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@Riot: Regarding the "Pantheon Event"

PhoenixSlayer13·5/20/2014, 7:18:26 PM·4 votes·1,155 views

To begin: I'm coming into this with a neutral, third-party viewpoint. While I own Pantheon, I do not play him regularly, nor have I bought Dragonslayer Pantheon. I however was aware that one could W out of ult before landing and deal full center damage on an enemy, if only by reading guides on Pantheon.

From the events, it seems that something like the following occurred. Please correct me if this is incorrect.

  1. Riot begins work on Dragonslayer Pantheon.
  2. On working on the ultimate animation for Dragonslayer, it is noted that the effects of the ultimate do not line up properly.
  3. Balance team notes this as well, and decides that the ultimate should be adjusted for gameplay clarity.
  4. Ultimate changes are accidentally not included in patch notes, Dragonslayer goes on sale shortly afterwards.
  5. Players begin to notice undocumented change, ask Riot what happened.
  6. Writers of patch notes ask if something was undocumented, players proven correct.

I suppose I have two main questions out of all of this:

  1. Were you aware of the issues with Pantheon's ultimate before beginning work on Dragonslayer? If so, did they only recently become important enough to address, or should they have been addressed earlier?
  2. Was there any specific event that resulted in the changes accidentally being left out of the patch notes?

Thanks in advance. I hope that we can all keep this discussion calm and objective.

2 Comments

RiotMorello5/21/2014, 9:51:25 AM9 votes

You're pretty spot-on. It's one of those things we noticed when doing the scripting "hook-ups" for the new skin (IE the scripting work that makes sure VFX and animations link up with the spell timings - something we have to do on every skin or champ)

While fixing this issue, we figured it'd be minor enough that it wouldn't have a major effect, so (like many very minor bug fixes) we didn't document this - even internally. That mistake translated to the lack of documentation in the patch notes, and then had an impact both perception-wise and in effect nerfing a champion in an undocumented way.

While the accusations around greed/intent are...well, pretty insane, I can understand the frustration due to the blindside. We've actually been instituting some new ways to make sure this gets caught in documentation so we don't make a little mistake like this that ends up having a big impact.

Fendral5/21/2014, 4:18:51 PM1 votes

Riot did a whole round of bug fixes, which should have lead to more understanding of how this mistake might have occurred. I laughed hard when I read that Nautilus has had a release bug on his anchor smash of 3s. So the tooltip has been wrong for years. Wow. And? That is it. Sometimes things don't get fixed in a timely manner.