Reign of Gaming

Morello on New Anivia Skin

A picture of a new skin for anivia hit reddit today, Morello had a small line to say.

Not Battlecast - something different.

This is still an early version. There's more surprises 

 Riot Yegg on League Placement

RiotYegg hit reddit to put right a few misconceptions.

Hi all,

Wanted to clear up a couple misconceptions real quick:

1. There was an assumption that the formula was simply an average of current and top rating, but it was more complicated than that. We won't be disclosing the exact formula used for seeding. I can confirm that it did take top rating into account in a meaningful way.

2. The rating requirements for League seeding were not the same as the Season 2 requirements. They were determined automatically based on your position relative to the ranked population of your server. This is actually why we set everyone's medal to the provisional medal last patch; we wanted to indicate that 1500 wasn't necessarily Gold any more, and 1850 wasn't necessarily Platinum, etc.

I personally apologize for not making the second point more clear. I know a lot of you were expecting to get placed based on the numbers that you were familiar with and that didn't happen.

Using OP as an example, if you're in Silver I now and you've been at 1640 Elo during the preseason, you should have no trouble moving up to Gold. Consider it an early goal and soon enough you'll be seeing that awesome animation where the Silver medal turns into the Gold one. :)

 League System Queue Dodge Penalties

Hey all,

To start this discussion, I’d like to go back in time a bit. Back in June of 2012, we announced achange to the ranked queue dodge penalty. It was clarified that the change was somewhat of an experiment and that we'd be making further changes if necessary. At the time, we removed Elo penalties for two reasons:

1. The Elo penalties were undermining the matchmaker and opening up abuse cases that people were very much using.
2. Queue dodging is sometimes a valid defense mechanism against toxic situations, and we didn't want to punish people too harshly for using it.

In many ways this worked out well. Players looking for easy wins could no longer dodge their way down to Elo ratings hundreds or thousands points below their skill level. Other players stuck with true griefers in their lobby could get out of that situation without any permanent penalty. These are all good things.

However, over the last 7 months it became clear that there were three undesirable side effects:

1. Trolls gained more power in champ select.
2. Players were much less willing to work together and became much more focused on what they individually wanted.
3. Some players started using queue dodging to micromanage their Elo gains and would dodge whenever they perceived the matchup to be unfavorable.

The first two above led to an increase in trolling in champ select, which in turns leads to an increase in queue dodging. Combined with the increases from the micromanaging group, it’s now the case that queue dodging is very common in the ranked solo queue.

You might think that I'm crazy based on the first point above. “Trolls gained more power when we removed the Elo penalty?” You're probably also thinking that by increasing the penalty now, we're giving trolls more power because it punishes innocent players who are trying to avoid trolls.

The key is this: most trolls want to win just as much as you do. They might believe they need a certain role to do that, or they might be annoying to interact with, but at the end of the day they generally want to win the games they queue up for. Here's a corollary: most trolls don't want to sit through a 30 minute game rocking Karma/Revive/Promote (or whatever the latest "troll picks" are) just as much as you don't want to be in the game alongside them. What they want when they troll pick is for you to dodge for them, because then they'll get another lobby and they might get the role they want. Think back to the days when there was a 10 Elo penalty for dodging. There was much less troll picking in champ select for one simple reason: it often didn't work. If no one dodges, everyone on the team loses, and no individual wanted to dodge and lose Elo, so everyone was compelled to cooperate more. But with the removal of the Elo penalty, it was almost guaranteed that someone would dodge, and once it was clear that troll picking and/or threatening "X or feed" worked, more players starting doing it.

So here's how the penalties work now that the League System is active:

* Dodging in the ranked solo queue will trigger a 6 minute lockout and will deduct 3 League Points (LP).
* Dodging in ranked solo if you've dodged recently will trigger a 30 minute lockout and will deduct 10 LP.
* Dodging a ranked team game will trigger a 1 minute lockout and will deduct 10 LP from the team.
* Dodging in ranked teams if you've dodged recently will trigger a 60 minute lockout and will still deduct 10 LP from the team.
* Dodging during a Promotion or Division series will cancel the series, so you'll have to get back to 100 LP to start another series (likely just one game away, unless you had already lost a couple series games).

Now that League Points are on the line, there's much more incentive for everyone on the team to work together and try to reach a positive consensus on champions and roles. The number of League Points lost is small enough that it's not a huge setback if a dodge does happen, but it's big enough that players will think twice about dodging just because they don't like the matchup or didn't get their role. Taking away League Points does not tell the matchmaker that you're worse at the game, which means the penalty is no longer opening up abuse cases or leading to unfair matches. We've also greatly shortened the time penalties, and almost completely removed them from ranked team dodges, because it sucks when everyone has to wait around for a teammate's dodge penalty to wear off. In general, our goal here is to reduce the amount of time that it takes you to get a game started by reducing the number of failed lobbies.

As with many changes that we make these days, this is an experiment. We'll be monitoring the effects, both in terms of queue dodge rates and also in terms of the feedback that you all give us on the forums. I'll personally be reading all of the replies in this thread even if I don't have a chance to reply to them.

Champion & Skin Sale: Less-than-Epic Adventure

• Friends! (No? Aww…) I’m Little Knight Amumu, and I've returned from a… less-than-epic adventure. 487 RP
• Freljord's royalty reported that one of the Institute of War's recently-discovered artifacts, Mikael’s Crucible, had been stolen! The thief was identified as Exiled Morgana. 487 RP
• Queen Ashe's magical Hawkshot guided my first steps into the Freljord tundra, but exploded a few seconds after I left the castle. I swear it wasn't my fault! 487 RP

• I traveled east across the sea to Ionia and learned that my partner Akali had already left to track the culprit. She was supposed to wait for me, but I guess she does have a tendency to dash away at a moment's notice. 395 RP
• As I traveled through Noxus, I caught a glimpse of Cassiopeia slithering through the royal halls. She was cursed to become half-snake, you know. I was cursed to be alone forever. 440 RP
• We tracked Morgana to the heart of the Plague Jungles. Wukong's spin on Wuju style was invaluable in aiding our passage. I'd show you some of his moves, but my arms are too stubby.487 RP

We leapt from the treetops to accost the villain, but what we found was not what we expected. While Morgana had indeed pilfered Mikael's Crucible, we discovered that she was only trying to un-curse her hair, which had been magically bleached by a stray summoner spell.

Summoners, you have from February 1 to February 4 to take advantage of my little misunderstanding. After that, I'm denying any involvement. No one’ll ever know about my quest, as usual

Today Curse is extending the author rewards program to our mapping and modding authors. This is great news for people who are already uploading great items for the community. For more information check our the video below as well as check out the FAQ here.

Curse.com
CurseForge (or any Forge) Authors
Spend points you earn through downloads at our CurseForge store for Amazon gift cards or cash, located here. To date, we've given almost a million dollars back to our authors!

Bukkit Devs
If you're a Minecraft author, you'll want to go to your Bukkit Dev profile and click the "Sign up now" link.  You can buy all your goodies through Bukkit's own personal rewards store: https://dev.bukkit.org/store/.

We're also testing a new reward structure over the next 1-2 months which will allow authors to claim PayPal cash rewards more often, with a new minimum incentive in the shop of $100. 

All of the stores are interconnected, so Forge users can go to the Bukkit store, and vice versa. We do hope you'll take advantage of this amazing opportunity to let us give back to you. As always, our massive range of addons developed by valuable community members can be found at http://www.curse.com in the Downloads dropdown at the top.

Make sure you also check out the free Curse client today, where you can organize, update and download all of your addons!