Riot Games' Greg Street Answers 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.

(rock music)

Diabolicly Red asks, hey riot I've been playing the game

since season three.

I never really understood how you pick

the free champ rotation.

Is it algorithm or something else?

I mean this the kind of thing, it's a little bit

of art and a little bit of science.

We try to make sure that they're enough champions

available that you can make a team comp

of all free to play champions.

There are also some that we like to have in the rotation

because they're particularly good for

particularly for new players,

and we have others that we don't really want

in the rotation because they're really hard to learn

or they're about to be, you know, massively remade

or things like that.

Candy Cane asks, when will Teemo get deleted?

You know, we've tried to delete Teema several times.

There's a quirk or something in the code,

he just keeps coming back.

You can't keep a good demon down.

Nacl Samurai, is that salt samurai, that would be funny.

I see there's some quality of life changes

coming to ARAM, but why is the oracle extract

still a thing?

It ruins any trap invisible stealth champs.

I think what he's getting at is it really ruins

Teemo, which I think was partially, honestly

the origin of the item.

You know ARAM wasn't designed to have champs

with a ton of invisibility around all the time.

I think aside from Shaco and Teemo,

it shouldn't affect that many champions that much.

D Sca asks, hey riot, ARAM was released four years ago

after you started.

Why is it taking so long to release

another permanent game mode?

That's a great question.

Overall we view Summoner's Rift as kind of the core

League of Legends experience.

We're not against offering other maps,

but we want to make sure that they're good ones

and that they really add something to the game.

The Howling Abyss, the ARAM map, is really popular

among players and that one's a keeper

and obviously has a large audience.

The real answer is we can come up with a really good mode

that if we felt good about and players enjoyed,

then we're fine having another permanent game mode.

But it's not a goal of ours to go out and add a ton

of different maps to League, if that makes sense.

MagicTurtle says, I'm new to League of Legends

and I need a good beginner champion.

Comment please.

There's a lot of good beginner champions.

I think the best thing to do is just pick a champion

that you're excited about.

Even though League has 140 something champions,

when you're just learning the game,

you probably want to pick one or two

and play a lot of games on that character

until you really kind of understand the basics there.

Popular good champions I would say are like

Miss Fortune, Zedd, Master Yi, Garen is a common one.

I would stay away from say, Kalista, Azir, Aurelion Sol.

They really play really differently

from kind of the standard League champion.

It's never too late to pick it up.

Many different phenomena, that's a great name, says,

why did y'all decide it was a good idea

to make the death timer so long in one for all?

Over time, the kind of classic summoner's rift experience

has gotten longer and longer.

And when the average game time gets to be

in the 40 minutes or so, that feels a little long

to a lot of players.

We don't want to arbitrarily just say look,

League of Legends should be a 20 minute game

and that's it, but we do want to make sure

that the game doesn't drag on and on

or it's kind of hard to fit in your lifestyle.

It's not that one for all is necessarily always

tied to long death timers, but that was an experiment

we were trying to see if we could make the games

end a little faster.

I'll try to pronounce this name.

Buyhefneronitunes, why is the entire team punished

in rank for someone rage quitting?

We see all these unneeded gameplay changes each week,

but the rank system has sat stagnant for so long.

We deserve updates this season.

We are changing ranked.

We are changing it for next season because

touching rank is kind of one of the scarier things

we could do for League of Legends.

It's an easy way for us to screw up the game

if we're not careful.

These changes, like any changes to rank,

tend to be a little controversial.

So we're giving players plenty of time to kind of react

to what we want to do and make sure that

when we finally do launch the new version of rank,

that it's something you guys are excited about.

As far as why everyone is punished for someone

rage quitting, we don't ever want to set the team up

in a situation where you guys are kind of voting

and saying hey we're going to make one player the sacrifice

and you quit so that we can all don't get punished as much,

but we can like end the game sooner or something like that.

And as a tip, it's probably not going really badly

at first blood, you don't need to give up that quickly.

Kelly asks, can you guys please please put trading in

all random urf.

We're talking about it, you know, we had trading

in ARAM, which is all random.

And we just kind of wanted to see if we can improve

the earth experience by having the champion selection

be random as well.

If that seems like a popular change,

and the whole kind of history of Riot turning

earth on and off is pretty complex

and probably would take longer to explain

than I should go to right now,

but short term if it seems like a good change

and it's something players really like,

then we can certainly consider it.

Related to that, Richi says, please bring back old urf,

all random urf is so boring because you only play

with popular champions.

You can't try new champions, and that's why

all randon urf is a little bit hated.

We have a weird history with urf.

Urf tends to make League players quit playing

League of Legends, which sounds really weird,

but we see this huge hangover effect

whenever we turn on urf.

Players play it a lot, and then they stop playing League.

It's a bit of a thing where they come back to League.

So we're faced with this really weird situation

of this is something players really love

that makes them actually quit the game.

So we have to decide, as a player focused company,

do we want to be so player focused

that we kind of put ourselves out of business,

you know, supporting urf or not.

Roma says, I downloaded League of Legends

and I am so confused, the game wants me to battle

with another player, but I still do not know

how to control it.

Roma we have just updated the tutorial experience

for League of Legends.

The one we had has been in the game forever,

and it was not doing a great job of teaching new players

how to play the game.

The best way to learn League of Legends

is to find a friend who plays League of Legends

and have them teach you the game.

That's still the best way today,

but we realized that we were kind of shirking

our responsibility by not offering a way

that you could try to pick it up yourself.

I think if we tried it again, we'd do a little bit

of a better job kind of explaining here's where you are,

here's where you want to be as a League player,

and kind of help you take the steps to get there.

Ian McIntyre says, hey guys, I don't really know

where to ask this formally, but is there a chance

you could introduce a help ward here ping?

That's actually a really cool idea.

I'm not sure if we've talked about that before

or if it's somewhere in the backlog,

but it seems like a useful thing.

We've been trying to make our ping system

a little more powerful so that people can use that

to kind of communicate with your teammates

because it's faster than having to type something out.

Guong asks, my boyfriend has been crying because

he thought a new patch we released today

with Pyke in it, I said that's not the case.

He insisted that usually Riot releases champions

a week after it was first on the pbe.

I mean generally that's how it works out.

We put a public beta test up, and if it you know

all goes well, we don't need to make major changes,

then we'll release the champion.

But that's not a hard and fasts rule.

It's more about how we want to release the champion overall.

And with Pyke, as you probably realized by now,

there's this huge event that goes along with him,

you know, it's very bilge water themed.

There's the ARAM map turned back on

and some new skins and that sort of thing.

So we wanted to make sure we could drop all of that

at the same time.

Aron says, so how long until League of Legends

Battle Royale game mode is announced?

We had a really hard time even getting hexi-kill to work

where we have six champions on each side.

I'm not sure we could get a hundred or more champions

into the game.

On the other hand, there's some really cool things

that Battle Royale does that I'd love to be able

to capture.

For example, the expectation that you probably won't win,

you'll probably lose, so you're just kind of in there

to have fun, that's a really nice element.

Whereas in League, statistically if our match making

is working well, you're going to lose about half

of your games.

I'd love if there was a game mode in League like that

where you felt like you were kind of in there

to do crazy things and see how far you could get

versus like crush the enemy team.

But whatever form that takes, it probably can't be

a battle royale.

Mike, wow, how'd you get that name?

Hello, as a support main, is it possible to get

an end game stat for damage dealt by

Zzrot and Banner of command?

That's a great question, and we actually have some plans

to improve the stats we offer.

The ones we do now have been, you know that system

hasn't been touched in ages, and something,

you know, you're not going to see it

in the next few patches, but long term

we would love to offer a lot more stats,

particularly so players who aren't so focused

on you know dealing damage or getting kills

will also have some stats they could be excited about

or try to improve over time.

Vince Sobel asks, hey guys, one quick question,

do you lose more LP when you surrender instead of

letting the enemy destroy your nexus?

I think that what he's trying to get at is,

if I'm going to lose, should I quickly surrender

to lose fewer LP?

And the answer is, the game doesn't really care

how you lose, it just gives, you know you lose LP

when you lose.

So you shouldn't worry about trying to game it,

if you're going to lose elegantly because

you surrender or if you're going to go down

fighting to the end, it's kind of all the same to the game.

Juble says, LOL two, when?

Honestly probably never.

Like League of Legends is an ongoing game.

It's something that we support.

It's something that evolves over time.

I think the only reason to launch a

League of Legends two would be some kind of

cynical marketing campaign where we were like

trying to get players, you know, excited about

the game again, but it shouldn't require that.

We should be able to get players excited about the game

because League of Legends is a good game,

not because we need to kind of rebrand it

and relaunch it.

I would hesitate to ever like take away

player's accomplishments and say,

hey just start over again.

And this probably sounds like I am scrubbing

out a bunch of other games out there,

which is not at all my intention,

I'm just saying for League of Legends

it's about League of Legends,

not about the, you know, the sequels

that we make every year.

Yes, I think that wraps it up.

We got a lot of great stuff planned this year

for League of Legends.

Hopefully some cool surprises coming up

at the end of season two.

So thanks a lot.