Patch 0.9.1 is a small patch, so no card updates this time, but that doesn’t mean there’s nothing to see. Read on for details on new boards & guardians as well as quality-of-life improvements to friend challenge XP and game pacing.
Dev Notes: Animations
We’ve seen a lot of feedback about animations taking too long, and the tl;dr is…yeah, agreed. We’re going to speed some things up over the next few patches, beginning with this one.
Finding the right pacing for the game is a work in progress (and will be for a while). We want interactions to be clear and cool moments to feel cool, but animations shouldn’t make you impatient for the game to get a move on—we’ll keep working to find the right balance. I think it’s fair to say we’ve so far leaned toward the ‘slow and clear’ end of the spectrum, and now it’s time to make things a little snappier. I love a good Draven axe as much as the next guy, but there are only so many hours in the day and I’ve got Ranked games to lose!
We’re starting with some of the basic moments you see many, many times each game—things like drawing, summoning, passing your turn, and starting a new round. These aren’t the flashiest animations, but small changes to them can add up and make a big difference over the course of a match.
We also know there are a few card-specific animations and interactions that are especially slow; we’ll be tackling those over time. Please keep telling us about the worst offenders, and look forward to a speedier LoR in the near future!
– Riot Exis, Engineering Manager
Boards & Guardians
- New guardian now available:
- Minion
- New boards now available:
- Jinx
- Garen
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- Guardian improvements:
- Silverwing and Gloomtooth make fewer noises while idle.
- Basilisk’s tail and Gromp Jr’s legs no longer clip through certain boards.
Game Pacing & Feel
In response to player feedback, we’ve put together a group of devs tasked with improving LoR’s overall pacing and responsiveness (code name “Feel Good”—we’re clever like that). This effort will continue as we head toward launch later this year (and beyond, if necessary), and we plan to release component changes over time as they’re completed. This is the first batch
- We’ve increased animation speed, decreased action lock-out windows, and removed effect buffers in order to increase responsiveness across a variety of game actions:
- Summoning units.
- Drawing cards.
- Dragging units out to attack.
- Playing Fast & Slow spells.
- Playing Burst spells.
- Initiative token flip at the beginning of rounds.
Friend Challenge XP
Last patch, we made a change to friend challenge XP intended to curb win trading via surrender spam, but it was a bit too harsh on players looking to play with friends normally. For now, we’re increasing friend challenge XP for both wins and losses, but we’re also planning to make more systemic changes in a future beta patch.
- Win XP: 100 → 200
- Loss XP: 0 → 100
- XP gains capped at five wins (unchanged) and five losses per day.
Deckbuilder
- Card counts now represented by “pips” (you’ll know em when you see em) that better communicate copies owned, copies not owned, owned copies used in deck, and owned copies not used in deck.
Bugfixes
- Repeatedly hovering Region Road rewards no longer causes shadows to steadily consume the screen. Spooky.
- Muting AI opponents will now properly hide their emotes.
- The Rekindler and The Harrowing will no longer revive Champions that only had their unique spell cast (rather than an actual Champion unit played and killed).
- Champions will now properly level up if they return from being Detained after their level up condition was met while they were Detained.
- Twin Disciplines now displays correct effect text when selecting Discipline of Fortitude.
- Players should no longer get stuck on the loading screen when signing out of League of Legends while signed into LoR (communicated last patch but didn’t make it in).
- Players logging into LoR from different devices should encounter fewer crashes (communicated last patch but didn’t make it in).