July 11–12 Featured Matches—The Velocitronic Railway

There has been significant demand to transfer more story significance to Featured Matches, especially in the absence of a formal World Systems setup. For the next three weekends of Featured Matches, we’ll be giving each faction a chance to make some gains in their individual subplots. Featured Matches will still be worth Balance of Power points, but they will also have a direct impact on the progression of these secondary storylines.

For those who are new to Factions, this might require some explanation. World Systems were first (seriously) introduced during the Hextech Revolution arc. Factions is about a storyline that develops according to actual match outcomes, and the idea there was to use Balance of Power to influence dice rolls that would determine factions’ progress with various pyrikhos-related research projects, like the HexKorps or the refueling of the yordle Mothership. Among other advantages, this sort of arrangement allowed every faction to have some kind of a shot at achieving story objectives, even if only one of them could ultimately win the arc.

As the World Systems rules are still under revision, for this round of Featured Matches we’ll take a shortcut, and directly link Featured Match outcomes to story developments.

We’ve randomly generated the order in which the factions will appear. Piltover is going first. We might try to get fancier about this later on, e.g. by allowing factions to select their specific story targets, we want to keep it simple for now, so we’ll be assigning the stakes ourselves. For Piltover, we’re going with the velocitronic railway, a high-speed pyrikhos-driven train system.

Featured Match Stakes

The temporary truce that accompanied debate over Shurima’s petition to join the League has dissolved. War has returned to Shurima. Piltover has deployed the New Model Army to retake the governor’s mansion, intent upon putting the ungrateful Shuriman rebels in their place and resuming work on the velocitronic railway connecting Demacia to Bandle City. While the railway might bring some economic benefits to Shurima, it would also strengthen Piltover’s hold on the southern part of Shurima, and would disrupt the local arcanosphere with hextech distortion. As for Noxus, well, its reasons for opposing this project should be fairly clear.

These matches will represent both Piltover’s efforts on the battlefield and its ability to win actual League matches to, e.g., establish logistical supply routes, secure secondary objectives, and tailor the rules of engagement to its advantage.

If Piltover wins both days, it gets the bright-and-shiny outcome. If it loses both days, it fails completely. If it beats one faction but loses to the other, it will only be able to meaningfully proceed if it can make a deal with the faction that defeated it. (If it lost 1–2 against one faction, it can choose to try to proceed even if it can’t make a deal. It will have a one-in-three chance of success, and a two-thirds chance of extra-costly failure.)

Choose Your Battleground

For these three sets of matches, we’ll be allowing the “home faction” to select the battlefield.

Voting has closed for Piltover and they have selected into playing on the Howling Abyss this weekend.

I will also be posting the votes for Noxus’ and Shurima’s featured weekends for their map selection at the same time in their respective subforums, but will keep them open longer. This way, I can announce the map that will be used when I post the sign ups.

First Round: Piltover

For a brighter tomorrow! …do you have a flag?

Piltover has selected the Howling Abyss for the Featured Matches map this weekend.

Piltover will face Shurima on Saturday and Noxus on Sunday. Also note that partial early victory rules are now in affect, as Cupcake stated in his post, so everyone playing against Shurima will be getting one real ban, with Azir and Sivir being protected.

Good luck to everyone who will be playing, and I hope to see you all on the Fields of Justice.