Ask Riot

Ask a question about League or Riot, and we’ll try to answer it. Answers go live every other Thursday at 1:30 pm (PT)

What do you want to know?

Something went wrong. Try asking again.

Thank you for submitting a question!

Next Article

Ping and a Stolen Key

Checking ping in-client, grammar, and where Zoe’s key came from.

Welcome to Ask Riot! Have a question?

This weeks, it’s Zoe’s mysterious key, checking your ping in-client, and grammar.

Q

Zoe has a key on her belt, and I’m wondering what the key opens? Zoe can create and travel through portals… what does she use the key for?

A

When designing Zoe, we tried to communicate that she travels all over—not just within Runeterra but to whatever lies beyond. We also wanted to show that she’s so powerful that what might be considered an incredibly rare and wondrous item to your average Joe Valoran is a mere curio for her. This Moon Stone? Oh, it just sparkles nicely. One of Bard’s chimes? It makes a great sound! The key Zoe carries around was actually “borrowed” from another champion; you’ll notice it’s missing from his updated splash art.

As to what it opens? Probably best we never find out…

Concept Artist, Champions
Q

Do you have plans to add a way to see ping on the client itself? This would help a lot for those who suffer from lag/disconnects.

A

It’s clear players want to be able to see what their ping is going to be (at least roughly) before going into game. We can’t give a timeline or firm commitment on when it will happen, but we are looking at how we might bring this feature to the new client. In the meantime, we’ll share some context about why this isn’t as straight-forward as it may seem.

We may have (to pick a rough number) 1000 game servers in a particular region, and you don’t know which server your game is on until the end of champ select. A ping needs a destination, so which server should your ping go to? Let’s say that we either picked a random game server or had some other host sitting alongside the game servers that we could send a packet to: There are a lot of routers (hopefully not too many) between you and the game servers that we don’t control. How they shape or affect game traffic can impact your in-game latency, and we’d want to make sure any number we showed you was close enough that you didn’t get a false sense of security. We also want to be sure that it’s not just a short sequence of ping packets, but something you can trust to get an overall idea of the current health of your connection to our servers.

That being said, I don’t want to overstate the problem. All of the obstacles are solvable and you should expect to hear more from us on this in 2018.

Engineering Leadership
Q

When you choose a question to answer, do you choose only among the correctly written or do u chooz teh mst intrestin and rewrite it with grammatical accuracy?

A

here at rito games we hold a high standard of grammar and every single person here is amazing at grammer & speling

But really, having perfect spelling and grammar doesn’t matter when we’re looking through Ask Riot questions—when someone asks “when delete yasuo,” we know what they’re saying. Plus, a lot of the questions are from different regions and are auto-translated into English, which can make the grammar and spelling really wonky. If a question is too confusing, we’ll clean it up a bit so it’s easier to understand, but we generally try to leave the questions as they were asked.

tl;dr: Grammar doesn’t matter.

Edditorial Riter

Have a question? Click on the button below, sign into your League account, and ask away.

We’ll do our best to read every question, but we can’t guarantee they’ll all get answers. Some questions may already be answered elsewhere, and some won’t be right for Ask Riot. This isn’t the best place to announce new features, for example, and we might skip conversations on issues we’ve talked about in depth before (though we can clarify individual points).

We are listening, though, so keep asking. We’ll make sure your questions are heard by the Rioters working on the stuff you’re curious about.

Next Article

Religion and Leblanc