Yone, League’s newest champion, will be disabled for the entirety of the 2020 regional playoffs and World Championship, LEC commissioner Maximillian Peter Schmidt announced. The reasons for this decision are based purely on the rules and regulations, according to Schmidt.
Rule 7.4.3 in the official ruleset says “champions which have not been available on the live servers for more than one week will be automatically restricted.” While this doesn’t strictly apply to Yone, the rule goes on to say that champions “released on the patch utilized during playoffs” will also be restricted, even if that patch is also used during the regular season.
Despite this, Lillia, who was released just two weeks prior to Yone, will be available in the playoffs. This is due to the time frame and cutoff dates for each of the champions. Lillia was released on July 22 with Patch 10.15, while Yone came out on Aug. 6 with Patch 10.16.
The playoffs, unlike the regular season, are played on Patch 10.16 but will include the newly added Patch 10.17 bug fix to Lux, which addressed the issue around the triple-shield of her Prismatic Barrier. This means the playoffs will almost certainly feature certain champion pick priorities with nerfs to Ashe, Sett, Syndra, and Volibear, and buffs to Hecarim, Rakan, and Ziggs.
Even though Riot said that it appears Lillia and Yone are better balanced than some previous releases, like Sett and Aphelios. While they still might need more tweaks down the line, both champions appear to be in a healthy state.
Lillia has exceeded Riot’s expectations of a balanced champion at release, having benefited from an effective “wait and see approach.” Since she’s a “pretty nuanced and skillful champion,” according to Scruffy, players needed more time to learn her ability kit. While she might need slight buffs or nerfs in the long run, Riot believes her launch was “ideal.”
Similarly, Riot is “happy so far” with Yone’s effect on the League meta.
“Time will tell if we need to do more, but we’re generally seeing healthy patterns from Yone with the counterplay we intended (fair counterplay can be challenging to design correctly for the assassin class),” Scruffy said.
Riot had previously made a commitment to “improve launch balance” after many new releases dominated the meta. Senna, Aphelios, and Sett instantly became pick-or-ban champions and had to be nerfed many times before reaching a semi-balanced state.
In an attempt to stop this pattern, Riot’s focus became a “long term balanced target.” So new champions might release with subpar win rates that “slowly climb” as players get used to them, like in Lillia’s case. Riot devs’ other strategy is for faster and stronger follow-ups if a champion is slightly overtuned, like in Yone’s case.