Boards›Announcements

Ask Riot: Should New Champs Be Disabled in Ranked?

Riot·4/6/2017, 6:29:14 PM·2 votes·283 views

Welcome to Ask Riot!

This week, let’s talk Lux’s new VO, loading screen borders, the Darkin, and first time Galios in ranked.


When you release a new champ/rework, why dont you disable the champ in ranked for one week? Why dont you need a certain number of normal games before you play a champ in ranked?

Releasing a new champion or a major champion update is a big deal for us and for players, especially at the slower release cadence we use these days. After the teasing and the hype and the spotlights, we want players to be able to try the champion out right away. For players whose primary way to engage in League is through ranked (and that’s a lot of players) a week can feel like a long time, especially since the champion will have been on the PBE before that.

However, we sympathize with the basic problem you’re hinting at, of someone going into ranked with a champion they have never played before, and having your team possibly pay the price. While we think the new Practice Mode will help some with this problem, we also have discussed requiring you to play with the champion - even if it’s as little as one game - before you take him or her into ranked. No concrete plans at the moment, but it’s something we’ll keep on our radar.

Ghostcrawler, Design Director


In the loading screen, why can you only see the champion masteries and borders for your teammates and not enemies?

tl;dr We limit the information exposed across teams prior to a match because it can influence match outcomes and make games less fun.

Information exposed to players before a game begins anchors their perception about how the match will play out and can change how they play. The most obvious example of this is with ranked status. Playing against someone who has a higher skill from the previous season, even if you're currently equal in skill, can be intimidating in a way that influences the end result of a lane. Given that, we default to not exposing skill information across teams.

In the case of champion mastery, while we don't think the effect would be as pronounced as with ranked borders, it would likely have a similar negative impact in some games. For example, knowing it's your first game on a champ and facing up against a mastery 7 Yasuo isn't a great experience. When we weigh the negative impact of surfacing this every match-up against the pretty minimal benefits that come from the opposing team knowing exactly how big your emote is, it doesn't seem worth the trade.

There is some gray area around this. Some of you might be thinking: dropping the emote in game when you go to lane seems like it could anchor players in a similar way, so why allow that? We debated this when we first launched emotes and even created an emergency switch we could flip to make it only appear for your team if things got out of hand. Ultimately the decision to leave it cross team came down to two things. 1. For the most part, people don't drop their emote right when they get to lane. Usually by the time an emote gets dropped much of the game has already unfolded, so any impact to match outcome is minimal in aggregate. 2. Some of the most interesting and memorable moments across teams are highlighted emote drops. Preserving those moments felt important.

Along these same lines, we know many players scout one another via third party sites to determine opponents rank before games. This is a natural result of ranked game stats being public information and some players looking for any way to get a competitive edge. In spite of this, we wouldn't change the pregame to give this information more visibility. Though some players want this information, we don’t believe forcing more players to absorb it would ultimately make the game more fun.

Riot Socrates, Lead Game Designer


Love the Lux voice over update (and I don’t even play Lux). Can we expect to get more of these in the future and if so how often?

Glad you liked the Lux VO!

We currently don’t have dedicated resources to updating old champions’ VOs. Lux was an opportunity we took because the voice actor was coming in to record lines for Elementalist Lux, and since we were planning on doing a big Demacia event for Galio’s release, it felt appropriate to update her VO along with it. In the future we may do some VO updates here and there, if it makes sense and there’s a good opportunity. It isn’t a trivial amount of work, so we have to be careful about what we commit to, but we actually have another coming up in the not too distant future!

Reav3, Lead Producer, Champions


With all the updates to Runeterra, can we expect more about the darkin?

Oh, we’ve definitely not forgotten about the Darkin. ;)

Ant in Oz, Worldbuilding Lead

Have a question? Head over to Ask Riot and sign into your League account. Check out the Dos and Don’ts, then ask away.

Ask Riot

We promise to read every question, but we can’t guarantee they’ll all get answers. Some questions may already be answered elsewhere, and some won’t be right for Ask Riot. This isn’t the best place to announce new features, for example, and we might skip conversations on issues we’ve talked about in depth before (though we can clarify individual points).

We are listening, though, so keep asking. We’ll make sure your questions are heard by the Rioters working on the stuff you’re curious about.

1 Comments

Omitsuru4/6/2017, 11:53:37 PM1 votes

So since this Q&A already happened, I dont know a more direct way of responding to how Mr. Socrates answered the "In the loading screen, why can you only see the champion masteries and borders for your teammates and not enemies?", question. So I'll do it here and hope for the best for someone from Riot responding to my post about it here.

I'm mostly going to be playing devil's advocate here towards his response going paragraph by paragraph so it makes more sense to read:

  1. Youre absolutely right that the information you learn about an enemy team before the game even starts can influence the mindset of you and your's (its called psychological warfare). This entire game can be won or lost based on simple information that you or your opponent have about each other. That has been true since the very first fight happened in the history of humanity. However, and as cheesy as it is, the show GI Joe had the perfect slogan in regards to this: "...and knowing is half the battle.". That is ultimately true in this concept, the MORE you know about your opponent the BETTER, not WORSE.

It is one of the reasons Riot implemented the idea of a drafting/banning phase in the game in the first place (instead of ONLY blind picking). To be able to see what champions the enemy team will pick, and to try to champion/summoner spell counter pick around that information. And if you get counter picked yourself, at least you KNOW you have been and your team can play with that knowledge in mind (JGer assisting more, mid laner roaming more, more vision, etc).

Seeing the ranked status, or champion mastery of an enemy team is no different than being able to see what champions the enemy team will pick during pick/ban phase before the game even begins. Your team now at least has that knowledge before the fight begins to be able to strategize on how to play the different phases of the game (early/mid/late) to your advantage and your opponents disadvantage.

  1. Mostly just a reiteration of my response to his paragraph 1. However I will use his yasuo example to continue my point. KNOWING that the enemy yasuo is max mastery level, versus not knowing and the information you can infer by knowing that simple fact.

Knowing: You can safely assume the player has at least moderate skill at using yasuo's skills and mechanics, while expecting they will be less likely to fall for possible baits or traps the champion can fall into. So you play more strategically towards yasuo's weaknesses and against his strengths (more defensively while minions are in lane so he cant dash in and out, more aggressive when youre low on minions so his mobility is limited). Since youre new to the champion youre playing , and you know your opponent is not, you can preempt the yasuo from getting an advantage that allows him to snowball by asking your JGer (or adjacent laner) to give you support/ganks against him early in game to keep him behind.

TLDR: By knowing this simple information you (and your team) play more tactically/intelligently against a player who may be skilled with a certain champion that youre laning against.

NOT knowing: You know nothing about your opponent which could make you over confident and make decisions that end up badly for you (over chasing, failed all in/executes, failed bait against them or getting baited by them, etc). Then by the time you realize it yasuo has multiple kills and it is too late for your JGer or other laners to help you.

  1. I'm skipping this one, because there isnt much i have to say about it.

  2. So you dont want to give this information out because you feel it makes the game less fun, yet you admit to knowing that players use 3rd party sites to look up the information anyway. Which in turn gives ONLY those specific players an unfair advantage in the game because they have more information about their opponents then their opponents have about them. Would it not be more fair for everyone to give that information (which you admitted is already public anyway) to everyone as a whole, to prevent as many people from getting an unfair advantage in this manner?