Riot Games' Greg Street Answers Even More League of Legends Questions from Twitter

Hi, I'm Greg Street from League of Legends at Riot Games.

And I am doing, Wired League of Legends Support.

Xavier La Rosa asks, what makes you

decide on buff/nerfs on an item and or a champion?

It's a little bit of an art and a little bit of a science.

We certainly gather a lot of data

on what's going on in the game,

have wind rate changes, our items being picked,

you know, more or less than they used to be.

And then it's a little bit of judgment that goes into that.

Of like, is this a problem, are we likely

to be able to fix the problem by making changes?

We make changes based on things other than balance.

For example a common one is frustration,

if it's really frustrating

playing against a certain champion,

even if their win rate is fair

then that's still the kind of thing we might change.

P-Roy says, what 3 champions would

you guys crack open a cold one with?

I think off the top of my head,

I always love this thought of Twisted Fate, Graves

and MF sitting down, maybe for a poker game

and cracking open a beer with those guys.

I think the answer I'm supposed to give

is something like Gragas and Brolaf

but that's more like, what champions

would you guys love to get so drunk

that you wake up in a strange place the next day?

And I don't know if we wanna go quite that far.

Rena asks, why are there three bushes in the middle

of the side on the top but only two on the bot-lane?

You know, if I had to guess, this is just

one of those things that's been in the game forever,

maybe ever since League of Legends

first evolved out of Dota.

We're hesitant to change it, because people have,

you know muscle memory and know the way the map looks.

It's also technically often difficult

to change the map, since a lot of it's just hand painted.

Maybe it's the kinda thing we could do someday

in the future, if those two bushes are really bugging you.

Rodrigo_721 says, what is the exact age of Zoe?

What you're probably getting at

is that Zoe is not a young girl,

she's actually a many thousands year old,

supernatural, quasi divine entity from Mount Targon.

I don't know that we specified the exact age,

but I think it's in the thousands

if not tens of thousands of years.

Exiled Caste says, okay League of Legends,

serious question, Can we get a Kanye skin for Kayn or nah?

I'm gonna go with nah.

Tragedy Ann, is a great name, asks,

when is the Janna rework because it's obvious

you don't want current Janna to be able to do anything.

Janna is one of those champions

players love or players hate

because she can shield and she can heal

and she can knock back

and she kind of turns off the enemy team.

When you're trying to attack,

Janna can kind of just shut that down

and make it so you're not having any fun, on the other hand,

for the Janna players, this is a lot of fun.

I mean I don't think she's in dire need of a drastic rework.

We just have to figure out a way to kind of reduce that

frustration element when you're going up against a Janna

and you feel like you can't actually do any damage.

Keji asked, quick question: is Jhin based

on any real life murderers, madmen, serial killers?

Goodness, I hope not, we could ask the designer

and the narrative team that worked on Jhin.

I think it came out of their own twisted,

deviant little minds.

How can you keep queue dodge penalties asks,

Bartlomiej Zdybowicz, how can you keep queue dodge penalties

if half or more of these are cause by your bugs?

For him, a hundred percent.

I am deeply sympathetic for that problem,

we can't always tell if the queue dodge

is caused by something technical or caused by,

you know the player is doing it.

And unfortunately, we also can't trust players to be honest

about whether they did it or whether it was a bug.

So, I'm really sorry whenever it is

something that is our fault that is causing it to happen,

fortunately, you know we're a little lenient with the

queue dodge before we ever assess a penalty against players.

Because we understand that things like this happen.

You should only get penalized if it's something

you kind of do chronically, over and over again.

Deep inside, is Riot's favorite champion Yorick or Urgot?

I used to make fun of both of those champions a lot

and we since updated them, so my new whipping boy,

that I always bring about is an older champion, is Volibear.

That is my favorite champion.

J. Young-Ju Harris says, are there plans

to release more non-marksman bot-laners

like Mordekaiser in the future?

That is something we would love to do.

If we could do it right.

As an example, we just released the Pyke,

who is a, you know, intentionally bottom lane

support champion, but he plays much more like an assassin.

I mean he's the assassin class in the bot-lane position,

if you wanna be technical.

Long term, we'd love to do it,

but it has to be the right champion

and we don't wanna do something messed up

just so we can claim that there's

more diversity in the bot-lane.

Great question.

Derek Tam says, when will be the next Ryze rework?

I mean, we joke, and I know players joke that,

one of Ryze's passives is, he constantly gets reworked.

I make fun of it, but it's nothing to be super proud of

because we just can't get that champion quite right.

We always end up in a world where he can be super powerful

in the hand of high Elo players or pros

but is very hard to play for other players.

And we've always had a hard time

kind of keeping that sweet spot

where anyone can play Ryze and be successful.

So, it's our bad that we can't quite get him

in a good state, now we don't have a Ryze

update immediately planned so hopefully his current

state can stick around for awhile.

Cruxon Noctus says, Patch 8.11 is making my friends

into toxic people, please help.

I'm sorry, we don't need more toxic people in the world.

I don't know them, they're your friends,

so maybe you could talk to them

and get them to understand kind of what's going on

and, you know, it's just a video game.

Kevin says, I was in the middle of a ranked game

and the client kicked me out,

now there's emergency maintenance,

is my LP going to be affected?

If you trigger LeaverBuster,

which generally happens if you've left a lot of games,

then your LP will be affected.

Overall it should be neutral, I'm doing that based on memory

so I could very well be wrong, but that's my understanding.

Gustavo Ruzza says, what is your stance

on putting ketchup on pizza, it's very important.

Um, I am anti ketchup on pizza, I think that's,

that's a little weird dude, sorry.

Phillip says, hey League,

what do you think of an Emo-Teemo Skin?

If you like the idea please name it Eemo, E-E-M-O.

I realize this is coming from a team

that just created a Beemo skin

but I do want to be sensitive to the fact that

we have a lot of players that don't play

League of Legends in English

and a lot of these funny, punny names don't necessarily

translate well to other languages.

So while it's cool, we shouldn't

do it just to make a good pun.

Teemo seems like a pretty happy dude overall

so I'm not sure emo really works for him,

Emo Yasuo, I could totally get that.

Takaya Kusuki says, what, what, Rakan got nerfed, why, why?

Typically because he was too powerful,

I think he'll still be just fine.

Pat Nev has a great question.

This has been going in my head for ages,

like the past three minutes,

what would multiple of Rammus be, would it be Rammai?

I think there could only ever be one Rammus.

I guess you're playing one for all or something,

I would totally support a Rammi word,

Rammus-es is a little complicated.

Does League of Legends ever ban people?

Happened three times already, this is from Eszter.

My auto filled support just decided to ditch me

to go top jungle instead,

leaving me in bottom lane alone 1 V 2.

We do ban people, the best way to ensure

that someone gets appropriately penalized is to report them.

When we get enough reports, that's the kind of thing

that lets us recognize that this is consistent

bad behavior and not just someone having a one off

or maybe a unintentional disconnect or something like that.

I'll also pitch here a little bit

that part of the intention of the rank changes

we're doing for next season

is to separate out MMR by position.

So if you don't normally play support

and you get auto filled support,

it won't penalize your main MMR,

if that's say on mid, for example.

You can play the support, hopefully you'll do well,

hopefully you'll increase your MMR on support,

but overall you're only out a little bit of time

rather than having your MMR penalized.

And hopefully that'll lower the amount of people

that feel like they have to bail if they get auto filled.

Tsuchiyomi says, hey, how about a game mode

where we play pre-reworked champions?

I'd love to visit old Yorick or AP Sion.

The real answer, which you probably don't wanna hear

is those champions are gone.

It's not like we have an old version of the database

and we just flip a switch and they're back again.

And even if we could do that, that probably wouldn't work.

There's probably been changes to things like runes or items

that make it hard to just, you know,

turn on this older content and have it come back

without doing a whole lot of work to make them functional.

I've often loved the idea of like,

could we have a, you know, a temporary game mode

where you get to come back and play all the older champions,

but again, that may be a ton of work to implement.

Rico says, why did you guys remove the Phreak announcer?

Those were always intended to be temporary.

I think we'd have to figure out the right way

to bring them back in some kind of permanent mode

or give players an option to turn them on

or something like that.

I think for the time being we'll leave

these announcer packs as kind of special occasions.

Don't want anyone to overdose on the Phreak.

Tathin asks, why is gangplank's ult minimum cd

77 seconds, if he has a minuteman skin?

It's minimum should be 60 seconds, mang.

You know, we have a lot of players

in other parts of the world besides North America

that might not understand what a minuteman is

in U.S. history and therefore might not understand

the 60 second duration, I'll just leave it at that.

Poor Brock Dries says, decided to start playing again

but I have forgotten my password

and what email account it is linked to.

I mean, I laugh, but I think

that's probably a pretty common situation.

I know, if I pick up a game, or even

go to a website I haven't used in a long time

and I have trouble remembering what it's attached to.

Usually, if you can figure out the summoner name,

you can contact our player support

and they can kind of help you get through

to the right email address,

you also might just try hitting Riot customer support

from the different email accounts

and they can probably help you figure out which one it is.

RocketMury says, can you tell me

how I can work for Riot games, I have finished

graphic design school, am a Master Tier player

and am passionate about the game.

I mean those are three important things.

I mean, we get a lot of people who say

I love the game, but you love the game

and you're really good at it

and you've actually got a degree in a skill

that we need all the time, which is graphic design.

So, I mean obviously the best way

is to go to the section of the Riot Games website

where we talk about open positions.

Even if you don't see one in graphic design,

I would go ahead and send a resume and a letter,

explain why you wanna work at Riot on League.

Explain what it is you bring to the table

and why, you know, why that team should hire you

instead of someone else.

Passion's important, but it's kind of not enough,

you also have to have a skill that a company,

you know, whether it was Riot or anyone else,

is really, really looking for.

So, if you really crush it at graphic design,

you shouldn't have too much trouble getting a job anywhere.

You guys, thanks a lot for these questions.

Some of them are a little troll-y and meme-y

but there's some really good stuff in there too

and I don't mind answering any of it.