Quick Gameplay Thoughts: Dec 4

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.

LP Gains in Preseason

We've made some pretty big changes to the LP system during preseason, some of which are easy to see (no more division promos) and some of which are more under the hood (improvements to our matchmaking algorithm). There have been some hiccups during the rollout of these systems, but that's why we do them during the preseason where they have a smaller impact. The end result is that we saw players' ranks being inflated, which resulted in lower LP gains in the short term. We made the necessary tuning and fixes so that everything will be correct with the seasonal reset in January.

With all of the changes for next season, we do expect LP gains and losses to be slightly smaller on average. We're planning to do a smaller ranked reset at the start of the season so you stay closer to the rank you've achieved this year, and removing divisional promotion series makes people climb faster, and benefit more from a win streak. The combination of these two changes would cause significant rank inflation, so in order for the ranking system to stay accurate, we needed to tone back the amount of LP gained per win. 

Preseason Followup Progress

Just recapping a bit of our progress and future goals for the preseason follow up work

• Priority 1 - Overall game health and pacing.
  • Are game length, snowball, damage, and other high level aspects of the game in the right place.
  • We’re currently happy with snowball and game length
  • Burst damage was too high on release, and after changes in 10.24 it’s better but still a bit too high from where we want long term. We have another pass on burst reduction coming for 11.1
• Priority 2 - Position and class balance as a whole
  • Are all classes viable and succeeding in the right ways?
  • Initially we had (as expected) a few strong (tanks, AP, some assassins) and weak (ADC and Enchanters) classes
  • Hopefully with the 10.25 changes, we are in a fairly balanced state here (buffs to ADC and Enchanters, nerfs to Tanks)
• Priority 3 - Individual item choice, health, and satisfaction
  • Is every champion accessing the wide range of choices that we intend and are their builds satisfying and synergistic with their playstyle
  • Initial results seem to be successful for more than half of the roster, where champs are seeing expanded choice and satisfying builds
  • The first patches of spring will have a lot more individual item and champion shifts to realize the full potential of the new system

Thanks again for playing League with us. Stay safe out there.