In late 2013, Riot’s map team started to work full-tilt on updating Summoner’s Rift, the flagship map for League of Legends. It was an enormous task: not only did the team need to upgrade the map’s look and feel while preserving the bits that players loved, they needed to do it without increasing the minimum required hardware spec. Looking back, now more than a year after the launch of what we called the Summoner's Rift Update, or SRU, I think the team did an amazing job. The map is more vibrant and engaging, and it better supports the competitive integrity of the game.

League of Legends has more than 125 champions, each with their own set of unique animations. (One of my faves? Sion’s dance, shown below—just one of his 38 animations.) These movements help to bring the champions to life: from determined movement to powerful spell casting to tragic deaths. (I see that last one too often.) As we’ve continued to introduce and rework champions, the total amount of animation data has become a larger burden on resources like run-time memory, patch sizes, and storage space.

Greetings, skill-shot savvy summoners, Brian "Penrif" Bossé here to talk to you about some new technical underpinnings behind missiles. We've been rolling out a new implementation of missiles in the past few months (as mentioned in recent patch notes). If we did our jobs right, you didn't notice the change while playing.