Quick Gameplay Thoughts: April 3

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.

Increasing Dodge Penalties

Champ select dodges are something that hurts the overall player experience by putting 9 players back into a longer queue after they’ve already spent a lot of time and effort getting their last game started.

There are many underlying reasons why a player may want to dodge a lobby, and we think dodging is ok as a very rare outlet for players. Today, we think players are dodging too frequently, and without significant enough penalties when they do.

Over the next few months, we’re going to slowly tune up the penalties for repeated champ select dodges:

1. Increasing the “repeated dodge timeout” so that we catch more egregious cases where players are dodging constantly
2. Amping up LP penalties for dodges (current is -3 for first dodge -10 if repeated)

Fiddlesticks Learning Curve and Follow Up

With Fiddle VGU just launching, there’s been a lot of spooky gameplay going around. Like normal we will be monitoring his power and do multiple phases of follow up if it needs. Our typical follow up for a big launch is:

1. A few days after the patch, if things are way off look to hotfix a buff or nerf
2. Reevaluate after the first week to see if they should be in the following patch

Fiddle might be a rare case where the playing-against learning curve might match or eclipse the playing-as curve. For most normal champs or VGUs, we see their win rate climb over the first few weeks as players learn to correctly play them. But a certain type of champion design that is very trickery focused can have a similarly steep learning curve for opponents, as they get familiar with the types of tricks that they should be looking out for when playing against them. For example Neeko had this type of reverse curve, where her win rate actually decreased slightly over the first few weeks of her release. Our current expectation is that Fiddle should still have a normal curve where its win rate will climb over the first week because it has a very unique jungle playstyle that will take some time to master.

Duo Parity Results Update

With the full rollout of Duo Parity in 10.7, we’re getting some results on how things have improved. The good news is that it's even better than we first predicted!

• Before - 54% of games have uneven duos
• After - only 8% of games have uneven duos

It's worth noting that this is also achieved without significant change to queue times or widening the MMR spread in games. This combined with the Autofill Parity feature have amounted to a significant matchmaking upgrade so far this year. We’re hoping to continue delivering improvements to matchmaking, ranked, and player behavior systems like these throughout the year.

Jungle Work Finishing Up

In 10.8 we will be shipping the last piece of our planned work for improving jungle satisfaction. Just to refresh, the two key components of the design are:

1. Lower Gank Power Early
   1. Small homeguards effect for champs that are killed in the early game
   2. Slight decrease in champ kill XP for non-solo kills in the early game
2. Higher Jungler Personal Power
   1. Further increases XP from farming (targeted at mid and late game where junglers fall behind)
   2. Improved sustain when at very low health on the jungle starter items (to help less experienced jungle players in the early game)

Meddler mentioned in his last post that we’re seeing good results from the top lane changes so far this season, and we hope that after this last piece, we can wrap up our Jungle work for the short term and let things settle a bit.

Thanks again everyone for playing. Stay safe out there.