Ascension Q&A with the Play team. 9/18, 8AM - 10AM PST

For players new to the mode it was very disorienting because of a few factors; a requirement to teleport to different places each time and the fact that the pads look very similar on each side of the map. Internal play tests saw a lot of confusion and this camera snap successfully addressed that. On the other hand, we agree that after you get used to the mode this can be more of a hindrance than a help. When we bring Ascension back in the future we will look at better ways to help players orient themselves and hopefully be able to turn the camera snap stuff off.

I DON'T KNOW THEY WON'T TELL ME ANYTHING

Yeah, they had a huge falling out. Zombies-of-zombies were involved, feelings were hurt, but ultimately Xerath won out.

The 200 point threshold was chosen to hit that appropriate game length. Shorter games felt a bit unsatisfying, often coming to a resolution before your team's strategy really had a chance to get going, and getting full champion progression in that time made the experience feel pretty rushed. Longer games felt, well, long.

And I agree that high mobility champions are super fun to play on Ascension!

We often hear from players that they would like more ways to express their skill level visually; in particular, wishing there was more value tied intrinsically to things like summoner icons. For example, during the Doom Bots of Doom, many players actually expressed disappointment at the Doom Ziggs icon being too easy to get, devaluing it, and wishing it would have been locked behind beating the 5-bomb difficulty.

The 'Perfect Ascension' icon stems from us wanting to try making a 'challenge mode' icon to reward exceptional play. It had to reflect an actual gameplay achievement. Being a 'challenge', it is of course not compulsory by any means, and if it were too easy, it would have no value right? The icon doesn't require any deviation from regular Ascension play strategy, and happens naturally in the course of playing to win. You just need to win VERY convincingly (IE: play the perfect game).

The point you make about a possible disconnect between players expectations is true though, and we're taking this on board. Misaligned expecations of a game's win condition are probably creating the clash you describe. So we originally were going to make it an 'opt-in experience' and lock it to premade 5-mans, as not everyone might be equally bought in on trying to get it. This felt too limiting though, and we wanted to give everyone a chance to be rewarded for playing that 'perfect game'. We still expect serious players to gather a group of friends and try for it together though.

The temporary nature of Featured Game Modes let's us experiment with new things like this that might not be possible if they were more permanent. We can also learn from these things and let them inform any similar future design features. We'd be remiss not to! ^_^

Seeing as Azir is a major part of the Shurima event, we wanted to make sure he had something special for this mode specifically. Also it's awesome.

We wanted to do something cool for the Shurima event, and each Featured Game Mode is always a great opportunity to explore new types of gameplay within the League of Legends ecosystem. The feeling of a tense, non-stop brawling skirmish was something we enjoyed a lot during initial prototyping and didn't want to pigeon-hole players into having to 'destroy a nexus' or 'push lanes', just because "that's what's done in LoL". We wanted to move all of that out of the way and leave behind just the skirmishing 5v5 battle for players to enjoy. ^_^

Urf mode will come back when the time is right. We like to bring game modes back with improvements or slight modifications to keep them fresh, so we are also looking for opportunities to do that.

In the Shurima lore Xerath is the bad guy that betrays his emperor and tries to install himself as leader of Shurima. Not cool, let's get him!

Nothing super crazy this time around, though we do have a screenshot up on a wall at work where blue team's base is entirely covered with Relics of Shurima.

There was also a bug where two champions from opposite teams capturing the same relic would cause the relic to auto-capture itself.

I had the pleasure of dealing with all the Zombie-related issues (like killing Xerath as Zyra's Vengeful Plant), there were a lot of thorny edge cases and timing issues that proved challenging. As for "really cool stuff", we did play around with an idea for hidden content... i'm surprised it doesn't seem to have been found yet ;P

We playtest every new game mode extensively so, we tend to get a good idea of what *we *think is fairly strong. Of course, players are much MUCH better than us, so once a mode goes live we're always surprised by certain sleeper picks we never would have expected to be strong. :P

Ascension is particularly interesting when looking at ban popularity VS actual win rates. The perception of the current 'assassin meta' being the strongest and "absolutely a MUST PICK" is interesting. :) There is a cluster of assassins that are seeing an ungodly amount of bans, and yet almost ALL of them have a sub 50% win ratio. This probably signals strong champion enjoyment more than actual functional superiority in Ascension. ^_-

Ascension took about two months to make. There's always a bit of infrastructure work to make sure the modes work the way we want them to - in this case, we used a similar framework that allows both Battle Training and regular classic gameplay to exist simultaneously on SR, and allows us to selectively load the scripts and assets we need to make the mode work.

We put the removed nexuses in the shed out back where we keep all the other nexuses we're not using at the moment.

1. Yes!

2. Nope! =) In all seriousness, a lot of these ideas are unproven and unbaked - even Ascension went through several iterations before we landed on what we have now. Teasing a mode that we end up not delivering because it wasn't fun isn't great (and I know we've been guilty of this in the past, sorry). But rest assured that we have several ideas in the backlog!

3. The goal of the Ascension buff was to make someone burn bright and fast. Camping the Ascended felt really bad for a team that comes out of a clutch Ascended fight down a champion or two, and making the Ascended more tanky felt directionally off for what we wanted the Ascended to be - a powerful combat participant with a strong but temporal advantage. The knockback gives the Ascended player more strategic options upon appearing, but at the same time doesn't give a free pass to a player that steals it from a team 1v5 - it's quite doable to hang out back and murder the Ascended with great prejudice once he appears when he's in the midst of 5 players.

4. Teleporting in felt like a cool way to get players into the action - we wanted to center the experience around skirmishing and objectives. Retreating and escaping is unbecoming of the Ascended and his followers! Teleporting in allowed us not only to close off this avenue of unhealthy combat-adverse gameplay, but also to get players into the action faster, as well as providing new strategic decisions for engaging in combat. Do I teleport close to the team fight that's happening to try to take down the enemy Ascended, or go to a point further away and try to take a relic while everybody's busy?

5. I don't actually know, sorry. =(