Hi folks,

Usual Disclaimers

These posts will often contain talk about future work we're doing, or planning to do, that isn't yet guaranteed to ship. The nature of the work could change or, depending on what we discover, projects mentioned may get delayed or even stopped. If you'd like to see a Tweet whenever a new one of these posts goes up: https://twitter.com/RiotMeddler

Nexus Blitz

Nexus Blitz should be live next week with patch 10.15! We’re really excited to see what you all think of this updated version, both art and gameplay. It’s going to be out for two patches and our plan is to also have it return in the future again for other events. We’ll continue to work on Nexus Blitz over time, so would love your feedback on it to help with that. Our plans and when we could act on what sorts of feedback are as follows:

Patch 10.16 - We’ll be in a position to make balance and pacing changes. If you’ve got thoughts on things like class/champ balance, snowball rates, game length, frequency of sudden death etc we’ve got a brief window where we could act on them here. We’ll also be using this time to see if we can get Mordekaiser working for Nexus Blitz, with a small chance Ivern also gets enabled.

Next time Nexus Blitz returns - For Nexus Blitz’s next outing (exact date still to be determined) we’ll have the opportunity to act on larger feedback. Things like event design, rewards, the mechanics of the sudden death walking nexus fight etc would be feasible to change on this sort of longer timeframe.

New Thematic Lines

Speaking of feedback as we discussed last month player sentiment on a new theme, and its potential in the future, are some of the key factors that determine whether we return to a theme again or not. We’ve got a few new skin/event thematics coming in the second half of this year, starting with Spirit Blossom in 10.15. If there are particular elements of those themes you really like, champs you think would be fantastic in them, ways they miss the mark that can be addressed etc please do let us know. We’re looking to flesh out our stable of themes we return to regularly to make sure we’re providing content for a wide variety of tastes and to avoid overusing our existing popular skin lines. Understanding which of our efforts are resonating with you folks, which are rough but have potential, and which just aren’t of interest to you helps a lot with that.

Tooltips

On the clarity side of things we’re just about to start rolling out updates to our in game tooltips. Our goals there are to:

• Standardize how we present information to make it easier to process quickly (get away from every champion having a different approach for example)
• Cater to two different audiences (those who just want to understand high level functionality quickly and those who want all the details)
• Make better use of color, symbols etc, particularly when it comes to updating tooltips that were written years ago when we didn’t have as much functionality as we do now.

Lillia will be the first champion to get the updated format after which we’ll regularly update older champions until we’ve got the whole roster addressed. That will involve changes like:

• Adding the ‘Hold Shift to see more info’ functionality to all champs (eventually some items too), ensuring things like ratios are consistently in the expanded version.
• Cleaning up unnecessarily wordy sentences, including places where it’s not clear whether mechanics are being discussed or just theme.
• Adopting consistent standards for gameplay elements (it should be clear what we mean when we say ability, versus spell, versus skill etc and isn’t always at present)
• Etc

As some of you may recall (or may have assumed from the way we’ve got things like Shift for more details functionality on only some champs) this isn’t our first attempt to unify and improve our tooltips. Past efforts got hindered in part by a desire to overhaul a lot of our tech and to roll all the changes out at once. To make sure things work out this time we’ll instead be rolling things out over many patches and going back to integrate new functionality rather than having everything wait until it's ready.