League Of Replays

Lore:

For those who brave the harsh seas of Runeterra, attaining one’s own ship and crew is the pinnacle of success. Sarah Fortune, a well-respected (some would say legendary) bounty hunter from Bilgewater, was able to achieve this feat just after her sixteenth birthday, etching out her name as the go-to gal for resolving special troubles. No bounty was too difficult or too dangerous for her feminine charm and her renowned use of her twin pistols, “Shock and Awe”. Her success gave her the means to legitimately purchase her own ship… with a little flirtatious haggling, of course. Things weren’t always so fortunate for Miss Fortune, though. When she was young, trade ships began to dot the horizon of her quiet home along the northern shores of Blue Flame Island’s largest chunk. Trade routes brought piracy, and the inhabitants soon found themselves caught in a frenzy of pillage.

One day, young Sarah returned home to hear gunshots and screaming. Her front door was smashed open; inside, she saw her mother lying in a pool of blood. A sudden blow to her head made her collapse next to her slain mother. The last thing she could remember were her attacker’s red eyes, as his face was blocked by a rogue’s bandana. Miss Fortune has a strong distrust for pirates and she finds herself constantly bickering with the infamous Gangplank (the only captain to resist her charms) over the direction of Bilgewater politics. Her two goals: to unite the people of Bilgewater, making them into a strong and independent society, and to find the pirate who killed her mother. To that end, she has entered the League of Legends as a champion, trading her skills for the wealth and influence that will help her accomplish both.

"More men have voluntarily surrendered to the care of Miss Fortune than any other bounty hunter.”
-Grinnick Torip, Bilgewater Bonds

Abilities:

Double Up: Miss Fortune fires a single bullet at an enemy target, dealing that enemy and another target behind the first.

Impure Shots: Miss Fortune passively increases damage dealt to a target with each strike. This ability can be activated to increase Miss Fortune's attack speed and cause her attacks to lower healing received by the target.

Make It Rain: Miss Fortune unleashes a flurry of bullets at a location, dealing waves of damage to opponents and slowing them.

Bullet Time (Ultimate): Miss Fortune unleashes a flurry of bullets at a location, dealing waves of damage to opponents and slowing them.

Strut (Passive): Miss Fortune gains an additional 25 movement speed after falling out of combat for 7 or more seconds, increasing each second up to 80 maximum bonus speed.

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Greetings Summoners! This week’s 10 free champions have been rotated:

Week 8 (this week)

Malphite	Melee DPS
Master Yi	Melee DPS
Morgana		Support
Ryze		Mage
Singed		Tank
Sivir		Ranged DPS
Taric		Support
Teemo		Ranged DPS
Shen		Tank
Malzahar	Mage

With the recent increase in ninja population at the Institute of War, there has been some PR backlash amongst pirate enthusiasts. For those like myself, who proudly sail under the Black Flag, Riot Games has asked me to inform you that you have not been forgotten! Every scurvy dog has his day, and very soon, you shall have yours!

To appease these constituents, we have our latest pirate champion coming up! Her name is Miss Fortune, the Bounty Hunter, and she’s got everything a lady buccaneer should offer. I mean, just check out the pair on her! Those are some seriously huge, enormous, titanic pistols she’s got there! That’s right, pistols. What did you think I was talking about? So start getting excited! Miss Fortune will be sailing into your port, soon!

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Greetings League of Legends Community,

We are extremely aware that over the last couple of weeks the performance of our servers hasn’t been as good as we would have liked. I wanted to assure you that service stability is currently Riot Games absolute number one priority. We have a team of over 20 senior engineers, system administrators, producers, and other personnel who are fully dedicated to improving our service uptime and availability. Answers to common service stability questions:

Is it really a huge priority? How come it’s taking so long to fix!
We definitely understand how frustrating the instability is, and I promise you – it’s even more frustrating to us. The core mission of Riot Games is to deliver the best gaming experience to the greatest number of people possible, and our hearts sink every time our service has issues. We are working around the clock, have 24-hour on-call schedules, and are spending massive amounts of time and resources to improve this area.

In addition to being a team of people who work on the game – we’re also a team of people who play the game, and really understand how frustrating the experience is for players. I know that sometimes it doesn’t seem like it, but stability has actually improved over the last 6 months, and will improve much more over the next six months – it’s just a really challenging set of problems to solve given how rapidly we have grown.

Why is it such a challenging problem to solve? It seems like plenty of people have done it before.
We’re often asked why we don’t just buy new hardware, or a second set of servers, and the reality is that these statements really oversimplify how our systems work. PVP.net runs on a very large and complicated infrastructure of hardware and software. We have hundreds of servers spread over multiple continents and many different sets of software and they all have to communicate with each other harmoniously. The problems unfortunately cannot be solved by simply adding or upgrading hardware, I can absolutely assure you that if the solution were that simple we would have definitely already done so. Additionally, even though the systems often appear similar each time we have system problems, each issue over the last several months specifically has been extremely unique, and has varying causes.

One of the most challenging aspects of our stability efforts is our explosive growth. League of Legends is growing rapidly, and the rate that we’re adding new users is increasing every day. Our audience has been more than doubling every 3 months and the growth has been accelerating and this has made it difficult to keep up. The good news is that we believe we are very close to having some major and long term improvements that will give us a lot of additional room for growth.

Why do restarts take so long? Can you just restart them at a fixed time more frequently so at least the downtime is predictable?
This really gets back to the complexity of our server infrastructure. Restarting the servers themselves really doesn’t take more than 20 minutes or so, but restarting the service is a lot more complicated than that. In addition to the simple server restarts, we also have to enable the appropriate software in the right order, pre-populate our storage caches, and run through an extensive battery of tests to ensure that everything works correctly when we it comes back up.

In addition to improving our overall service stability, our stability team is working on other things that make downtime less painful. These efforts range from improving the way we handle downtime communication and ETAs, to actually reducing the time that individual steps in the restart process take to complete, to improving our automated testing ability. The player experience is and always will be our number one concern, and we appreciate everyone bearing with us as we go through this growth.

I really hope that this information has been helpful. We understand how negative service instability is to the player experience and are doing everything we can to resolve it as quickly as possible.

- Marc "Tryndamere" Merrill

I discovered a while back that it's almost impossible to have literally exactly numerically balanced abilities. All of our abilities - and the abilities of basically every game in existence - deal with multiples of 5. AP ratios are almost always .35, or .7, etc. Spell damages are almost always 100, 110, 250 per second, etc. If you want to branch out into something like StarCraft, every unit had nice neat HP counts, nice neat range numbers, nice neat costs, etc. Would Anivia be more balanced if all her spells cost exactly 1.35 mana less? I mean, maybe?

With that in mind, you don't get to use a magic equation and put a champion in line. You identify issues. Let's take Heimderdinger.

Big issue: He downs turrets too quickly. The turret kills snowball the rest of the game. Heimerdinger's damage vs turrets is halved for both turrets and grenades. We playtest him; he indeed doesn't have those issues nearly as strongly anymore. We ship the change to live. Maybe he's not perfect, but he's certainly on the right path.

Players come back, play him, note the changes, and come back with a new issue. Heimerdinger camping in turret nests is problematic, and grenade bombing turrets with a Golem buff is still ridiculous. Alright, we'll cut grenade vs turrets altogether. We'll nerf his turrets from 3 to 2. But let's be fair here. Let's give him some cooldowns back for those late levels of turrets and make learning level 4 turret actually worth something. Also because Grenade lost so much functionality, let's give him a bit of AP ratio to make it more useful PvP. We play him, I personally "signed off" saying he was completely viable, along with everyone else in the playtest. I solo'd mid against the new buffed Kog'Maw played by one of our best players. Maybe he's still too strong. If he proves to be a problem, we can continue to assess him.

Generally, people have a good perception of general power, but a lot of champions have learning curves. If I could play Heimerdinger back during his remake as well as I can play him now, he might have been shipped in a different state. But we played him during his remake, he seemed effective and didn't have any significant issues. The same was true for a very long time among our community. Once he arose as a problem, we began to take stock of his issues and assess them.

If I can impart one piece of thought process onto you guys it would be this:

If you think a certain champion is OP or UP, try really hard to answer this question: What specific problem does this champion present that makes it too good / too bad?

Candidate: Urgot
Date: 24 August, 20 CLE

OBSERVATION

Urgot shambles along the great hall of the Institute of War, spider-like legs ferrying his bloated, bulbous body towards his ultimate goal. The scrape of metal against marble and the dull crackle of energy mark his passage as he moves with deceptive agility. His horrid emotionless visage belies the conviction in his gaze.

From his right arm swings a wicked-looking blade, beginning where the hand should have been. His left arm terminates in a cannon, a similarly poor replacement for the extremity. He creaks to a halt before a pair of ornate marble doors. He lifts one of his segmented metal legs, extending it forward to deal with the blocking portal, which slides open easily at his touch. His scarred, patchwork skin - blanched in the eerie glow of the techmaturgical engine that sustains him - glistens with beads of sweat as he scuttles inside.

REFLECTION

The darkness around him grew heavy and familiar. He could feel the dew on his scalp as a stiff breeze crossed over him. His whole body trembled, but there was no fear in it. Only the anticipation of what was to come. Urgot wrung his fingers around the shaft of his axe. His fingers! He lifted a hand in front of his face. As his eyes adjusted to the darkness, he stared in disbelief at the sight of his own, unspoiled digits. Just beyond them he recognized the dour face of Sion, his commanding officer, a whistle pinched between his lips.

An arc of lightning lit the sky, its brilliance revealing a distant silhouette. Thunder followed a few seconds later. Could it be? Could he be here, now?

The shrill squeal of his commander's whistle wrenched him from his contemplations. Almost involuntarily, he broke into a charge, dashing headlong towards his distant adversary.

"Gatecrashers!" he heard someone cry. "Form up, men!"

Ahead, he could see the soldiers forming ranks, a wall of Demacian shields waiting to meet the charge. Something was wrong. There were too many.

Without breaking stride be brought his greataxe around, sundering the lead enemy's shield and toppling him backward. Urgot waded in - oblivious to the danger - swinging the weapon in wide arcs to broaden the hole in his enemy's defenses. The sounds of combat filled the air as chaos erupted about him. For an instant, the Demacians were staggered, offering him a moment's reprieve.

A fresh wound leaked blood into his eyes, and he smeared it away as he peered through the havoc. Another bolt of lightning revealed a resolute, armored form to the rear of the vanguard who was shouting orders while steadying himself against an ancient oak. Urgot began moving once more, battleaxe leading the way.

He hacked his way to the back of the enemy force, the cries of his fellows lending urgency to his attack. The Demacians were rallying. His comrades were being overwhelmed. He lunged forward to intercept the enemy commander, axe held high, as he moved to rejoin the fray.

His opponent darted to the side and the axeblade bit firmly into the trunk of the tree. Urgot wrenched wildly, struggling to free the stubborn weapon. But it was too late. There was a flash of silver, and everything fell silent. His vision blurred as he stumbled backward, arms extended before him. The ruined appendages - ending just below the wrist - burned white hot agony as they issued forth a torrent of gore.

"Do you remember, Urgot?" asked a familiar voice. Urgot turned to face who addressed him. The carnage around him had vanished, and it was daybreak now. He was standing at a clearing in the woods. He could hear the birds chirping in the brisk morning air. Garen, the Might of Demacia, stood a few paces away, idly wiping the blood from his sword.

"I remember, Demacian," croaked the maimed warrior, stoically, "I remember what you have done to me."

A wicked smile curled at the edge of Garen's lips. "It is not over," he mocked.

In the blink of an eye he was gone, replaced by a cheering crowd of Noxian warriors. Urgot's mutilated right arm now ended in a vicious looking glaive, a gift from a field surgeon. He looked down. At his feet, bound prostrate in the dirt, was a handsome, blonde haired youth. Jarvan IV, the Crown Prince of Demacia stared up at him, piercing blue eyes locked on his executioner without fear. Though he was defeated, the air of pride and dignity about him could not be tempered.

Urgot wore a self-satisfied grin as he raised his arm to strike the fatal stroke. An arrow caught him in the chest, staying his hand. He gasped in pain, looking up just in time to catch a glimpse of that same armored figure closing in on him with uncanny speed, weapon raised menacingly.

He plummeted to the earth, a warm puddle spreading rapidly beneath him with each slow, deafening beat of his heart. He felt to scream, but could not find his breath. This could not be the end! Not like this! This was his moment. Not like this! Blackness closed in around him, leaving him alone with his killer.

"Why do you want to join the League, Urgot?" asked Garen, leaning heavily on his sword.

Urgot's labored gasps ceased. He was whole once more, his metal legs creaking as he quivered with rage. Necromantic energy raced along his metallic spine. "Revenge!" he roared, eyes ablaze with hatred.

Garen nodded, taking a step closer. "How does it feel, exposing your mind?"

In response, Urgot raised his mighty glaive over his head and brought it down furiously on the image of his nemesis. He found only the open air as the phantom dissolved into the dark. The great doors before him flew open. The League was waiting.