League of Legends' Clash Mode Improving to Prevent Smurfing, Add Clarity

Riot Games recently held an open beta for League of Legends' Clash mode and is now looking to improve the feature based on players' feedback.

While Clash tests have been held on the PBE on more than one occasion, the latest beta welcomed players on live servers as well. According to a post on the League of Legends boards from Riot Draggles, over 100,000 players participated in the beta and offered their opinions on areas that could be improved.

"We're so glad so many of you had a great time playing Clash - the new ways you're thinking about pick/ban, practicing specific comps, map rotations and objective control," Riot Draggles said to the players who participated in the Clash beta. "It warmed our lil' macro-loving hearts. We knew some things wouldn't quite hit the bar yet. We are still in beta! Don't forget you'll have a survey in your email to share more feedback soon."

Among all the issues that players identified, one of the first was that navigating the Clash menus was confusing at times. Without all the animations in place every time and some tooltips leaving players unclear about what was going on, Riot said that it's looking to improve these tooltips and UI to add more clarity.

"We'll be implementing better error messaging, tooltips, and cleaning up some of the errors you probably saw," Riot Draggles said. "We'll make sure you have a way to navigate Clash before entering a tournament to see where you go after each win. We'll also spell 'ineligible' correctly."

And then there's smurfing, a problem that affects games inside and outside of the Clash mode. When there are prized on the lines in the teams are even more important than usual, smurfing can put a serious damper on Clash. Riot Draggles first pointed out that just because your team is getting blasted, it doesn't mean that you were up against smurfs. Sometimes you just lose, and lose badly. But for those who did smurf in this recent beta, action has already been taken with Riot planning on taking more precautions in the future to avoid the issue.

"We've taken immediate action on those accounts, starting with removing all earned Clash rewards," Riot Draggles said regarding the Clash winners who were verifiable smurfs. "For launch, we will have more robust processes in place to discourage smurfing."

Those capsules and included loot that you earn at the end of the Clash competitions also felt pretty rewarding, according to Riot's feedback, but the rewards are also being improved to clarify exactly how they work.

"We'll be adding some more information around when exactly you can expect to receive your capsule (hint: it's when you lose out of a bracket) and some better graphics to differentiate between 1-ticket and 5-ticket entries. We'll publish full loot tables for Clash at launch, too, so you know what you're fighting for."

The full 10-point post addressed much more, so give it a look here if you're interested in how Clash is changing.