Hey guys! If you don't know what the CCOS is, it's the Community Concept Open Stage. A champion concept contest here on the boards, made by and for players. No reds involved and nothing official (no, you won't get a concept in-game or anything), but it's a great way to show off your concept know-how, get feedback from your peers as well as vye for a chance at some bragging rights and a shiny custom .gif to pin on your concept.

The CCOS happens every month, taking entries starting at noon EST on the second monday of every month. Currently we're in the March segment!

Now with that out of the way, this post is a little something I do whenever I get enough volunteers for judges that I don't have to jump in myself. (I organize/host the CCOS btw). A Breaker post is a culmination of tips, rants, shout-outs and anything else I can throw out to keep those creative thoughts rolling and keep the CCOS cheer on the up and up. I'm shooting for doing two every month while the judges are doing their thing, but no promises on me being able to keep it up [Insert parrot meme here]

#Storytime!

One thing I always love doing is talking to other conceptors about their best/worst times in the hobby. The stories you can get are always a blend of hilarious, frightening and impressive. So, with that in mind...

What was the single weirdest concept name/title you've seen??

Oldie but goodies are always welcome, the concept Golden Age is still locked away in the vBull archives so don’t be afraid to brush some dust of of some particularly ridiculous names. Show us in the comments!

Shout-outs

Let's give some attention to some particularly creative people who have entered into the March CCOS! I'm always tweaking how I do shout outs, so I'm going to give out one this week and another next Sunday.

######Note: I can only do this because I am not slated to judge, this does not imply favoritism or foreshadowing of the CCOS results in any way, just a personal thumbs-up from me. :)

I'm a kit guy through and thorugh, so anytime I see cool mechanics at play I'm already liking the concept. Zyx, The Astral Projection by Arcane Flux does just that by introducing a stellar (aha...ah...ok I'm done) initiation blink with his W, a super-sneaky point blank AoE on his E, and one of the most interesting ultimates I've personally seen.

There have been a lot of different tries at a 'mind-control' ability in concepts, but Zyx takes a different crack at it by making the control portion incredibly reactive. To give a tl;dr if he manages to finish the channel, Zyx will be able to 'lock' a specific ability on the unfortunate champion and control their movement for 2 seconds within a 5 second window. Mind control ultimates such as this are always a huge challenge of balancing power versus satisfaction and Astral Flux has had the marvelous idea of allowing skill/knowledge to play into the ability so he can afford to bring it several pegs lower than a 'full control' mechanic. There are several other nice nuances like making it channel-dependent (so he can't do it in the middle of the teamfight) and locking most of the damage as a DoT, allowing for QSS to be an easy route to counter the ability and increasing the risk/reward of the ability's use.

Overall Zyx's kit is a great culmination of tricky movement dependent on other, more predictable targets, a massive amount of untargetablity in exchange for less reliability on his own damage. If you're looking for an unholy blend of Fizz and Lee Sin minus the escapes then you've found your champ!

No kit is without flaws of course, help Arcane Flux out by visiting his concept and giving your two cents!

Tip of the week - Number recycling

One thing I know I have trouble with a lot of the time is getting the right numbers for a concept's kit. An easy way to build a baseline is to find a mechanically similar spell/passive/range in the live game and then push the numbers higher/lower depending on what you want. You'd be surprised how many parallels you can draw between specific abilities even if the don't seem the same at first. As an example my personal Concept Horst has a basic periodic AoE ability, very similar to Rammus' ult. However, since my concept's ult had CC and higher damage it needed to be shorter than Tremors. But to make it satisfying/useful I felt adding more range for the relatively short duration would be a good addition. This same logic can be used for nigh any ability.

Future plans

As always I'm always open to feedback for making the CCOS bigger and better across the Board (hehe....heh....ok seriously I'm stopping). These posts themselves are actually a direct result of people wanting more to happen during the long spell of judging!

Of course it's hard to give good feedback on stuff I'm planning to do, so let's talk about that!

Currently I'm looking into the possibility of more permanent judges to help out keeping the numbers reliable. So if you're interested enough (you've already read down to here so I'm going to assume you are anyway :P) e-mail me at '[email protected]' and I would love to add your name to a currently empty list that will be contacted everytime I'm looking for new judges, as well as the ability to schedule to be a judge ahead of time. Spontaneous volunteering judges will still be a thing don't worry!

On a tangent from the above, I am also tentatively looking to build a team. I'm hoping to find a few individuals who want to help out on a more specialized and recurring basis. What this would mean is putting work into the CCOS every month in roles that do not necessarily have to be judges. At present I am looking for:

• A hype-generator. Not spamming or cheesy or anything, but someone to post things like Breakers to keep people interested and talking. Random tip collections, shout-outs and the like are all fair game. More details to be discussed if interested.

• An animator. Look, I'm not a pro at animating. I can navigate Blender and Maya alright but I simply don't have the time to practice enough to give you guys the .gifs I think you deserve. So if anyone feels they can do better (and has better/quicker equipment) and do it every month feel free to contact me. It's honestly good practice for anyone looking to animate/model as a career imo.

• Perma-judges. This means I can rely on you being available every month to judge every concept in a month. This also means (prone to change depending on number of perma's) you cannot enter the CCOS once you're signed up.

Why am I suddenly building a team? Well let's just say I have bigger plans for the CCOS and I'm going to need some help! I'll touch on that next week!

Feedback

Need feedback, open to ideas/critique. yada yada, heard it before, very few people read this far, blah blah. :P

Seriously though, if anyone's wondering why I haven't made the Hall of Fame yet it's because I've been expecting a formatting change to the Boards for a little while now and I've had quite a few posts break due to a change like that. However it hasn't come for awhile now so I'm moving quickly towards saying 'screw it' and making it anyway. I apologize to the previous winners thus far. You're time will come do not worry.