26.17 is a stabilization patch, and a player who admitted abusing the ward bug asked for their ban back in public.
The 26.17 preview landed, Sundered Sky is getting hit again, and Riot spent the weekend explaining exactly where cheating starts.
Red Post Roundup
August 15 to 18
Issue #326.17 is a stabilization patch, and a player who admitted abusing the ward bug asked for their ban back in public.
The 26.17 preview landed, Sundered Sky is getting hit again, and Riot spent the weekend explaining exactly where cheating starts.
The short version
Nothing came out of League Classic in this window. Everything below is modern League.
- 26.17 is a stabilization patch. The bot lane mage nerfs from 26.16 did roughly what Riot wanted.
- Sundered Sky takes another nerf, Stormrazor gets power back, and a standard set of champion nerfs ships alongside.
- Abusing the ward gold bug is cheating, and Riot's penalty for cheating is a permanent ban. No appeals landed.
- Your rank decays and your MMR doesn't, on purpose. That's what keeps your lobbies fair after a break.
- Aegis is meant to reward playing more than one role, and Riot says it's supposed to work against one-trick accounts.
- Names showed up in Ranked 5s lobbies by mistake. The bug is fixed, but Riot wants to know if you liked it.
Want these as they happen?
Our League of Legends Red Tracker collects everything Riot devs say in public and refreshes every fifteen minutes. This roundup is the weekly read. The tracker is the one you leave open.
Open the Red TrackerThe big one: 26.17 is a stabilization patch
Modern LeagueMatt Leung-Harrison posted the 26.17 preview on Tuesday morning. It's the quiet kind of patch, the one that checks whether last patch's swings landed rather than starting new ones.
Patch 26.17 Preview! This patch is mostly a stabilization patch after observing the adjustments made on 26.16. Mages bot overall have lost some amount of winrate across the board, but not a huge amount, which is roughly about the impact we're looking for. So far, we're seeing good skews on Poppy and Camille support with support nerfed and Top skews playing out well (in particular). We're still monitoring the impact of Hail of Blades on champions more broadly, eg. Yi, Trynd, Shaco, etc. [...]
Matt Leung-HarrisonLead gameplay designer, Leagueon X
What it means: a skew is where a champion actually gets played. Poppy and Camille were meant to move out of support and back to top, and they have. Bot lane mages lost a little, which was the target rather than a full removal.
The item half is more interesting than the champion half.
[...] Sundered Sky - Directionally, Sundered Sky and AP Jungle changes have been good, but magnitude is still off - We're putting another small-moderate nerf in for this patch and hoping to see more movement on AP jungles and Sundered Sky dominance in higher levels of play Stormrazor - Outside of Stormrazor Jhin, it doesn't have a large user base and we think it could have more power overall to broaden the user pool Champion wise, a pretty standard set of nerfs here, mainly for power impacting outliers.
Matt Leung-HarrisonLead gameplay designer, Leagueon X
What it means: Riot likes the direction on Sundered Sky and thinks it didn't cut deep enough, so it's coming down again. Stormrazor goes the other way. Almost nobody builds it outside of one Jhin build, and the fix for that is more power, not a rework.
Riot's line on the ward bug is a permanent ban
Modern LeagueThe gold bug from last week's roundup got its aftermath on Saturday. A player who'd used it to sell control wards over and over in a ranked game said so publicly, apologized, and asked whether the ban could be anything other than permanent. Drew Levin answered all of it in the open, starting with the ranked part.
in ranked is crazy work brother
Drew LevinDirector of Product and Strategyon X
Then the answer itself, which came in one sentence and never moved afterwards.
no, sorry - we agree that it's blatantly cheating, and our view is that the appropriate penalty for blatantly cheating is a permanent account ban
Drew LevinDirector of Product and Strategyon X
Asked to explain where the line sits, given that plenty of players hit the bug once by accident and stopped, Levin laid it out as three questions rather than a threshold.
the questions are ones of principle: 1. when does selling your Nth ward go from "oops the ward didn't sell" to "oh wait how does this bug work" to "hahaha yes free money I'm going to win this game!!"? 2. are any of those cheating? 3. is cheating bannable?
Drew LevinDirector of Product and Strategyon X
What it means: nobody's getting banned for selling a ward that didn't sell. The action is aimed at the third state, where you've worked out what's happening and kept going because it's free gold. Intent is the whole test.
Several people pushed back that a permanent ban for one game is too much, and that a month would teach the same lesson. The reply kept turning the question around.
How many of your ranked games are you personally willing to lose to cheaters who aren't banned?
Drew LevinDirector of Product and Strategyon X
Nobody pretended the argument was settled, either.
We disagree about how hard a line to draw on cheating, as well as whether such severe abuse of this bug is equivalent to cheating.
Drew LevinDirector of Product and Strategyon X
Rank decays. MMR doesn't. That's deliberate.
Modern LeagueTake a month off in Master and you come back to a lower rank than you left, while the lobbies feel exactly as hard as they did before. Players read that as Riot taking something away and giving nothing back. It's the opposite.
1. if you decay neither, people just sit master forever 2. if you decay both, you're saying that taking a month off of league means that you should play in diamond lobbies (which you will fucking smash) 3. if you decay rank but not MMR, you will play in fair lobbies
Drew LevinDirector of Product and Strategyon X
What it means: rank is the badge, MMR is the number that picks your teammates. Decaying the badge keeps the leaderboard honest about who's still playing. Keeping the number means your first games back are still fair, and the badge returns in a handful of wins.
Aegis is built to reward playing more than one role
Modern LeagueA long question about high-elo queue quality got a long answer. The first half is a number worth knowing.
1. "Nonprimary vs primary is a bad experience" we agree! we do our very best to avoid that, we went from something like 70% of M+ games having one or more lanes of that to, iirc, 10 or 20%. Could get it lower but that involves taking more people off primary. [...]
Drew LevinDirector of Product and Strategyon X
The second half is the part people will argue about. Aegis, the ranked system change from earlier this year, is designed to favor players who can handle more than one role, and Riot is comfortable saying so.
[...] If you can only play one champ in two roles, aegis will structurally disfavor you by design. [...]
Drew LevinDirector of Product and Strategyon X
What it means: MMR isn't tracked per role, so the system reads you as one player rather than as a jungler. If you're only good on one champion in one lane, autofill will find you out. Riot calls that working as intended, and says Aegis is far from the first change aimed at the same thing.
Names in Ranked 5s went live by accident
Modern LeagueRanked 5s players spent two days seeing opponent names in lobby. That wasn't a feature. It was an option the team had been testing internally, and it shipped by mistake.
Bug fixed as of earlier today. My bad for this one getting through. For transparency, the team has been exploring a few potential options for future Ranked 5s, we miscommunicated internally, and one of them went to prod. That's on me, and apologies for the confusion. Curious, though, for those who played R5s in the last two days: better, worse, or just different to see names?
Drew LevinDirector of Product and Strategyon X
Worth noticing that the post asks for feedback anyway. The accident was a two-day live test, and the replies decide whether names come back on purpose.
Everything else Riot cleared up
EUW and EUNE ranked came back
Modern LeagueBoth regions went down on Saturday morning with traffic rerouted through Paris, which meant higher ping the further east you were. Ranked came back for both within the hour.
on XAsking a Rioter to ban someone doesn't work
Modern LeagueTwo separate players brought Levin accounts to action directly. Both got pointed back at the in-client report button, the second with a flat "just use the report function on your screen dude cmon why".
on X
A Nami-themed name gets Nami banned
Modern LeagueLevin, on how a name in the lobby steers a ban: "I am sure as fuck not banning heimerdinger over nami". Broadcast your one-trick in your Riot ID and you have picked the enemy team's ban for them.
on X
Old Noonquiver isn't coming back for ADCs
Modern LeagueA thread wanting cheap early power restored got a flat no from Leung-Harrison: "it's important that different classes and roles have different powerspikes relative to each other". Early damage has to come out of the late game somewhere.
on RedditThe lead designer's one habit
Modern LeagueAsked what single realization improved their play most: "Roaming halfway to a lane and then turning around if nothing is happening, then repeat". Map pressure, without paying for the walk.
on RedditCaps is the first Western Hall of Legends inductee
EsportsRiot announced Caps on Sunday, the first player from a Western region to go in. The full film arrives September 10, with a trailer already out.
on Riot's siteNext week
26.17 goes live Tuesday, August 25, so the nerfs above stop being a preview and start being your games. Whether the Sundered Sky cut is finally the right size is the thing to watch, since this is the second attempt at it.
Don't wait a week
The Red Tracker carries every one of these within minutes of Riot posting it, plus everything that didn't make the cut here. Filter by subject, search the archive, check it whenever a patch drops.
Open the Red Tracker
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