"After a full 2 days of data, wanted to give an update on what we're seeing in Ranked.
Format: 14.24 | 25.S1.1
First Blood Winrate: 57.6% WR | 57.5% WR
Game Time (10, 50, 90th%): 20.7, 30.2, 39.6 min | 20.5, 29.6, 38.9 min
First Turret Winrate: 70.4% WR | 70.8% WR
Feats of Strength Winrate: 74.1%
Atakhan Winrate: 78.9%
Baron Winrate: 82.5% | 82.6%
Each of the other major objectives like Inner Turret, Dragon, Rift Herald, etc. are also ~the same as the previous patch.
Objective winrates are also related to how far ahead the team is by just playing and getting ahead normally through kills/farming, etc. so winrates need to be interpreted with that in mind. Ie. If all of the epic objectives were removed from the game and players could only kill each other and take turrets, you would probably expect something like a 70% winrate at 20 minutes.
Current Thoughts
Based on what we were seeing, we don’t think snowballing in the new season is much higher than the previous season, if at all (snowball on the first season start patch is typically higher since new content needs to be learnt, but goes down over time).
We took a lot of preventative measures to reduce snowballing in the new season like early homeguards, increased XP range, removing gold from FB, First Turret, etc.
However, the perception is that snowballing is higher and the visibility of the Feats reward makes it feel like the game is more snowbally which can cause mental to collapse. It’s hard to argue with how players feel.
We think most of the Tier 3 Feats boots are either on the borderline/not worth the 750g cost and we won’t be nerfing them further as a result (unless something changes significantly).
At the same time, we’re trying to strike the right balance between nerfing things out of viability and allowing time for perception to catch up with reality.
For now, we are skewing further towards perception, because players generally think these things are extremely overpowered (a stance we disagree with, but can see why players would think that because we've increased visibility on these objectives and getting Feats is correlated with winning).
Regardless of whether it changes perception, I wanted to present what we’re seeing and explain why we’re making the decisions that we are. If you’re a player who feels like we should FF if the opponent got FB and now has 57% chance to win, we don’t agree with or encourage that. Even if a team wins Feats of Strength, there is a fighting chance to win at that point, despite playing from the backfoot. It would be inappropriate for games to still be 50-60% chance to win at the 15-20min mark or game time would get too long.
Future
Even if the stats look good, some changes create too much friction and how it feels matters just as much as the numbers. We wanted the Feats system to create more reward satisfaction, focus and tension around prioritizing early objectives. We’ve been starting to see players experience some of the dynamic and fun game states that we saw when playtesting, especially when it’s a close game around the last Feat.
Currently though, even if the actual game impact is reasonable, it’s clear that First Blood is causing too much friction for the satisfaction & clarity of gaining it. As a result, we’re going to change it either in 15.2 or 15.3. Candidly, we messed up here and it should have been changed pre-release, but we’re going to own that mistake, learn from it and do better for next time.
By the time we identified we wanted to change it, it was just not possible to change on that timeline.
Tomorrow we’ll post full patch preview and detail further changes we’ll want to make for 15.2.
