It’s your turn to Ask Riot

Welcome to Ask Riot.

This is a space where we focus on your questions and give you answers.

You’ll find three existing questions and answers below and can expect to find new questions answered each week. Please feel free to hit us up in the comments. Each of the Rioters who answered a question will do their best to engage in a conversation with you. We want this to feel like it’s offering a deeper insight into our work.

Have a question (or two) yourself? Go to ask.leagueoflegends.com and sign into your League account. Read the Do’s and Don’ts and then ask us something. We’ll be adding a repository of the answers to the web once we’ve accumulated a few of them.

We’re committed to reading every question but can’t guarantee we’ll answer every one. Why not?

Some questions will be answered elsewhere or won’t be right for this space. (We won’t be launching new products here or taking away from existing conversations.) Even if your question isn’t the one being answered, we’re listening and we’ll be sharing with the Rioters who are working directly on the things you’re curious about.

(This week’s version features questions taken from existing player conversations on the web to get the ball rolling.)

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If I stop playing League I get rusty. If I take a long break from League, does my matchmaking adjust to Reflect that?

The purpose of our matchmaking system is to create fair games that feel winnable. If you haven't played for a while and return to League, there are adjustments in place to compensate for skill changes and ensure match quality. In ranked, this manifests as LP decay, which does have an MMR decay component but this feature is applied in other game modes as well.

- Riot Socrates and Riotlobster (Meta Game Systems Team)

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Where in Runeterra do Minions come from?

The minions of Summoner's Rift are descendants of a tribe of highly-intelligent trolls who spent centuries studying the energies of a shattered boundary into another world. These giant, lumbering creatures discovered arcane secrets that promised the ability to change the very concept of reality on Runeterra. In order to ensure they could harvest the raw magical energy needed to infuse the runes that were the basis of their studies, the tribe's greatest mages combined their powers and collected them in a giant crystal, intending it to be a versatile power battery to be unleashed when needed. The crystal, to their disbelief, absorbed all magical power that surrounded it, including that of the trolls.

One amongst their number, a troll named Lari, wailed against the injustice of the event, and declared he would destroy the crystal that had grown into the nexus of all local magical power. By doing so, he posited, he would restore his people to their former glory. Though their magics had been utterly extinguished, Lari knew his tribe had one remaining facet that could crack the nexus: their monumentally thick skulls. With this in mind, Lari ordered all remaining trolls to take a long run up and smash their heads into the crystal.

Initial efforts proved futile, and messy, but Lari persevered. Eventually, he hit upon a plan to repeatedly smack the trolls' skulls in quick succession into the nexus crystal to gradually weaken it. He commanded the entire remaining populace to line up in single file and race towards the tough, sharp, and often blood-smeared crystal.

Once the first pile of concussed and dead trolls was moved out of the way, Lari himself led the charge for the next wave of brave volunteers, desperate to recover their magic. Lari was unable to carry on his quest after that day (because his calendar was suddenly filled with meetings about drooling into his own lap), so he retreated to his hut, scribbling incomprehensible gibberish into a giant tome.

Over several millennia, which seemed to go on for eternity, his tribe continued Lari's work. Thanks to the power of evolution, the trolls eventually adapted to their new way of life by becoming greatly diminished in size and developing huge, plated foreheads. To hide their diminutive ugliness, and to pay homage to their heritage as former mages, the trolls adopted the practice of wearing obviously oversized robes.

To this very day, each morning the minions of Lari wake up, wave at the statues of their leader, and dash along the lanes plowed by centuries of small feet pitifully running head first into a glowing, apparently impenetrable crystal. Many historians have difficulty believing that billions have died of awful injuries and general heartache due to the raving madness of one giant idiot named Lari, a troll who spent his last days slopping nonsense into a book for others to read. As has been said by many witnesses to the appalling daily ritual (shouted loudly over the sound of skulls repeatedly bouncing off a large gem), there's no bigger troll than a rambling writer.

Ok fine, here's the answer the editors made me write:

The creeps in League of Legends were created purely for gameplay. Although there was plenty of thought put into where they could come from, it is something we don't plan to spell out specifically. It's a fun bit of flavor on the new Summoners Rift and one of those mysteries that players have been piecing together from artifacts we intentionally scattered around the map. As we reveal more about Runeterra's history, the analogous counterparts in the story world to the minions on the game map may or may not appear, but we won’t infodump it. Sorry if this isn’t the definitive answer you were looking for but hope you enjoyed the trolly answer instead.

- Jaredan (Narrative Team)

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Why are Kindred, Fizz and Shyvana Super Galaxy skins, not Neon Strike skins?

This year we are making an effort to expand some of our thematics. That’s why we’re excited to add new skins to the Super Galaxy line for Fizz, Kindred and Shyvana (currently on PBE). Part of this deeper look is that we’ll be tying Super Galaxy and Neon Strike into the same alternate fantasy. Both are inspired by modern anime while offering a few retro touches to give them their own style. So what do we see as the difference between the two lines in the same universe?

Neon Strike is more mischievous - they aren’t bad guys per se, but we wouldn’t call them good guys either, they are misfits, the ones living on the edge of the law. Maybe some day we’ll add the really bad guys as another expansion. Super Galaxy champs are more traditional heroes with Rumble leading the charge. Thematically, we wanted to position Fizz, Kindred and Shyvana as heroes even if they’re a different generation — or even a different heroic team— of Super Galaxy than Rumble.

This isn’t the first time we’ve expanded an alternate fantasy experience with a skin. We took a different approach with Mecha Zero Sion, which is very much a Mecha skin but features a significantly different design from prior Mechas. Super Galaxy Fizz, Kindred and Shyvana might not be fighting alongside Rumble in this alternate fantasy, but they’re fighting for the same ideals, thus making them Super Galaxy.

- I am Carlos (Skins Team)