Disclaimer
These posts will often contain talk about future work we're doing, or planning to do, that isn't yet guaranteed to ship. The work or goals could change depending on what we discover, and projects mentioned may get delayed or even stopped. That said, I believe it’s important to share as much as we can even if plans may change.
With the Bot position changes in 10.11 some items and a large group of champions got changes so we’re going to be watching for anything unexpected and following up if we need to. We’re also releasing the Volibear VGU this patch, which will require close monitoring for follow up as well. Volibear is our second release (after Fiddlesticks) with us committing strongly to more balanced champions on release, so don’t expect any fast buff reactions unless he is clearly very weak.
I thought this is a good opportunity to give some more general insight into how we monitor and follow up on bigger or more risky changes. Our current follow up method has four important check points for if a champion or systems change has landed with the intended power and gameplay:
The big focus of last time’s Gameplay Thoughts was a package of systems changes coming into the game in 10.12 aimed at:
With the focus in 10.12 following up on the Bot changes and shipping the systems package, we are getting early testing of how we can effectively bring down the mid position power in ways that also improves the overall game flow. Our current iterations are mixing two strategies:
These changes will take a bit of time to tune and get right, so we’re not expecting them to ship in 10.12.
Thanks again everyone for playing. Stay safe out there.