Riot Games Answers League of Legends Questions from Twitter

Hi, I'm Jess,

Executive Producer on League of Legends.

And hi, I'm Andrei,

and I'm the Game Director on League of Legends.

And this is League of Legends support.

[upbeat electronic music]

@jerryferrara,

I am determined to get decent at League of Legends.

Currently I am getting my ass kicked.

In response, MindOfAB,

I have tried watching it on Twitch and don't get it.

Is it better to play it to get a better feel

for the game?

I know it's crazy popular,

just don't understand some of it.

Let's start with some basics here.

League of Legends is a team-based game.

Two teams competing over about 30,

35 minutes to try and destroy the other team's base.

Everybody picks a unique character.

There's a really large roster you pick from.

It's a pretty deep game.

It can be pretty hard to get into.

And I think the way we've seen people have the most success

with that is to play with a friend,

or somebody who already knows some of the game,

somebody to teach you the ropes,

and get you past that initial learning stage.

For a lot of people,

it also works well to just dive straight in.

I would definitely try to pick a champion

that you think you can stick with for a few games,

a character that you really like,

if you like their theme, that helps a lot,

and just stick with it.

Honestly, like as long as you kind of understand the basics

of try to to get the nexus,

you'll learn a lot of the mechanics along the way.

Getting good at League of Legends.

That's such a hard question,

depending on what your definition of good is.

It's kind of like asking,

how long does it take to get you good at a sport?

Like you might start doing well compared

to all the new players almost immediately.

And then we've got people who are insistent,

that even people have played thousands of games,

even some of the people who play professionally

are not good enough for their standards of good.

@GzQjLoV2E0wG1W,

asks, @LeagueOfLegends,

Will you develop a mobile game for League of Legends?

That's a great question.

And the answer is, yes.

We are currently working on this right now,

and we actually announced it

during our League of Legends 10-Year Anniversary.

It's called Wild Rift.

Hopefully it's gonna come out soon,

and we hope you like it.

@Coraberry asks,

What's some fun facts about League of Legends.

Well, one fun fact,

we just had the 10th anniversary for League of Legends

last year.

As part of that was sort of reflecting,

and looking back at just how much the game

both has and hasn't changed over the years.

Its core is still very much the same game

that launched back in 2009,

but almost every element of it has has been refined,

has evolved over time.

And we occasionally get the question, you know,

When are you gonna make League of Legends 2?

And I think from our perspective,

we've made League of Legends 2,

probably League of Legends 3 and 4 already at this point.

But our style is just to keep those things rolling out

as a constant series of updates to the game,

rather than a discreet name change and a relaunch,

or anything like that.

A big part of League of Legends 10-Year Anniversary

was announcing a bunch of games

that we needed to keep under wraps for so long.

Us being able to finally announce all of that,

and like being able to have that payoff of,

no we actually do want to invest in league in the longterm,

as like,

as an ecosystem,

as a franchise,

we have like this lifelong commitment to the game

and the sport.

We're in this for the long haul.

We won't always get it right at first,

but we'll keep coming back to it,

and figure things out

At @Neon_catss asks,

I'm wondering if there's any wild champions,

reworks, or item ideas that never went through

and we never heard of,

both kit-wise and lore-wise.

I'd like to hear the most chaotic of ideas please.

I live for these.

Okay, so we've tried a lot of stuff

that never ended up happening for one reason or another.

I think we'll focus on the kit side of things

rather than the lore side here,

because we're much more likely to go back to the lore side,

and don't want to spoil that if we do.

Ekko, for example,

used to have an ultimate that would rewind

the entire game five to 10 seconds.

The only exception was if a champion was dead

they'd stay dead,

but every other champion and unit on the map

would go back to their previous position,

have their health, the amount of their cooldowns reset,

and so on.

It created some really cool and funny moments,

but a lot of the time it was just a really annoying

nullification of consequences and actions.

Another champion we were developing

at the same time as Ekko was bad,

and about, at one point,

had an ultimate that sent out a giant sound wave

from his team's Nexus,

that would silence and slow enemy champions

when they were in it.

And the combination of trying to play test

those two at once was just a bit of a nightmare

of endless sound and slowing waves,

covering the landscape,

and then being reset,

and repeating over and over again.

For some others,

we had an idea for a painter champion

who had different colors of paint brush,

and could make shapes on the ground,

and then activate that paint to do things like,

you know, create sort of fire lines,

and, you know, deal damage, or slow,

or create walls or whatever

based off the shapes created,

but it never quite worked out.

'Cause the best play

was usually just create a blob of paint really quickly,

and then just stun stuff in it or something similar.

So it sounded all creative and artistic,

and it just boiled down to throw an AOE at them,

unfortunately.

Another concept that was fun, but never went anywhere,

was for a giant mech sort of character,

a fair bit like Urgot.

Two of his abilities were shoot left

and shoot right.

It was like a old school sailing ship,

and he had cannons that could only fire out

one side of his body.

And that was really novel,

but it didn't turn out to be that much fun.

The character got rebooted,

this time with the name Shrink and Squash,

with a bunch of tank treads and the ability

to just run over people in some shape and squash them,

and a shrink ray to make it easier to do so.

Again, didn't happen.

What about you, Jess?

Anything come to mind?

Yeah, I think of things

that are like, yeah, a little bit older,

like when Ahri,

when she had her old R,

where you could basically R from one Blue Buff to the other

and get both,

that was definitely pretty broken.

There was also a point where,

when we were working on a Skarner,

we were trying to figure out

what this crystal scorpion was gonna be.

And there were like 500 different versions

of this freaking scorpion,

ranging from like the scorpion by itself,

to like having like a scorpion rider,

to like, you know, Ziggs,

who I think like started off

as like a potion human,

like a--

An alchemist.

An alchemist of some sort.

There was the Akali rework,

that at one point had a skill

that allowed her to attach yourself to a missile,

and then ride along with it.

So like if your team had an Ashe with a global ultimate,

Akali could just hop a ride on that

and travel across the entire map.

It was pretty buggy,

pretty janky, very powerful.

It was cool,

but it was not as useful as you'd think.

Oh, Aurelion Sol, in a much earlier version,

had a global Lee Sin Q as his ultimate.

So he'd fire it out across the map,

and if he hit somebody,

he could then basically zoom to them,

traveling across the entire map at really high speeds.

Most of the time, it just missed,

and it was a giant bait for his team,

'cause he'd be trying to split push or whatever,

and then miss his skill shot.

@leon_jfernandes

asks, @LeagueOfLegends Hello!

I'm a student studying games development,

and a huge fan of your game.

Any advice on getting into the game industry?

I think there's a lot of ways

you can get into the game industry.

Really it depends on kind of what you want to do.

If it's art, you know,

there's a huge swath of areas within art, right?

You can be anything from concept art,

to 3D modeling,

to animation,

to illustration, right?

To visual design.

There's so many types of ways

of kind of deepening your craft and figuring out,

okay, well, if I go into UI,

like there's, you know,

I'm looking at menus, I'm looking at progression systems,

I'm looking at all sorts of stuff,

and design, same thing.

Do you want to go into systems?

Do you want to go into game mechanics?

Anything is kind of, it's your oyster.

Really understanding what speaks to you

and how you wanna really deepen your craft,

going hard into that one line of expertise

can just open up opportunities later for you

to kind of expand

and be able to make more parts of the game.

The other thing I'd suggest doing,

is just start making games,

if you're not already doing so.

Anything as simple as like, you know,

like a 2D shooter,

or, you know, a small platformer

Board games using pen and paper,

or a homemade RPG campaign.

If you kind of use your expertise

to maybe add one differentiator to that game,

and kind of talk through what you were trying to improve

with that game.

It'll both give you valuable experience and skills,

and it gives you great things

to put on a resume or to talk about in an interview

to actually get into the industry.

That could be a really great kind of insight

into your thought process,

and kind of how you develop games,

and that's actually great to from you.

The difference between two candidates,

one of whom has gone out of their way

to try and make stuff already,

who've shown their passion and learning,

versus another who is really interested in it,

but hasn't actually put the time and the effort in yet,

it's really stark when you're interviewing somebody.

@miky_box asks,

League of Legends friends,

any tips on how to learn a basic build strategy

for two to three champions,

Morgana, Ashe, Garen for now.

So there's a few different ways you can approach these.

The first is just jumping into the game,

starting with things like the recommended items,

experimenting,

learning what works for you.

The second is to go to

a lot of the really good third party sites out there

that use the League of Legends API,

and show off a bunch of recommended builds,

you know, things that do really well for champions

in different contexts,

like what's good for Morgana or Ashe in Plat plus play,

for example,

and they'll recommend combinations of items,

of runes, of skill orders,

those sorts of things.

And the third option that could be we're thinking about,

is trying to track down one of the communities

for those champions,

things like the Morgana Mains subreddit, or whatever,

where you'll get a lot of talk in detail

about just that particular champion.

In this preseason.

We're also looking into revamping the item system

and the item shop.

So, actually, this will be a problem

where we're trying to make it a little bit easier.

And that'll include things

like recommended items that are automatically updated

based off what other players are doing with that champion,

rather than being hand coded by us at Riot,

and getting out of date,

and being incorrect.

All that sort of thing.

It will also automatically update

as patches kind of come out,

and update what items are relevant for you,

and make sure that it's still a good build for you to buy.

@7sin1e asks,

Do you think a person's main or role

is a reflection of one's personality?

Is there any data or insight available on the matter?

I believe we did at one point look at a chat restriction

and ban rates by champion and by position,

and there are some champions out there

that have really chill player bases on average.

Bad players, for example,

are generally gonna be pretty chill people.

Without naming any particular champions,

we've got some top laners, in particular,

where certain high mechanical champions

have some of the more vocal,

and likely to be penalized, players in the playerbase.

Hey Andrei, how often is that for Yasuo players?

They're pretty high up there.

Though, not top of the list, but close.

@eDaruKii asks,

How to get better at League of Legends?

After every game you play,

take a moment and reflect on,

what did you do poorly that game?

Or what could you have done better?

Because beyond a certain point,

playing hundreds or even thousands of games

won't make you better unless you're being really critical

of your own play.

Even in the game in which you did fantastically,

take that moment of time and reflect,

hey, did I overextend for that ward?

Did I not track my mini-map enough?

Did I not give my teammates the information they needed?

Those sorts of things.

Being able to look at your damaged charts,

looking at how much vision you've added to the game.

Also seeing kind of like the timeline of how each,

how the game progressed,

and what happened,

and your participation in it really helps.

Sheer time alone doesn't matter enough.

It's, I think, a combination of time and critical feedback

that really gets you there.

I definitely think learning groups really help a lot.

I would also encourage,

if you do have a friend

who can kind of watch one of your games afterwards,

and kind of talk through,

especially if they have more experience,

what you could do more optimally in the next time over,

that's also a great way to kind of understand

what you can do better.

@Easty_Tg asks,

What's the hardest role and the easiest role

to play in League of Legends,

#newbie.

I definitely think that jungle is pretty hard to pick up.

There are so many things

you need to kind of learn about,

just like map awareness,

where the jungle camps are,

how to apply the right amount of pressure

on the different lanes.

There's just like a lot to kind of do right

so that your team is set up to succeed,

but all of the roles have their own kinds of things

that you need to learn.

Jungle, especially,

when you first started to play the game,

is probably the hardest role to learn,

particularly because it's so different

than all the other roles earlier on in the game.

I think support or the bot carry role

are both fairly forgiving,

bot carry can be demanding on your positioning,

but at the very least you're playing with her an ally there,

somebody who will help you out.

I also think Mid-lane

can actually be a pretty forgiving role

for a new player,

because the lane's so much shorter.

You're just much closer to your tower,

to a place of safety.

So you've got much better odds

of just being able to run away from stuff,

and actually survive it.

Top lane, by contrast,

can be pretty merciless when you're still trying to learn

how it works,

what other champions can do to you,

that sort of thing.

I would've have said support.

Maybe I would still say support at this point,

just because it kind of gives you some rhythm,

and support your ADC,

and give them the right buffs and heals,

but, nowadays,

there's also pretty crazy play-making supports as well.

So there's definitely a breadth of difficulty there too.

@Deineaux asks,

How much RP do I need to be able to use @safelocked's voice

as announcer pack on the Rift?

Asking for a friend.

Okay, I kind of feel you should be the one answering

most of this question.

One thing I will throw in here,

we are still planning to get announced packs

as a general feature into League of Legends.

They've been pushed back somewhat, unfortunately,

due to COVID-19,

but they're very much on our roadmap

once things are a bit easier to work with.

In terms of exactly how much RP for a Safelocked voice pack?

We're gonna have to see.

I don't know what the pricing is gonna look like.

Okay, charity auction?

Maybe we'll do a charity for it.

If everyone says they'll contribute to a charity,

maybe I'll record something.

Okay, hot pitch.

Charity auction where you try and fake an announcer pack,

just live on stream while somebody's playing through them.

You know what?

Sure I'll do it.

I'll do it [laughs].

Perfect.

@GMousinhoD asks,

How do you decide that a skin line is successful,

and how I, player, can make it return next year?

So we look at a few things

when we're assessing a skin line.

We look at how well that skin line performed

relative to our expectations for it,

how popular are the champions that are in the skin line,

that sort of thing.

So it's not just how many players picked up the skin,

but relative to the skin line's expected popularity,

how did it do?

In addition to buying the skin,

we also kind of also look at

whether you use the skin actually.

Did you buy it but didn't find it that interesting

after a while?

And so there's a different skin that you're using.

The next thing we then look at

is general player excitement for that skin line.

How excited about people to have their mains

get a skin in the thematic, for example?

And then based off a combination of those,

and also just looking at how many remaining champions

we think could be a good fit for that skin line,

we figure out whether to go back to it or not.

Player hunger, basically.

How interested are players in that?

And we'll gauge that through things

like social media discussion,

through getting tweeted out directly even sometimes.

If you love something,

give us the feedback on it,

is probably the single biggest thing.

In terms of making it return next year.

A lot of the time with the popular skin lines,

we'll sort of have them alternate year on, year off.

So we might do PROJECT one year,

Star Guardian the next,

and then bounce back to PROJECT again after that.

And a lot of that is just wanting to get enough variety

into the skins we deliver.

We also wanna make sure

that you actually get the most out of your purchase,

and actually enjoy it.

We just wanna make sure that whatever we make next year

is actually something you would buy, love, and use.

@WNarramore asks,

Are the upcoming item changes in the preseason

going to focus more on new items entering the game,

or changes to existing items?

It's gonna be pretty balanced.

We don't wanna go too far

into kind of flipping the table with items,

because we understand,

like, players also have affinity for certain items,

and, if anything, it should just be clear

about what works for your champion,

what's purchasable,

and makes sense.

We're thinking about a third of the item system

should stay the same.

So stuff that's already working well,

that'll still be familiar.

Another third of it will be modified somewhat.

It'll be recognizable,

but with a bunch of changes.

And then about a third system should be completely new.

I'd also like to call out Firaxis,

the studio behind games like Civilization and XCOM,

for that third-third-third system.

And we found that really helpful as a frame of reference

when looking at League of Legend's item system.

@_Kouseii_ asks,

What does the honeyfruit taste like?

Can you eat the other plants?

Honeyfruit is delicious.

It's the most amazing fruit you've ever tasted.

You can also eat the other plants.

Blast cones are real damn spicy,

so best of luck with them.

Scryer's Bloom will,

let's just say give you some gas,

but you're free to eat them.

@LeaderPeasy asks,

Following my identity question about League of Legends.

How the hell am I supposed to know what's my best role

if I just won three straight games as a support?

I've picked Leona,

and we stomped every single lane like gods.

I mean, should I play every lane?

Sick humble brag,

play Leona.

Yes, you should play every lane.

@HowLocr asks,

Can you guys talk more about skins

and tease us with more concepts please?

Also, are we going to get Star Guardian this year?

I want Sona as a Star Guardian so bad.

She deserves that.

I think Sona as a Star Guardian would be super cool.

Definitely great that you mentioned it.

So we're not gonna just spoil

all the upcoming skins we've got.

Apologies.

I can tell you that we've got a handful

of completely new skin lines that we're gonna be trying

over the second half of this year.

And we're really excited to get feedback

from you folks on how much you like them.

The best way of kind of us getting ideas

for who who could be the next Star Guardian

is when players are asking for specific champions

in particular.

@StormArthur7 asks,

What has been the biggest lesson you've learned

while working at Riot Games.

Definitely keep learning,

keep adapting from what players are telling you,

how they're playing the game.

Especially since the game itself

has changed so much over time,

and it's such a deep one,

it's great to just kind of get different perspectives,

not only from the playerbase,

but also the people who have come

and joined Riot as players,

and wanna just make the game better.

I think good results for game development

are often much less about that single big brainwave

or whatever,

that flash of brilliance,

and more about just repeatedly iterating,

working as a group,

taking feedback,

getting things wrong, learning from it,

repeating,

and eventually iterating until we get something really good.

@AvisYew asks,

League of Legends question.

What happens if I build full attack speed on Twisted Fate

Can I just yeet an entire pack of cards at once?

You know what?

You personally can,

but let's also do the math here.

There's 52 cards in a standard deck.

You can throw out 2.5 attacks a second.

So the fastest you'll get without somewhere breaking the cap

is throwing the whole pack in about 21 seconds.

It's up to you,

but 21 seconds to throw a deck of cards

doesn't feel like you're yeeting it to me,

so I don't know.

Maybe TF cheats and uses magic or something,

but it's not looking good.

@subbxies asks,

If Bard was a piece of bread,

what kind of bread would he be?

He'd be a sourdough,

because I love Bard,

and I love sourdough,

and Bard is kind of hipster.

@skyscraper_0 asks,

Do you see a correlation between days of high heat/cold

and lower than average player performance?

I.E., do people tilt more

and play worse on days when it's super hot?

LOL.

I feel the only time I've ever seen this actually manifest

has been like that one time at STAPLES Center,

where everyone was like,

it was pretty hot, I recall,

and everyone was sweating

and everyone had to play,

definitely found that, probably, to be hard on the players,

when when we're watching.

Like any normal human being,

you wanna be comfortable while you're playing.

Please don't subject yourself

to having to be an environment where you're uncomfortable

and can't play and enjoy the game.

But, yeah, as any normal human,

I think if you're trying to,

if you're trying to play a sport,

and you're uncomfortable,

I'm gonna assume you're gonna tilt pretty hard.

Andrei, what's your follow up?

So it's not directly answering this question,

but it's something pretty similar.

One thing we did look at at one point

was how much worst players got over the course

of long gaming sessions late at night.

We discovered that an awful lot of players

Rioters especially,

lose between five to 10% percent win rate

if they keep playing after about 1:00 AM.

And, basically, when you're still going at like 3:00 AM

or whatever, you are losing so many more games.

Even if you think you're still playing really well later on

in the evening,

you're probably not.

@KennekyDeky asks,

are you guys planning on any visual updates?

Not to be confused with VGU.

There's a few champions that their visuals didn't age well

with modern LoL over their gameplay.

I like Morgana and Ezreal visual official update,

and I hope to see more.

We call both of them VGUs actually.

And depending on kind of the state of the character,

and, you know,

how much we think is iconic to that character,

we decide on how much we wanna preserve.

And so for Morgana and Ezreal,

we did actually change some of their gameplay as well,

but because we understood

that both of those champions

have pieces of their kit that are very iconic to them,

we wanted to make sure that players didn't feel

like they were losing out with the change

when we change them and updated them

to be more visually impressive,

and upgraded,

and kind of just better versions

of their previous selves.

With regards to, like,

are we ever gonna make a visual update again?

Absolutely.

I think that's always gonna be an option for us to consider

when we're looking at VGUs.

And it's just going to be a matter of,

kind of where on that spectrum we think

it is appropriate for that year.

We've mainly been focusing on hidden characters

that need both substantial visual and gameplay improvements,

because the amount of work involved in going back

and updating at all of a champion's visuals

is about the same if you're keeping the old kit

as if you're getting a new kit.

So we just get much better value for the time spent.

Having said that,

we've also got through

an awful lot of the older problematic kits at this point.

I think there will come a time

where we're in a much better position to do more updates

that are very gameplay light,

like Morgana and Ezreal,

at some point in the moderate future.

And that concludes all the questions we've got for now.

Thanks to all of you who submitted them.

We had a lot of fun answering them,

and hope to do this again someday.

Keep playing League.

See you later.

[laughs]