Contents
- 1 Cody “Riot Codebear” Germain is a competitive product manager for competitive gameplay and behavioral systems have made a bold statement about this year Clash 2021. In this article, we will hear what Cody has anything more to say about Clash this year.
- 2 2020 Recap
- 3 2021 Clash Priorities
- 4 Build-A-Team
- 5 Barrier to Entry Reduction
- 6 Skill Detection
Cody “Riot Codebear” Germain is a competitive product manager for competitive gameplay and behavioral systems have made a bold statement about this year Clash 2021. In this article, we will hear what Cody has anything more to say about Clash this year.
“Last year, we shared frequent updates about ongoing improvements to ranked, matchmaking, and behavioral systems. However, we’ve been relatively quiet on the Clash front. As we kick off a new season of Clash, we want to recap 2020 and share notes on improvements we’re targeting for 2021”.
Read more about last year Clash: here.
2020 Recap
2020 was the first year that Riot launched Clash in development. Though through the successful tournament, there were still problems that they still faced and had to fix.
“We dedicated the majority of 2020’s development to infrastructure improvements, sustainable tournament operations, and better tech to support Clash’s large number of the game starts”.
2021 Clash Priorities
Clash is still at the start of its journey to become the best competitive organized play experience for League players everywhere. This year, Riot is focusing on three of the biggest problems that reduce player interest and excitement for Clash.
- Provide Players better ways to find others to fill out their roster
- Reduce barriers to entry for Clash
- Identify and action smurfs earlier in Clash
Build-A-Team
Riot are launching a version 2 of their ‘Build-A-Team’ feature with the Zaun Cup this weekend. Here’s what it does:
- (v1) Solo players can mark themselves as Free Agents in the Clash tab and specify their primary and secondary roles.
- (v1) Team Captains can see available Free Agents when inviting players to join the team
- (v2) Free Agents have access to a Find a Team page where they’ll see teams looking for members and can apply to join
- Team Captains can mark their team as Closed if they’re not looking for applications
- (v2) Team Captains get a notification when Free Agents apply to the team and can see all pending applications on the invite screen
Barrier to Entry Reduction
“At the beginning of the year, we allowed players who hadn’t finished 2021 placements to compete in the Shadow Isles cup as long as they were ranked in Season 2020. Overall, it was a good step in allowing those that didn’t want to rush through their placements to participate, and we’re deciding to keep it around for future seasons so teams can play together in January without having to grind out 10 ranked matches first”.
Skill Detection
According to Riot, skill detection sentiment and fairness of matches derease by ~ 8%.
“Between high-MMR smurf accounts and a broadening of player participation, there are some key areas that we would like to dig into to see how far we can push improvements here.
Specifically, we’re exploring how to bring 2020’s Ranked matchmaking improvements into Clash. This means better skill detection for new accounts that have little ranked data beyond the 10 placement matches required to play Clash, as well as providing more clarity around match quality expectations to tournament participants”.
To sum up, Riot has very high expectation for this year Clash and hopefully it will be the best teamplay League of Legends has to offer.
“This is the year that diamond is not just a dream” – Riot Codebear
