Clash brings the professional competitive experience to everyone

Lead Producer Leanne Loombe had a few words about the new Clash mode in League of Legends.

“I’m so excited that Clash mode is finally coming to League of Legends. This is an eSports tournament that takes place over three days, every two weeks. But Riot didn’t just design this mode to target top players in a highly competitive amateur environment, possibly a jump to pro. Clash is a game mode for everyone.”

LoL is a team sport and it’s best when played with friends and on a team you care about, just like any other sport. Currently in League of Legends, players have no reason to play with their team and there is nothing to encourage players to invite their friends to play with them. The game currently lacks motivation for players to team up, combine to play with friends.

That’s why Clash was created.

Clash will launch on May 25, but registration is open for players from now on. Players have 5 days to assemble their team. Then on Friday, 5 team members will have 30 minutes to lock the confirmation. Once locked, you can start competing in the 4-team draw on a single-match format. If you win, you continue to play the next day in the 8th draw, and if you continue to win, you will advance to the final round in the 16th day bracket.

The truth is that players can join any day of the three days of competition, but will always be in the 4-team draw on the first day of participation, the 8-team draw on the second, …So if you want to take a chance To enter the final round in the 16-team draw, players will have to start on Friday. If you are disqualified, you can continue on the next day, you will be placed in the branch you lost the previous day.

If you lose your first match, you’ll be sent to the consolation bracket, so even if you don’t make it to the final day, you can still get some extra experience and rewards.

The flexibility of allowing players to start on any day of the 3 days, have a chance to retry if they lose, or maybe win the 4-man draw and Friday and possibly go on to the 8-man draw on Sunday – this is a very important factor in attracting the majority of players. It gives the player a feeling of being unfettered and there’s always a way to come back if you’re more of a chance rather than a all-or-nothing.

Loombe also explained how Riot ensures that low ranked tiers, such as Bronze V, know the competition is for them as well as for 0.02% of Challenger players.

“Those are the things that we talked about a lot during the development of Clash, especially when it comes to the tournament and its experiences. A player’s default response may be “I’m not good enough to participate”, we’d love to make sure that’s not their first thought when it comes to Clash.

That’s why flexible systems are so important. The idea is to make the competition tough and make the players feel like they have something to lose. You’re sure to get into at least 2 matches thanks to the consolation system, and with the way the league offers it, you’ll get some of the feeling of a professional match if you watch the Finals. world and MSI.

Next, we will talk about the 7 minute polling phase, after everyone has locked the confirmation. You will see the opponent’s stats such as the most frequently used champions and champion mastery points. It helps to introduce some strategy in the league where you can ban certain threats or counter picks.

Loombe also confirmed that Tier IV will be the tier with the most players in Clash mode and will prioritize ensuring that they can play in the mode.

Tier IV is the lowest tier in Clash. Each team is ranked based on the average rank of each member in the Singles or Flex queue. The averaging will favor the more skilled players, so if your team has a gap, say, for example, 4 Bronze players and 1 Diamond player – the system will take that into account. remind. The system would make the match harder for Bronze players in that case but in the hope of preventing Diamond players from joining the team and killing other players because of the skill difference.

Loombe also points out that players new to the 4-player bracket have a much better chance of winning the trophy on day 1 (not taking into account individual skill, since it’s 1vs.4 vs 1vs. 8 on the second day). It can be seen that it is an easier aspect to control.

By the way, the other modes are not abandoned either. The idea of ​​Clash is that if you want to play in a team of all your friends, then this will be the best experience. But if you want to, for example, play Leona and have 12-3-12, ARAM is there for you.

The idea of ​​​​making the tournament experience suitable for all players from low to high skill is an act of awe. I’m curious to see what it’s going to be like when Friday comes and people actually start playing, but it’ll still have barriers to entry – which will keep this open tournament definite, especially especially with low ratings.

For example, the prerequisite to creating a team or joining a team will prevent new ghosts who may not know where the dragon is or what the champion is. Players are required to reach level 30 and must complete the promotion in at least one queue.

In addition, you must achieve Honor 2 or higher. The Honor system is one way that Riot motivates positive behavior in the game. Players are just starting out in Glory 2, so this requirement doesn’t require much experience, but above all, no violations of bad behavior. If you are lower than Honor 2 it means you have been penalized based on your behavior in the game.

Another step by Riot in its effort to eliminate the unhealthy is the solution for players who don’t have real-life friends. The developer has partnered with OP.GG, a third party that provides information and data of League of Legends players, allowing you to search for teammates.

One of the ways you can filter out groups of players by psychological classification: play for fun, casual, highly competitive until a must win. In theory so that you won’t be in a group of players who are determined to win at all costs, when you just want to play for fun.

The final requirement to join Clash is that you must link your LoL account with your phone number, this is to limit smurfing. In case you didn’t know, smurfing is a situation where experienced players use low-level accounts and they beat new players down. In Clash mode, smurfing happens the same way, but sometimes it’s also because the player wants to play with his friends on the lower levels and doesn’t want to push them along with the Higher Tier.

Loombe says they are very concerned about smurfing. It’s important because Clash is highly competitive and they don’t want that to be destroyed. Also can’t say that smurf will be eliminated completely, there will always be a way for it to survive, but what they want to do is prevent smurfing from happening in Clash.

Confirmation via SMS is one way to prevent it. Most people only have one phone number, according to Riot research. Some can get around using a relative’s number, but most players will link their phone number to the most used account.

To create an incentive to prevent players from smurfing, rewards in the higher ranks will always be more valuable, the purpose is to encourage players to play to their ability. Other systems have also played a part in wiping out smurfing, and if you get caught smurfing or cheating, all your rewards will be forfeited and you’ll be banned from Clash mode forever. .

If you want to participate in the tournament, you have to pay to buy tickets, this is to create a sense of resource investment in the game. Players can get or buy tickets in a variety of ways – completing quests, using blue essence or RP.

Tickets will cost about 1000 blue essence, which is estimated to be equivalent to the value of 1 player’s level. Riot’s changes to Runes and the reward system last year gave players a lot of blue essence that they didn’t know what to use.

Clash’s launch also coincides with the end of MSI – an international esports tournament with the top teams in each region. Take advantage of the excitement of the tournament to engage players and distract them with another event just a straight line apart. It is unknown if Clash will be paused once the Worlds tournament begins.

Loombe replied that Clash will be open throughout the season and there will be times when the mode will be paused, although she also did not mention what the Clash mode opening schedule will be when Worlds begins. nor to mention that Riot wants to have a connection between Worlds and Clash.

One thing that is uncertain is how Riot defines success for them? Do they want players to participate equally at skill tiers, or just a few specific tiers, or is it some other mysterious metric?

Loombe says that player engagement in Clash is one of their main goals. The other side is getting players involved in various seasons. Then it’s pretty obvious. Riot wants people to play Clash and play Clash over and over again.

She also added that they don’t expect the tiers to have the same number of players. Each region has great differences. For example, when testing on the Korean server, most of the teams are in tier I, while in Europe it’s tier IV. So there are bound to be huge differences and nothing out of the ordinary.

Source: PC Gamer