December 14 Staff Meeting Notes

Hi all! Here are the notes from today’s staff meeting.

Some highlights:

• Remember, this arc ends on December 22.
• There’s a schedule there for this final week of the Nyroth arc.
  • On Monday night, we’ll give each faction a couple of island revisits, with very streamlined polls. (Basically just “do you want to try again at that thing you failed to do the first time?”)
  • Then, we’ll do Yoroth. The Freljord will get some chance to decide whom to bring along on its Yoroth adventure, if anyone. The other factions might also get a chance to try to sabotage whatever the Freljord does. Regardless of what happens, the Freljord and Bilgewater will each get a partial say in the victor’s decisions at the end of the arc.
  • The arc’s ultimate victor will get to decide what to do with the mega-nexus and the island.
• We’re asking people to start using na.op.gg for post-match screenschots for scoring, after some errors with LoLNexus and LoLKing improperly displaying Summoners as Unranked.
• We’re adding a -10% match value adjust for each Unranked Summoner in a match, to account for the greater variability in that category and to partially offset errors that may have arisen. (For comparison, it’s -20% for each sub.)
• We’ll have Featured Matches this weekend, and possibly also on Friday. We’re not sure which factions will compete on which days. That might depend in part on how the lore events play out.
• We’re going to keep this last week as simple as we can. We keep saying that, but we mean it this time!
• As has been discussed, we’ll have a special “scored intermission” after this arc. We’ll maintain an all-factions Balance of Power, and people will be free to play for any faction anytime, rather than declaring. There won’t be a particular dispute at stake; it’ll just be a way to track how the factions match up in a giant free-for-all. Meanwhile, we’ll be working on revising (rather than expanding) Factions procedures and rules, and working on the next arc. That way, we won’t be as crazed and overwhelmed next round.
• Remember: if you have multiple accounts on the server on which a match is played, use your highest-ranked account. If for some reason that’s impossible, it’s your responsibility to ensure that the rank of your highest-ranked account is noted on the match submission. We won’t look kindly on “oops, I forgot” situations.

“Why do you hate Unranked Summoners?”

We don’t. We really don’t. If anything, we think one of the nice aspects of Factions is the escape from the Ranked grind. But I’ve heard this complaint a few times, and I’d like to address it. Here’s what I wrote in a recent forum post.

Rank is a really loaded topic in LoL, which is probably part of why a lot of people don’t play Ranked. I’m very sympathetic to that. Rank is important in Factions only in that we need some way to roughly sort out experience and ability levels, to keep matches fair and allow everyone to participate. If we removed the rank-adjust component, we would be effectively discouraging anyone who wasn’t top-tier from participating in matches, because they’d be costing their faction points every time they played.

All we’ve got are imperfect solutions. Unfortunately, imperfect solutions come with costs. In this case, the cost of using solo queue rank as a rough proxy for skill and experience level is that it may create the impression that we think less of Unranked Summoners.

I’m painfully aware that, given how loaded of a topic Ranked is, this is going to hurt some feelings and create unwanted impressions. All I can do is to explain the logic behind the change and emphasize that I really, honestly do not mean any insult to Unranked Summoners.

The sub adjust is at 20% so that, if either team is all-subs, the match is zeroed out—five Ionia Summoners shouldn’t be able to make a Bilgewater team, lose and have it count against Bilgewater. (It also seems reasonable that if at least one team has over 50% subs, and the other team is nearly at that point, that the match not count.)

We chose 10% as the Unranked modifier somewhat arbitrarily, but in part so that an all-Unranked match (i.e. where we don’t have rank data on anybody) would be zeroed out. Again, it’s worth noting that an Unranked counts as a Bronze, meaning that (in most circumstances) they will increase the value of the match if their team wins and decrease it if their team loses. Unrankeds are not harmful to their teams. If anything, they’re quite beneficial: looking at the winrates, a single Unranked/Bronze can drastically change the match value in their team’s favor, win or lose. But we need to offset this impact somewhat to reflect the uncertainty associated with an Unranked Summoner, who could be anything from a freshly level 30 novice to someone who’s been playing five Normals a day since beta.

Discussion

You can discuss this meeting’s topics in this thread.

—CupcakeTrap

About CupcakeTrap

Caitlyn, you monster.