League of Legends Dev Update: An old beloved feature is making a comeback!

In the August Dev Update, Head of League Studio Andrei "Meddler" van Roon and Executive Producer Paul "Pabro" Bellezza answered questions from players all around the world regarding skins, honor, and recurring problems across ranked games in League of Legends.

Honoring opponents is coming back!

A long beloved feature in the game was the ability to honor opponents once the game was over, be it for their skills or their agreeable, honorable nature. This feature, however, was removed from the game several years ago, and has been sorely missed since.

Starting at some point in September, players will be able to start honoring opponents again when they feel they deserve it. Likewise, players will also be given the possibility to honor multiple teammates, as opposed to the single honor each player is awarded at the end of every game at this time.

Addressing new player experiences

Another issue plaguing League of Legends at the moment is that many players who are new to the game end up placing too high in the Ranked system, which leads to them performing poorly in comparison to their teammates and opponents. New players encountering these experiences are quickly discouraged from continuing to play the game.

With the combined effects of Vanguard removing more bots from the game and the addition of a minimum ten Summoner's Rift games played before being able to play Ranked for all new accounts, the skill level of players who are new to the game should be far more accurately measured than ever before.

That's not all, however, as Riot Meddler assured viewers that they are looking into ways of avoiding having new players match up against experienced players on fresh accounts.

"We're also currently working on more improvements to how we detect smurfs in general, so that they are placed more accurately."

Players were also curious whether or not Vanguard was actually working as intended in preventing botting in League of Legends. To this, Riot Pabro answered with a resounding yes. 

"Ranked scripting fell below 1% for the first time in four years. Only 1 in 200 Ranked games has a scripter. And we have seen very few false positives, but several cases of accounts being stolen or shared with cheaters.

Now, cheaters are running out of accounts, so please don't give them yours."

-Riot Pabro

Updated Champion Mastery emotes

Earlier this year, Riot promises players that they would be updating the Champion Mastery emotes. Pabro and Meddler allowed viewers a peek into the direction these updates Mastery emotes will be looking like.

"Now, our goal was to respect the previous design players loved while figuring out a way to make them look different and updated. "

Riot Pabro also encouraged viewers to allow their feedback to be heard on the initial updated looks for these emotes.

A growing sentiment amongst League of Legends players over the last few years is that Riot has been focusing too much of their attentions on skin-lines, rather than interesting skins for individual champions and their themes.

Riot Meddler assured viewers that they have heard and understood these complaints, and are looking to change the way they approach skins.

"We're going to, you know, look more at their (the champions) portfolio, figure out what they're lacking. Whether that's skins that really closely align with their base, existing theme, or things that actually take aspects of their personality in ways that work, but really reinvent them, like, what if Azir was a practitioner of the law?"

Addressing ADCs and auto-fill problems in recent patches

Riot is planning to launch a set of changes into the game with next patch (14.17) in order to better balance the amount of auto-filled and secondary role players in each team. More information on what these changes will involve are yet to be announced.

Moreover, Riot will continue to take a look at how ADCs perform across several lanes in competitive League of Legends, but are hoping the recently delivered changes to be sufficient in returning them to the bot lane. Meddler confessed that, in trying to "address some long running satisfaction problems amongst ADC players," the way they revolutionized ADC itemization during the off-season had some unintended consequences across the board.

"This is one of those cases where what we're looking to achieve and what we actually achieved didn't quite line up, unfortunately."

If you'd like to watch the full video, you can do so below.

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Image source: Riot Games

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