Devlog #17

League & Team Expansion

We have expanded the in-game leagues and teams to a total of 6 leagues — Korea, China, Europe, North America, Japan, and South America — featuring 120 teams.

Here is the full list of the newly added team logos.

Along with this, we have adjusted the overall skill level of team rosters and improved the stat-generation algorithm for players.

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Players with similar overall strength will now show more diverse distributions of strengths and weaknesses. You may see players who are evenly skilled across the board, players who excel at some aspects but fall short in others, or players who possess exceptional physical abilities but extremely low mental attributes. We believe this will make building your own roster more fun and meaningful.

Map Changes

We are making gradual adjustments to the overall structure of the map. These changes are not final yet, but we are working to reduce the excessive density of walls and bushes compared to how often they were actually useful in gameplay.

Addition of Inner Towers

As you can see in the image above, each lane now has an additional inner tower. Previously, in an effort to keep the average match duration short, each lane had only a single tower, and tower rewards were set high so that games would progress quickly.

However, based on the feedback we received from the demo, many players felt that losing even a single objective resulted in an excessively large disadvantage, which caused frustration. To address this, we decided to add inner towers. With the new structure, losing the first tower now creates less lane pressure, and because tower rewards have been reduced, losing one or even two towers no longer instantly snowballs the game.

New Bottom-lane Objective: Serpen

We have also added a new objective to the bottom side of the map. Serpen appears at the 2-minute mark and respawns every 2 minutes after being slain. When defeated, it grants the killing team a permanent stat-boosting buff. Meanwhile, Morgard no longer provides stat buffs and instead only empowers minions.

With changes to early-game durability and reduced kill rewards, the frequency of meaningful early fights decreased, which made pre-Morgard gameplay feel less exciting. The large-scale fights that occur around contesting Serpen help address this issue and bring back more intense early-game action.

Match Duration

As a result of these changes, the average match duration has increased from around 7 minutes to approximately 9 minutes. We will continue monitoring this, but as long as the gameplay remains engaging and immersive, slightly longer matches should not be a problem.

Ultimate Abilities

We are also working on the ultimate ability system for champions. Each champion gains access to their ultimate at level 5, and ultimates are designed to further emphasize the unique traits of each champion. While there is still much work left on the AI logic for using ultimates effectively, we aim to make ultimates a key part of champion identity, team composition, and strategy.

Match Engine Improvements

After writing the last dev log, we spent a lot of time thinking about what to prioritize next. There is still a lot of work to be done on team management, transfers, and player administration, and we know many players are looking forward to those features.

However, we concluded that refining the match engine to a fully satisfying level must be our top priority. No matter how well the management systems are developed, if the underlying match engine does not feel good, the management experience becomes meaningless.

As a coach, your intended tactics must be properly reflected in the match, you must be able to identify which player stats matter for which strategy, and you must be able to build your roster accordingly. If the match engine fails to support this, the foundation of the entire management gameplay falls apart. For this reason, bringing the match engine to at least the minimum quality we envision is our highest priority.

Of course, this is extremely challenging work. Despite the significant time and effort we are investing, there are still many aspects that need improvement. Even if we eventually reach a point where we feel satisfied with the match engine, there may still be differences between our internal evaluation and the expectations of our players.

Official Discord

To bridge the gap between our perspective as developers and the community’s perspective, and to receive feedback more actively, we have decided to open an official Discord server!

Through this Discord, we plan to conduct closed playtests during development and gather more active feedback before launching in Early Access. We look forward to your participation!

Join the official Discord: https://discord.gg/TKxAz2AJSp

That’s it for this dev log. Thank you for reading!