This week it’s Anivia design insights and a newbie’s guide to ranked borders. Also, Draven.
Which came first: Anivia, or the egg?
Anivia came first.
Anivia was the first champion I worked on at Riot, back when I was an intern. I had only been at the company a week by that time, but due to the rapid rate of champions we needed to put out I was asked to get her into a design-locked state in just two weeks. While Guinsoo had done an initial pass on her design, there was a lot of work that was needed, and the direction I wanted to take her demanded a bunch of new tech as well. She was the first time we attempted to have multi-stage spells (her Q), and the idea of a toggleable ult that drained mana was an entirely new idea in the game at the time. Polymorphing into an egg was basically untested tech, and initial implementations of it were incredibly brittle. In particular at the time “Cleanse” would remove all negative debuffs from a character, and was the bane of my existence.
In one playtest I remember casting cleanse would permanently remove the tracking buff I used to check whether you could egg again or not, rendering the player immortal. Fixing that bug causes another issue where the player would only egg once, but when they turned back into Anivia they had no spells at all. Fixing that bug caused an issue where the player would stay an egg forever but still be able to move and cast spells as normal, and my attempt at fixing that bug made the passive work, but as soon as you died you would respawn as an egg who could move and cast spells. Plus you were immortal.
You don’t know fear until you are being chased around Summoner’s rift by an immortal egg with infinite mana, an on-demand stun, and a wall spell that can and would teleport you to unknown locations on the map if you got hit in just the right way.
Well, I am a newbie in LoL, and sometimes in matches I come across players in the loading screen that have different effects around the image of a champion. For example: a golden border around an image of Tristana. I wonder what it is, and how to achieve it? Note: I am not referring to the symbol of the level of honor.
Hiya!
Those outlines around champs in the loading screen are ranked borders, and they represent the final rank a person reached during the previous season of League.
You can grab one for yourself by playing ranked games, which you can do anytime once you’re level 30 and own twenty champions. After you play ten ranked games, you’ll be placed in a division. If you keep playing and winning ranked games, you’ll earn points (known as LP) and climb through the tiers.
You’ll receive a border as long as you’re ranked silver or higher when the season ends, which is usually towards the end of the calendar year. The tiers go in this order:
Bronze → Silver → Gold → Platinum → Diamond → Masters → Challenger
So that Tristana you saw with the golden border? That person was gold at the end of last season.
tl;dr: Those are ranked borders, and you can earn one by reaching silver or higher in ranked before the season ends.
Also, welcome to League, and good luck out there : )
Why is Draven so perfect?
Draven picked up perfection like it was take-out. Only he had it delivered. With both buffs. By the enemy jungler.
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