Riot Shares Plans to Enhance League of Legends Preseason 2021
League of Legends gameplay design director Mark “Scruffy” Yetter recently discussed the 2021 preseason in a dev blog post. Riot Games aims to improve matchmaking and enhance the overall user experience.
After a week since Patch 10.23 was released, the developers now have sufficient data to analyze. Riot will be addressing specific areas, such as improving item icon clarity and limiting burst damage from weapons. They also have some new features in the pipeline that will enhance the game’s quality of life.
Riot has already released two hotfixes since Patch 10.23 to address immediate imbalances. They nerfed Bami’s Cinder items and made some adjustments to certain champions and weapons. Additionally, more nerfs are planned to reduce the amount of burst damage coming from items and active abilities.
However, Riot has also noticed that snowballing numbers are lower compared to the previous version. Scruffy mentioned, “Typically as players are learning new systems, snowball increases from wider skill differences in a game. We’re not acting on this currently, because a small reduction in snowball is still within our ideal snowball state for the game.”
If snowballing drastically affects matchmaking, Riot will swiftly respond with another hotfix or patch.
Scruffy also provided a preview of some upcoming changes to improve item clarity, addressing concerns raised by many fans. Some players found the new icons to blend in with each other, making them difficult to distinguish. This issue was especially problematic for colorblind players. In response, Riot will make the icons more clear, easier to identify, and visually designed akin to “powerful fantasy weapons.”
Another highly requested feature is the ability to scale the shop interface up or down, which is currently in development. Scruffy states that it will be available in the next few patches. In the future, Riot plans to offer more advanced scaling options, such as adjusting the size of item icons in the all item view.
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