Red Post Collection: Upgrading the Tribunal, Info on New Audio Engine, and more!

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• [ Updated ] Red Post Collection: Vi Dev Blog, Undocumented Pantheon Changes in 4.7, Fantasy LCS Live, and more!

Upgrading the Tribunal

Earlier today Lyte posted an announcement regarding the future of the Tribunal! For the time being, it will be put into maintenance mode for numerous upgrades. While it is being worked on Leaver Buster improvements plus an increased chat punishments and game ban thanks to another new system will be helping to fill that gap.

"With a number of upgrades planned for Tribunal, we wanted to share our vision for the system, what we’ve learned over the last few years and what changes we’ll be making moving forward. Tribunal is a powerful way for the community to decide what behaviors are acceptable during a League of Legends match. We’d like to take some time to upgrade the system with new features to ensure it’s an effective way of combating unsportsmanlike behavior in game. 

We’re going to temporarily put the Tribunal in maintenance mode while we upgrade the overall system to ensure players who deserve punishments receive them much faster than they currently do. We’ll also be adding the ability to review and reward players who exemplify the best sportsmanship in League of Legends. 

In the meantime, a new system will hand out restricted chat punishments and game bans rapidly so players will be banned or placed into restricted chat mode within a few hours of their negative behavior. Improvements to another system, LeaverBuster, will tune and upgrade its ability to further address ranked play, ensuring aggressive and severe consequences to maintain the competitive, sportsmanlike spirit of the mode. 

We’ll be rolling out additional experiments throughout the Tribunal upgrade and depending on the results of these experiments and the impact they have on players, we’ll incorporate these lessons into the upgraded Tribunal. 

To sum everything up: we want to spotlight and encourage positive behavior through the Tribunal as well as improve the speed of the system. We’re taking the Tribunal down to make these improvements and will use systems like Restricted Chat and an enhanced LeaverBuster while we upgrade Tribunal. Share your feedback and your questions below, and we’ll see you in game!"

OCE summoners can find a similar announcement about postponing the launch of the OCE Tribunal here.

About our future Audio Engine

BelligerentSwan, Sr. Sound Designer, is back with an update on the upcoming audio engine improvements and what we can expect to change!

"Hey guys, 

Back in the Patch 4.7 Notes, we mentioned a new audio engine is coming your way. Basically, we're transitioning over to a new tool to control the voices, music and sound effects in League of Legends. We're still a few patches away from switching over, but since we'll be shipping files out over the next few releases, we wanted to let you know what to expect once the new engine is activated. 

When we move to the new engine, there'll be subtle clarity improvements to the in-game sounds, proper support for Surround Sound and adjustments to how we implement stereo panning/imaging. You may also see slight performance gains with memory management. 

The biggest gains will come further down the road: our new engine opens the door for us to explore more ideas for how we create and use sound effects, voices and music in League of Legends, allowing us to create a more expansive and immersive experience. 

We've grown a lot the past few years and hope to be playing League of Legends many more years from now. This change makes our game more scalable for the long term. 

If you have any questions, we'll do our best to provide answers in this thread! 

Thanks!"

He continued:

"Yes! 

Edit: 

To explain this a bit further. The "Listener" (Think of this as a virtual microphone in game that helps determine which sounds should be played in which speaker), is currently very low to the ground. This is also where all the sounds play, which means all audio is essentially on the same plane.

With the new audio engine we have moved this upward quite a bit to give better stereo imaging and also allow players to utilize surround sound sound playback. 

2nd Edit: 

Just to clarify so I don't add to further confusion. (I'm really excited about this as we've been working on it for quite a while, and I may have mis-understood you're question before replying u̶n̶d̶e̶r̶s̶t̶a̶n̶d̶i̶n̶g̶ ̶i̶t̶ ).

In General the overall stereo imaging of the game should be a lot better. This won't fix every issue you run into with camera movements, but should address a lot of the Speaker to Speaker "Hopping" of sounds."

As for any system improvements with these changes, Wiksy added in:

"Very early testing shows that memory usage from Audio is reduced by something like 40-60MB. 

It's not huge, but could at least help with some low end machines."

Community Beta vs The Forums

In a thread asking if the "old" forum's days are numbered and if the community will have no choice than to use the community beta, Pendragon replied:

"I'd love to know more about what you don't like here. I think generally we'd like to get the boards to a place where the vast majority of players obviously prefer them to the forums, but we're really taking a "free market" approach to growth here.
Even inside of Riot - we're asking people to try these out but not forcing anyone to do so. Some people love them, some hate them and in either case we're getting as much feedback as we can to improve the system here. 

It's not likely that many feature improvements will be made to the forums. They're very expensive (on development time) to improve relative to the impact of the improvements. Something that takes a few hours to do here would take days or weeks over there. There will be times though when improving something here means it's a lot easier to improve something over there, so we'll absolutely do that. Finally replacing the question marks with summoner icons is a great example of that. 

If you have time could you please get more specific about things that you like and don't like here? When you say "layout" do you mean how comments nest, the colors used, the markdown system, not having bumps, etc? 

tl;dr We don't have hard-set plans to close General Discussion but that doesn't mean it won't ever happen. We are taking an "organic" approach to building following over here by trying to make this a great place for people to go."

He continued, replying to complaints about being bombarded with unappealing content:

"We're certainly planning on making ways for you to opt-out of viewing types of content. I think we can do a lot of stuff to make content more relevant to you over time so I'd encourage you to check back every now and then. 

Would be curious to see if you feel the same "no discussion" in this post as a comparable 

http://community.na.leagueoflegends.com/en/c/site-feedback/7qJ4ZGIk-weve-begun-247-moderation-hooray 

The format shouldn't necessarily lead to a lack of discussion, but can depending on who you give it to and how it's moderated."

 As for downvotes and other features to help curve the displayed content on the community beta, Pendragon commented:

"A downvote is a single data point - albeit a really visible one, but one thing that we're hoping to be able to accomplish here is a much greater level of individual relevance - even if it's going to be awhile before we can tackle some of those problems. 

A great example could be something like giving preference to posts that were made by people in your social circle, or people who you choose to follow. We can know that you prefer seeing only certain types of discussions because you can opt in/out of different groups.

his replies don't get their positioning changed because of downvotes

This isn't true actually! Right now red posts don't get any special treatment regarding positioning.

I'd have no problems with this system if it weren't for the fact that people are idiots and would screw it up. I'd be fine if people downvoted me for not liking how I said something, but I don't want to get downvoted just because I disagreed with them.

Are there particular discussions that you really enjoy on the forums? We love to see examples of those to see if we can do things to make sure that the quality of discussion can be preserved."

Brief Store Downtime due to 4.8 Preperations

Here's 2changz, NOC Technician, with info on the upcoming store downtime:

We will be taking the store down for a 1 hour period while we conduct some database work in preparation for the upcoming patch. Mystery gifting may be down for a longer period, as long as a couple of days please refer to the in-game ticker message to see if this is the case. 

Apologies on the inconvenience, we'll do everything we can to complete this work as quickly as possible. 

Thank you!