation. Telling someone how they died, lets them proceed to build and play in a way to help avoid it.
The 'why' is useful without question. Unlike the 'how' though, I believe the 'why' takes more time and isn't something that you can adjust on the fly. It takes time to improve as a player, you likely won't improve enough to see the difference over the length of one game. Like I said though, that is something players need to improve their play. I think this is the most useful with something like replays that way the player can put all of their attention of figuring out 'why' things happened the way they did.
TLDR: Explain the 'how' during game (death recap) and the 'why' later (a feature of replays).
Angry Monster1 votes"We have to prioritize" yes you do. You should prioritize all the broken stuff.
Great at some point you want to do C. Some point is not even a reasonable time frame. Some point could be 5 years from now. And do not say trust us. Time frames is the one thing that RIot pretty much fails consistently at.
So since C is now a not a realistic answer,(cause time is not something Riot does) i suggest that you move towards B. Since B is the same as C but right now instead of later. You could even program it in a way that is easily expandable.
RiotLes Nomerables1 votesYou're making the assumption that B is the same as C. It's not--in the example of restoring a property, AND in the case of fixing the death recap code, C is actually EASIER than B.
Rather, the functional resourcing difference between B and C is that there's a lot of other pieces too, like Game Design, UX Design, Visual Design, etc. I also see several arguments around "why haven't we fixed X or Y other issue". Some bugs are easy, others are not. The Shen problem, for example, I believe just got a fix internally by one of our awesome gameplay engineers--and from what I understand, that one was really, really hard. There's a lot that goes into how easy a bug is to fix, and how high on the priorities it is to address it. Obviously we'd want to fix every bug ever, but that's unrealistic given the amount of content we have and are constantly adding.
In the case of death recap, it's a combination of low player pain (the accuracy of individual damage numbers isn't important in providing actionable information!), poor understanding of reproduction (why does it sometimes say the Dominion aura does damage? No one knows!), a VERY deep root cause, and VERY lengthy fix times. As an aside, I do think we sometimes tend to drag our feet a bit with features, but that's something we're improving on.
Hyrum Graff2 votesshen bug -snip-
Since this was such a hard nut to crack, I think it would make for a really interesting (but reasonably short) dev blog :)
exec31 votesOne of the few things that Dawngate has done well is its death recap. That piechart is so easy to digest I love it. I hope you guys redo the death recap sooner rather than later as as it is it's pretty bad.
Funster1 votesI was gonna say something along those lines. I typically only use death recap after 5v5 teamfights just to get a general idea of the balance of incoming AD/AP damage so I can better judge which defensive items to grab. Simplifying it in to just raw damage numbers would be pretty sweet. I don't really care what did damage to me (I saw it in the fight, since I was there and all) but a simpler sum of all the damages would be nice (and probably less buggy!)
Superbian1 votesPut down the pitch forks guys. Okay, good. Now go make a list of the things that need to be improved about Champions, Itemization, the Client, and the Patcher in order of priority. Now, look to see where "buggy death recap" ranks on that list and tell me whether that's really where Riot should prioritize allocating their resources. Pretty damn far down the list, right?
Also, the Death Recap is the one place you don't want information overload. The Match History rework was great, but we don't need much information in a death recap. Death Timers are short, and you should be buying items and planning your next move during this time. Anything more than Spells that hit you, and the damage they dealt is unnecessary clutter. Now what would be interesting is an automatically generated 5-10 second clip preceding your death that would allow you to view the mistakes you made that led to your death. That's likely pretty hard to put in though.
SlashStriker2 votesi would like to know when i die the total amount magic damage taken and total amount physical damage taken the current death recap doesnt do this job very well
The Lexer1 votesI agree. It needs fixing (Sunfire Cape still comes up as Revive?) I love it, but it needs to be more informative, and fixed. (Still is useful when you find out Buster Shot does 859/1222 damage to me)
SnowFall1 votesI suggest a short replay after every death with slo-mo effect when you're about to die, that could really solve a lot of misunderstandings; also you press any key if u wish to end replay
cshakes1 votesWhat I'd like would be a sort of bar chart. Say, you're killed by a Vayne, and a Janna gets an assist. The "Killer/Assist" bar at the top with the champion name and icon would be the same, but there would be three vertical bars, one each for true, physical and magic damage received from said champion. The bars would be divided by ability. So, Vayne's "true damage" bar would just show "basic attack" (or, even better "Silver Bolts"), and her "physical damage" bar would show, say, "basic attack", "Tumble", "Condemn" and "Blade of the Ruined King". For any skills that applied CC, it'd say that you received CC - eg. "Condemn - X damage. Stun." "Howling Gale - Y damage. Knocked airborne." and "Zephyr - Z damage. 28% slow."
Cerbearus1 votesIt is odd when Garen uses Mystic shot on you for 800 true damage...
tamorrak1 votesTo the people complaining in this thread about the fix not being immediate, please try to remember a few things. First: things take time, getting grouchy over it isn't going to make it move any faster, and even though Riot promises an upcoming fix that fix may take a long time to make it functional with the rest of the game. Second: Manpower is limited. Yes Riot is popular but that doesn't mean that they have an infinite amount of programmers and game-designers to fix every problem all at once. For those not following me that means that there may not be people to immediately work on a fix. In short be patient and let Riot do their thing, because if they say it isn't happening I doubt pouting over it is going to do any good
