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.

Clash Trophy Case

We’re still in the early days of Clash, so we’re learning a lot about what’s working and what needs improvement. One clear area to improve is around the trophies you earn for winning a tourney. It’s cool to be able to show off your clash wins in the profile and on SR, but when they go away at the start of the next tournament it’s erasing accomplishments that we want you to have forever. We’re working to provide you with a permanent Clash “Trophy Case.” This new tab in the client will store all of the trophies, banners, and icons you’ve earned in Clash so you can go back and browse your past accomplishments.

Balance Framework Update for Elite

In our last update to the balance framework (breaks balance into four bands: Regular, Skilled, Elite, and Pro), I mentioned that we were feeling that our Elite band method wasn’t fully satisfying our goals. The old method using ban rate captured high popularity, high frustration champions that were overpowered (like Akali) but would fail to discover overpowered champs in classes that are less banned (like supports or tanks).

Range expanded from Master+ (top 0.1%) to Diamond 2+ (top 0.3%)

Our old MMR range of Master+ doesn’t give us enough data to assess power from win rates (too small of a data set). We revisited expanding the MMR range slightly to see if it was still a similar enough balance state. We see that the balance outliers are nearly the same after expanding the audience slightly, and it gives us the data we need to use winrates (expanding to just Diamond 1+ would have still given us too little data).

The new criteria:

• Overpowered Old - greater than 45% ban rate
• Overpowered New
  • Greater than 50% ban rate or
  • Greater than 54% win rate if below avg banrate, down to 52.5% win rate if >5x avg banrate
• Underpowered Old - Less than 5% combined pick/ban rate
• Underpowered New - Less than 7.5% combined pick/ban rate

These winrate thresholds are 0.5% higher than the skilled thresholds to factor in the reality that players of this extremely high MMR have slightly higher winrates overall because they can only be matched against players that are lower skill. In other words we don’t want to nerf champs in this tier unfairly because they are being played by the best players.

Priorities during COVID-19

We’re all going through this global pandemic together, and with all of the disruption to our normal lives, we’re taking stock of all of our work and trying to prioritize what is critical. Our top priorities are our game’s stability, servers, and client to make sure that League is available to all of us looking to play.

Personally, I hope you all are staying safe and sane. Let League be a place to compete but also a place where you can unwind or stay connected to your friends and family. I’ll see you on the Rift.

Scruffy