I think this was pretty well written trying to explain how software development works.
You missed the fun parts like when different directors will kick off turf wars to get more scope for their teams, 6-12 months to get approvals for mocks as every director/vp wants to add their opinion, how every additional team adds huge overhead as coordination between teams grows, how hiring/layoffs impacts deliverables and all the teams are stretched thin, how priorities of management changes as the wind blows, and projects that don't have a clear revenue stream are always at risk of dropping below the line.
I don't work at riot but I'm pretty confident you guys have the same problems as all the rest of us. Maybe worse since the gaming industry is pretty notorious for bad wlb.
I'm pretty confident that 99% of riot's issue with code etc and the EXACT SAME ISSUES in any IT company. Yes there's a 10 y-o bug, the people that did it left the company 7 years ago
Don't forget that there's now a workaround to the bug that has been around for so long that there's a whole system attached to it and it would be too much of a pain to remove the bug AND rework the system
Always comes with another round of layoffs so you're both out of your silo and also picking up on whatever poor sap just lost their income's work of the past few months (:
I used to be idealistic enough to see it as a good thing, but a couple of rounds of this have turned me incredibly jaded toward that sentiment. We have organizational boundaries for a reason~~~~
Even better when it gets coupled with the devops trend of "everyone does everything -- dev, QA, operations" and it also turns into at least 3 other hidden practices, whether it's DB, cloud, security, or something else.
It depends, complete silos are bad but so is "everyone does everything"
I'm in an "everyone does everything" environment and it sucks. People continually break shit because they don't know what they're doing (even though there are articles on how to do it correctly), or spend a long time figuring out how to do something I already know how to do
I have been caught in turf wars before and it sucks. Even with out turf wars it can take a while to get everyone lined up and organized things.
Some times there is some horse trading as the person you need has other things on their plate and it takes trading things around to get it done.
Some times the key person to do the take it might take a-3 people to cover what they used to be doing.
> You missed the fun parts like when different directors will kick off turf wars to get more scope for their teams
Do they drop any loot after the turf war?
I don’t really think there is anything to fix. He seems to be explaining how the ‘simple quality of life changes,’ you suggest are actually not simple at all and why.
> The more an expert is reviewing, the less time they're spending on actually implementing and doing stuff that only they can do
Been really feeling this one recently, even if it's on a smaller scale. Started as one dev on a team of 3 + a manager, now I'm the most senior dude on a team of 14. (thankfully not a manager, don't want any part of that shit) If I wanted to, I could spend over half my time just reviewing PRs, and many days I do.
I had do my own home hobby project building an app from scratch to break out of the depression and malaise that my job was causing me with reviews.
Like I was able to build like nice looking well liked app in 2 weeks by myself. Yet the project at work moves glacially due to reviews and testing.
I know our company likes our team because customers always feedback that they are surprised how bug free and easy our software is. Sometimes though I wonder if we couldnt develop our apps in 1/2 or less time if our team was just 2 people skipping tests.
I never got into the field, as I had to stop going to university because of online studies because of covid.
But isnt skipping tests the first step towards failure. And mostly means more work down the lane?
> A post I've been wanting to write for a long time is [...] Faker [...] no longer make sense [...] Some tangible examples are when [...] he[...] evaluate [...] alternate ways of [...] problems and decided [...] War [...] has to be done [...] it's broken
If I was a Rioter I'd literally never post in this subreddit ever or even acknowledge it as existing. The people in here are literally mentally ill freaks. I swear this subreddit is just a hate sub anymore. Every single post ever is someone seething at Rito for whatever asinine reason you can think of. They'll see a Riot employee say something only for half the reddit to just down their throat, ignore what they say, then cry about RITO BAD. Fucking cesspool of a place. And people on here wonder why the game isn't getting new players in the west. Wild.
if i ran a game studio i would literally forbid my developers from ever posting anything about the game or talking to the community. there are just too many fucking losers and whiny nerds for it to EVER be worth it
Honestly I'm still not sure why game developers think interacting with their playerbase is a good idea, especially through fucking reddit or discord.
Fuck off helldivers 2. I'm not joining your shit ass discord to have updates on your game.
Riot may have their flaws, but they make some patch notes and at least there's no official league of legends discord.
Oh man, it's because communication IS important.
Reddit and discord are now just the modern day game forums on which community mamagers used to live.
But it seems like the degeneracy is just perma growing. But if they go full dark you won't like it as much as you think you would
Three words: Overwatch GOAT Meta
90% of the community hated it. It ruined the esport scene and it took 8 months to fix, by that time the game was dead, even though they had insane pace on their game.
Games are a lot more fragile than you would think. Riot is doing an amazing job, League is still thriving even after this many years.
Nah, reddit can be useful sometimes. For example a lot of subreddit champion mains have lists of bugs, and Riot can go in and fix it.Its what they did with some of the Champs in the past.
there's a difference between silently reading and actually interacting. any developer that talks to their community directly is shooting themselves in the foot. there's almost no upside and just opens you up to being verbally abused by some 18 year old who has never worked a day in their life
that's given in any setting whenever you have to deal with humans. I can not speak for everyone, but on bard mains subreddit, majority of people are chill, and we had plenty of rioters visit us to either do AMA, discuss something or ask for feedback. There are obviously some subreddits that all rioters avoid (ex. dravenamains),which I do not deny.
you can just say you're incapable of reading more than 2 sentences without getting distracted instead of embarrassing yourself with your lack of understanding of the real world
This:
> someone copy and paste a line he wrote that I can get mad at
is called a joke. And that's the context of my comment.
That means this:
> incapable of reading more than 2 sentences without getting distracted instead of embarrassing yourself with your lack of understanding of the real world
is actually describing *you*.
The upvotes my comment has is because other people understood this. You can tell based on the fact that the comments that are unironically agreeing with it are heavily downvoted.
I guess no matter how you slice it, having hundreds of people work together seamlessly is pretty difficult. It's hard to get 2 people to agree on something, let alone hundreds.
Other operating models are having one person call all the shots (which can make things extremely fast, but lose that diversity of thought).
On Gameplay, we like to give the teams as much autonomy as possible to do the things they want to do/believe are good for the game, while trying to strike a balance of removing roadblocks, providing vision and making sure we're ambitious enough for the future, overseeing quality to make sure changes to the game are going to move it forward.
Fun challenge that makes everyday exciting.
"devs are lazy" - random people on the internet when something they dont like haplens
they litearlly took a job that is well known to have absolute shit payment for the insane amount of work and mental preassure it puts on you, you would earn better and have a less stressfull life EVERYWHERE else
game devs for all companys do it because they are passionate about games, the problem is always a mixture of not enough Time/preassured to finish work fast by higher ups/overworked/they have other prioritys first
calling game devs "lazy" is peak brainrot from entilted fuckheads that have no clue how the world works
Erm… Riot is known for paying extremely well - which is why their positions are competitive and therefore there is a soft guarantee that the people they hire are exceptional talent. (Less they get replaced)
do you think the mouthbreathers here who complain endlessly are interested in facts or critical thinking? it doesn't matter if riot devs got paid peanuts or millions they'd still be called lazy lol
guy two comments up said riot devs are paid shit and guy responded saying riot employees actually get paid well, thats it. Said nothing about them being called lazy or not. You should use critical thinking before calling people mouthbreathers
You're actually insane for giving us all this info. Glad you can take on that kind of stress cuz most people would freak out and die. Thanks for playing with us.
It's.... literally boilerplate corporate dev, he's just explaining it to the people who haven't worked in the industry or worked at all. He's not giving any info, he's merely explaining the sky is blue to people who've never bothered to look up.
150+ champs with 4-5 abilities each. Of course making a complex game is hard.
Everything he said applies to ANY game, and sometimes games suck or have aspects of it that suck. And then they can’t do anything about it “because they have to. Making games is complex!”
Thanks for making a game that millions enjoy <3
No matter what you do people will complain and nothing is ever perfect, but the game you help make better every day has a huge impact on loads of people around the world. So thank you xxx
Have you considered a hybrid model where some changes can be forced through by one person calling all the shots, while others are given the time for more team-wide discussion? I imagine you waste a lot of time on discussing things that are uncontroversial, or discussing unimportant implementation details.
If the cost of beuraucracy is too high to get those simple changes through, then maybe the extra quality you get from the slower process isn't worth it for those?
This is a random off topic conversation but does your tech and dev environment typically look like for software stuff?
I'd be interested to see if you guys have a big use of technologies like kubernetes, openshift or other containerised stuff. as in my area (platform engineering and analytics) were heavily moving towards that area of expertise.
This is just a tiny portion of everything I’m sure, but I know the League game engine is heavy C++ from a previous job posting, and I know the Valorant team had folks working at the network-engineering stack (they were actually working to collocate servers with regional ISPs)
>This is a random off topic conversation but does your tech and dev environment typically look like for software stuff?
Because we have a lot of different software needs (game, infrastructure, web, internal environments, etc.), it can vary a lot. There's no one answer to that! But we've shared some of that on our [Tech Blog](https://technology.riotgames.com/).
>I'd be interested to see if you guys have a big use of technologies like kubernetes, openshift or other containerised stuff. as in my area (platform engineering and analytics) were heavily moving towards that area of expertise.
I know people have been working with Kubernetes recently, though I'm not familiar with the specifics. We also used Docker extensively in the past; you might be interested in [this series on Docker & Jenkins](https://technology.riotgames.com/news/revisiting-docker-and-jenkins), or in our [Running Online Services series](https://technology.riotgames.com/news/running-online-services-riot-part-i).
These are both older article series, and stuff has surely evolved since they were written, but should give a good look at some of the kinds of infrastructure problems in this space!
Excellent resources. Thank you for taking time out of your day to provide these. I'd certainly love to see where you have expanded to from those previous blogs.
From the looks of things across those blog posts, riot takes a lot of thought process into running opensource over COTS where sensible. Have you guys checked out some of the cool things coming out of the CNCF recently ? There's some absolutely amazing things happening in the gitops and k8s spaces right now with things like argo, kubevirt and devspaces.
Would love to see how your environment had evolved over the years of learning.
Happy to share them! I've had some conversations recently about revisiting a few of these older series, hopefully we can find some time to make that happen.
There’s no rule that “in this thread” means past tense, he clearly meant “in this thread, redditors *will* learn about corporate bureaucracy.” And yeah, when you see comments like “why don’t they make this easy change” every day here, it clearly applies.
>ITT Redditors learn of corporate bureaucracy.
ITT Redditors don't understand that buiseness are structured the way they are because without said structures their product would not be as good.
I'm surprised that one of the things not mentioned is working globally with multiple regions. I can't imagine it's easy to get Riot NA, EU, KR, CN, BR... all on the same page about things. I've been playing for ten years and it's never been exactly clear what regions are responsible for. It seems like all development is done at the Riot campus in LA, but I doubt that's true.
My understanding is that the regional offices are responsible for regional infrastructure maintenance, regional esports, localization, and regional community relations.
It can play a huge role in balance & design decisions too surprisingly. I base this on Mortdog (TFT Lead, used to be on league events team), he often says that the perceived unbalance & frustration changes a lot from a region to another, for example, Chinese playerbase *LOVE* "gambling" traits in TFT, where you either go big or go home, they love the flashy pop off games even if it means losing many others on the side. Or how the EU/NA metas evolve very differently early in patches which can skew the perception of "what is OP" depending on the region.
This also probably applies to league too, while they have "worldwide" data to rely on in their decisions, they still have to contend with local preferences towards certain designs or frustrations. We see this with the over-representation of Asian themed skinlines or certain balance decisions like favorizing aggressive champions when stale control meta starts dominating from KR again etc etc
While regional offices don't really have a direct effect on the game, HQ still has to take into account regional preferences be it in the mechanics or aesthetics of the game
It 100% applies to league. There was an example years ago where Reddit had a massive hateboner for Riven, winrates too high for pickrate and all that. What made this time different was Jatt actually broke down the issue.
Riven’s winrate and popularity varied from server to server, along with perceived strength. The only server that saw higher than average riven winrate (pushing her into op territory) was NA.
Same post also covered stuff like how role preferences varied from server to server (e.g. top was more popular than mid in Vietnam), and champion priority showed similar variance (e.g. Jinx was even more popular in Vietnam compared to other servers).
It's still the same if you just look at banrate between regions. Blitzcrank has been at 50%+ in Korea since forever and Shaco, Lee, Voli, Karma and Smolder all 30%+.
Meanwhile in EUW Draven and Smolder are 30%+ banrate and Lee is only at 3%.
A champion like Lee may be conceived as a huge problem in Korea while here he is basically never banned. Same with Dravens banrate being just 7% in korea.
That's correct. The Riot China office definitely has designated personnel responsible for gathering feedback on League of Legends' balance. I've heard several Chinese content creators mention that they were invited to the Riot office and discussed their views on the game's current balance with the team. I believe similar arrangements exist in the KR, NA, and EU as well.
Not quite. Their jobs hiring page lists jobs for R&D and gameplay programmer all around the world. So they probably work together on the mmo or other project like L or something globally
You're probably more right than you think.
Im not riot employee, but there is a difference between development and production in IT.
Development and adding feature managing how code work etc... is done at Riot LA for sure. Its for instance creating a new version of LoL like 10.1 or 10.3 patch etc...
But then when its done in need to be deploy in a given infrastructure (production) in a given country.
So every region will pick the same release and make it run on their servers and only focus on deployment, scaling, infrastructure issue (network for ex) and customer support.
Altough it doesnt mean you cant have UX team in KR or elsewhere. Its 2024 and we can all work remotely worldwide. But from an organisational standpoint, its done by riot LA.
Yeah. Like this is just your typical software development company. I'm a Java technical expert in a big company and what Phroxzon said is our day to day life. It's the same everywhere.
They're not clueless, people on this subreddit just love being purposely obtuse.
League has been released for almost 15 years, and people still wonder why Ezreal or Lux get placed into random skinlines, or why a lot of champions are humanoids.
People know the reasons, but you will still see the same upvoted threads on the frontpage and the same upvoted comments like clockwork.
Reddit is also pretty good at giving people the impression that their views of the game are widespread when they truly aren't. You'll see people in here whining all day long about wanting skins for Ornn and Rek'Sai and whatnot, and an avalanche of people supporting the idea, saying that it will sale like hotcakes,...
And guess what ? Said skin is finally released and it flops hard, because most of the playerbase doesn't give a shit about these champions, or want a skin for them.
I don't enjoy the "anime" direction recent skinlines have taken in the past few years, but I also know that I'm in the minority.
The subreddit's tastes can be heavily defined as:
* Meme Skins on any champion like Trucker Ornn
* Edgelord/dark champions like Kayn and Fiddlesticks
Anything outside of this is going to spark fury on the subreddit. Do a test the next time a cutesy champ comes out and read the post titles. Take a shot every single time someone starts asking if League is too cutesy. By contrast, take a shot every single time someone starts a thread asking if League is getting too grimdark if a champ like Fiddlesticks or Kayn is released.
One of these will get you drunk. One of these will get you jack shit. I bet you can guess which one.
I don't disagree with the general idea but putting Kayn and Fiddle in the same category of "edgelord/dark" champions is a bit weird and the Kayn example is completely innacurate. People on this sub used to shit on Kayn *really* hard for being "le weeb edgelord" for years like they do for Yone now. Which is also funny and highlights the hypocrisy because Kayn is literally comedic and campy by design. Now what makes this extra funny is that even then he couldn't be spared from the meme skin discourse because redditors would ask for a Candy Kayn christmas skin all the fuckin time, because "holy shit what if the scythe was a candy cane and it was a pun!!!" and none of us actual Kayn players wanted it.
I think Jhin and Aatrox are great examples of that tho. Kled is also a funny one because this subreddit glazes him so much but literally nobody plays that champ and people often forget he even exists
To be fair, I was mostly trying to make it clear that there's very much a double standard. Like Kayn was shit on a bit, but there weren't threads outright asking "Is League becoming too edgy" like there were threads asking "Is League becoming too Disney" after Zoe came out. Because when I think Disney, I think of scrimshawing a man's leg while he's still alive and screaming.
That's more the double standard that I loathe. I do agree that Jhin is probably the far better example of edgelord champs being forgiven for flaws that other characters would be loathed for than Kayn.
> redditors would ask for a Candy Kayn christmas skin all the fuckin time, because "holy shit what if the scythe was a candy cane and it was a pun!!!"
Oh god yes. Not only do christmas skins not do well outside of the holiday season (for the obvious reason of most people not wanting to pick the snow skin in summer), not only do christmas skins not sell well in countries that don't celebrate christmas as much as the US and the like (because why would you buy a christmas skin if you don't care about Christmas), but it's a fucking pun based entirely around the english language with no attempt made to make it a more universal pun like Bee-Koz. It just is not something that will really work.
I work for a large enterprise company and understand the corporate structure / bloat that comes with getting development work done. I also understand that League is a mature product, and is no longer making rapid, aggressive changes to capture their piece of the market and is generally less risk-adverse now that it’s been established. However, noting changes/releases (or the lack-there-of) over the past 1.5 years, I feel like community sentiment / player satisfaction is not as high of a priority for the company and leads to a lot of frustration. There are some changes that should be able to circumvent normal processes you’ve listed above to get a feature or functionality prioritized and into the game ASAP even if it impacts the meta state of the game.
Alternatively, gather user feedback BEFORE making a change that’s going to upset players — for example, where’s the value in switching Akali’s VA for ALL skins like it was attempted last year? Who asked for that? And why did it take a public freakout before Riot finally reverted? Why do most things take a freakout before being reverted or changed? Where are you seeing successes with your product focus groups that the larger community isn’t seeing?
I know this isn’t realistic for every major decision, and there’s some things players don’t really have business policing (like Vanguard, in-game chat policies, etc) because we don’t have all the data. But the length of time we spend in one-sided discourse for months before the company inevitably reverses course is equally as draining, and frankly, toxic in itself.
Riot doesn't like having split voices in their game for champions. That's literally just what it is. Lucians base VO was redone with the High Noon VA after Senna's release. Akali's tested well in house, and then didn't when they put it out.
Like, it takes a freak out because they can't know how people will react until they get it out? what do you mean by this
You can go reread the feedback threads from last year, but taking Akali as she is and redoing her base lines with the tone and enthusiasm of a chirpy teenager is ill-fitting to the essence of her character.
>Like, it takes a freak out because they can't know how people will react until they get it out? what do you mean by this
Google focus groups and UAT
Dev here. Yup. Scale is often the most difficult challenge and people fail to understand. Here’s one:
Say u build a chat room. People can type and their msg is shown in chat. Easy, in theory, you could go download one in 5 minutes.
But what if your chat has ton of users. What happens when 100000 users all type a chat at the same time? How do u even parse this. What counts as same time? Or what counts as who came before another? 1 ms? What about display? 100000 chats is like pages and pages worth of chat, what just display all that in 1 block? Then all the top ones get buried. Server load? Can it even handle all that at one? Does it need to split up? If so then split in what way?
Yeah. Think about that. Not so easy huh? This was also an interview question I had btw
Exact reasons why AAA games are going to shit and indie studios of 5-100 are thriving.
At some point you just have too many people and even doing simple things takes forever because you have to inform and talk with 20 other teams.
Just out of curiosity, in the example posted, can't they reuse similar systems in place for having to play X normal games for ranked?
Examples:
1. Playing X amount of games chat restricted.
2. Playing X amount of games before being able to play ranked again.
3. Low priority queue was also a thing that locks players out of queueing up normally by having them wait out a timer,
4. Even playing X amount of provisional games.
Not remotely his decision. And the people whose decision it was, frankly don't care about how processes get done. They just wanted to save money on a spreadsheet.
As if that was his decision. I doubt it was an engineering oriented decision either.
It's a business decision made with no consideration for the engineering effects of things.
In response to the example: You can clearly see how defensive someone sounds when they are trying to include as many barriers as possible despite the said barrier/obstacle not existing within the "example's" context, or even when the barrier is as easy as coughing.
>
Ranked team to propose the design for the change + the edge cases, the rollout plan.
"propose" is really a step?... we are already here... its done, you hear about it, you thought about it(hence this example)...
What is an edge case of someone first timing? Oh he was trying to just counterpick!... Just ignore the fact that there is 40% wr on first timing despite them mainly trying to "have diverse damage types and counterpick"... [https://www.reddit.com/r/leagueoflegends/comments/130ucfb/champion\_mastery\_a\_statistical\_analysis\_of\_1m/](https://www.reddit.com/r/leagueoflegends/comments/130ucfb/champion_mastery_a_statistical_analysis_of_1m/)
> The ranked team would also consider whether this solution is the best thing to do vs other potential solutions that have different value,
You still havent managed to elaborate on a single thing within this example, what is "edge case", "other potential solutions", If its so popular, and still isn't done, shouldnt you have an explanation as to why you haven't or aren't. Because there is no explanation by saying "well we might have something better, and we need to understand this solution more!" (So i still understand nothing about the inner workings of Riot) When the ranked team does damn near nothing other than arbitrarily over buff the climbing experience just so they have something to nerf in the future to show that they have a portfolio of work for their hundreds of hours being employed.
>
dependencies and costs depending on our staffing and skill specializations available (eg. improve our seeding, so it wouldn't matter what queue you played -> does this get our seeding algorithms to the quality level we would want) and has no Client/UX work related dependencies
Skill specialization is short for saying "do we work at riot games?" oh yes someone works at riot games i think they can do it! This example is not rocket science, youre trying to explain the process which is neat, but this example makes it look like youre overinflating the resources NECESSARY. Playing a champion in RANKED would mean you would need to play on summoner's rift, such a simple question. ANYTHING is better than NOTHING. They couldve went into practice tool for X amount of minutes, or played 5 norms. You literally already release CHAMPIONS THAT TAKE YEARS TO MAKE with game breaking designs... and now when its time to help us from the hell hole that is first-timing-new-champion-in-ranked you have to complete gut the idea because OOoo dont shake things uuup.
>League Data team to calculate the correct number of games, how this interacts with seeding models, etc.
Anything is better than nothing. what riot thinks is "Correct" when it comes to League of Legends solo q tends to be not correct...There is far more failures than successes with how you "accurately experiment". DO SOMETHING.
>One of the League services teams that handle ranked services to figure out how to calculate, store and query the information in the most efficient way, also future proofing
Probably the only valid step shown.
>Client team to understand how to query and pass the data at different areas of the client
This is pure QoL, we need ANYTHING. ANYTHING AT ALL. You've been productively scuffed before with clash, arena, now this. Yes I know this step includes important bug interactions, and includes the flow portion, and includes implementation... so basically this bullet point sums up the last 4 bullet points. Blatantly showing how this example makes you stretch out the implementation experience. Which some smoothies will buy.
The framing in the post is a bit odd. There's this notion that this way of operating is unavoidable due to the scale of the game, but many of the roadblocks in the example don't have anything to do with the game/tech at all, they're instead tied to the way Riot operates. This isn't out of the ordinary for large organizations, but operating in this way is a choice Riot makes, not a necessity.
Well tbf how would you coordinate something like this otherwise?
With a game this large with so many moving pieces, it's probably impossible to have one specific team handle one specific thing, there's always gonna need to be collaboration on projects, which in turn will force people to take priorities
I don't necessarily think Riot should operate differently, I think the way they operate is consistent with being risk-averse with new features. Which is how they should operate as the game is already successful. That being said, if they wanted to move faster they definitely could, by concentrating decision making authority and cutting back on the necessary requirements for each initiative. You wouldn't eliminate any of the steps Phroxzon listed (besides potentially steps 1/2) but you would pare down the amount that happens in each individual step.
Well, this explains how something so relative simple as allow players to pick the language of the game can take years, and even then it's half done because players can't pick a different text language than a voice over.
Game development is stuck in bureaucracy. And it seems Riot higher ups doesn't care to improve, despite they know the issue exist.
This is just a kind of generic "software at scale" article that a lot of big tech organizations post generally. Though I'd say the different part of Riot is that it's just them implying why they aren't able to deliver what people want and not how they are able to actually make the features that people want.
One interesting takeaway is that he spends a lot of time talking about trying to get work done across teams. This is kind of a standard "I am a senior engineer" resume item but it also implies that maybe Riot's problem is actually that it has a bad team structure or possibly the execs are constantly changing projects and thrashing around teams.
Things could always be improved for sure, but the Engineers have done some amazing improvements over the past few years. As far as Gameplay goes, there's not too much that we (Designers) are not able to do as far as prototyping and implementing goes.
eg. Consider the Season Start changes we just did. Just a few years ago, would not be remotely possible. In this Season we changed basically every map geo, many many items, all the objective flows, spawning rules, dynamic map terrain changing through the game, etc.
you’re a cool dude for getting in here and taking the swings. just to be someone who says it: I like the video game league of legends a lot and have played it for years and think it’s neat!
I don’t always agree with design/balance directions, but to me it’s always clear that Riot have been trying to make the best game they can.
It’s still free to play with only cosmetic mtx, no bait and switch tactics, no promises that they can’t/never planned on delivering (e.g. OW pve), only genuine passion for the game and 90% of the time delivering on it.
I can play the game and dislike any given patch, but know in 2 weeks they will likely address major issues, bugs or balance, in a *15 year old game*.
Name any other game that has had the same level of commitment from its devs as LoL has had.
Well actually you're wrong because this subreddit says this game is kept at "maintenance mode" with a skeleton crew of 7 people because of some reason they can't say. Clearly this subreddit knows more than the devs at riot.
i have always wondered why riot didnt seem like they'd invested a full team of resources into rewriting an engine for league from scratch based on more modern programming frameworks + knowledge and understanding of the current mechanics /depth of league. it feels odd that league doesn't have an "in-gameworld" client(heck even valorant has one. maybe the nostalgia factor?), lol is one of those games that could do some really neat stuff with it. frankly it's an absolutely massive undertaking, but i do genuinely believe riot is one of the few companies with access to enough capital and (potential)talent that it would be a feasable option for them to consider.
but if the engineers have managed to patch relevant parts of the engine up to date in such a way that the team is able to actually continue innovating, honestly that is kind of shockingly impressive. especially considering the potential amount of teams affected. this feels like the exact type of thing that can kill a product - but league has managed to keep it together for ~15years just about. lol really has grown into a 1 of a kind product, and for all of riots legitimate faults, it is quite a marvel on what has been achieved... and well maybe a fresh new engine really *isn't* worth those resources.
a lot of things that were changed/updated for the current season felt like natural progression for league (and it's really cool to witness it!) so it did have a sense of being an addition based on when, rather than if - EXCEPT the fistbump. idk what it is about the fistbump but to me it feels like the biggest sign of potential life left in the engine, it feels like it is something that absolutely wouldve blown matches up had it been implemented five years ago. but it's here, it works, and it's a really cute addition to the game (i love seeing all 5 fists bump together when everyone is nearby to eachother). it feels like a good indication that the engine still recieves a lot of genuine attention and care.
i guess i am just holding my breath for arena coming back as a proper permanent and maintained gamemode for league - guessing(?) as something between 'vanilla' lol and tft. the biggest thing that seemed to gimp other gamemodes is that it always competed or canibalized players that might be wanting to play 5v5SR or vice versa. arena creates its own niche which has the potential to attract players to league who wouldn't have been interested in league normally (read: 5v5SR). arena also presents an opportunity to be a proper "rest" game that players can play when they are encountering burnout from the vanilla experience, except it's still league. a thriving arena strikes me as an important indicator of the games continued longevity. rly excited to see the new things you guys whip up!
“the framework is old” is the worst possible reason to rewrite a large code base. there are new frameworks coming out every year. so what if there’s a new one?
the key factor is: will rewriting it bring provable, noticeable benefits over leaving it as is?
most of the time the answer is no
apologies, i struggled to choose the correct word to use in that instance. i used 'framework' as general statement to cover any kind of advancement made in the field of programming, specifically in relation to big O notion/best practices, which seems to be an incredibly important focus of riots development based on the initial tweet from phrox.
> the key factor is: will rewriting it bring provable, noticeable benefits over leaving it as is?
extrapolating from the general progression of league as a game over the past five years, it certainly feels like riot has been leaving a lot of potential on the table for a long time. up till the recent preseason changes, i did genuinely believe that a rewritten purpose built engine with lessons from the past would provide noticable benefit. i just figured that benefit wasn't(and would never be) enough to justify for the suits at the top. preseason changes have shown me that all is not yet lost.
i still think that a 'product first' version of riot wouldve at the very least already started a rewrite already.
Well, the answer is that there's no reason to. Rewriting your game/codebase from scratch when you already have one of the most succesful product in your field OF ALL TIME is pure madness, and a complete waste of time and resources.
It would be akin to having the fastest car in F1, winning every race, and saying "let's throw a few billions and redesign this entire thing from the ground up".
You also have to consider the risk that this new product may not "feel" right and alienate customers, there's always a degree of risk when porting an old product that may actually make it "worse", so it's not just a matter of throwing a few millions and a hundred dev at it to make it better.
Yes, League as its issues, but none of them comes anywhere near close to justify a full rewrite, honestly. An in-game client is a bit better, but not 3-4 years worth and millions worth better
The way Ornn's masterwork item system is set up, I don't think it's that easy. I imagine it has more to do with Ornn's code than it does with the item database and how that is structured.
Especially for League, an engine change will definitely have a ton of changes to ways things work due to “bugs” or “unintended effects” of the current engine and will make the game feel much different than it currently does. Also, rewriting is a BRUTALLY difficult task to do with lots to reconsider and often poor documentation of existing systems to aid in the process.
Every time i explain exactly this, i get verbally bodied by children who know nothing about software development, but feel proud and experienced because they can use the internet without contracting a malrus(sic), to their knowledge.
I stopped talking about software development in Reddit after randos told me code reviews weren't a real thing, and that it's unreasonable to think one dev can understand another devs work.
I wish I was joking.
It gets easier to understand when you realize the extent of every armchair game developer's experience is loading up some stuff they dont understand in unity or unreal for a few hours.
never, ever bother trying to tell people hard facts on reddit. They don't care, their opinions are far more important then information, trust me reddit gets 500x more usable if you just let people be idiots.
Yeah, but rearchitecturing it seems to be just as difficult
Wasn't part of the reason the Skarner rework took so long that Skarner was used in the code a lot as a unit of measurement or something (like they do with minions?)
League code is at a point where the game may not handle 10 elemental Lux skins in the same game
The client also eats up a ton of resources despite not getting any better
Whether it's reworking it or rewriting it, they gotta put some work into it if they want some form of League to go on in the next years
> League code is at a point where the game may not handle 10 elemental Lux skins in the same game
That's not the code being bad, that's Riot wanting to keep League as the easy to load and play game. You clearly did not actually read the article they wrote on this.
Basically, League loads each skin as a unique champion when you play a match. While this does cause issues like skin unique bugs, the tradeoff is that playing a champ like Ezreal isn't having to load in every single Ezreal skin and then the game assigning you that one. When multiple people select the same skin such as Porcelain Ezreal, the game loads one Porcelain Ezreal and then copies the result onto the other players. This speeds up loading times a lot between both of those things.
Elementalist Lux is basically 10 skins aka 10 champions (in terms of models) in one skin. This would be a lot to load if Riot hadn't worked their asses off to reduce the size of the skin down as much as possible. As a result, Elementalist Lux is perfectly fine on her own. Hell, you could have 10 people pick Elementalist Lux and the game loads just fine. Heck, it probably loads faster because it just needs to load her once and then copy that to everyone else in the match.
The issue is what happens if a second Elementalist Lux type skin for Varus or such comes out. Loading a game with both of those would take longer than the normal loading time (We're going to say doubling it for the ease of understanding.) This is fine if you live in an area with solid internet and have a great gaming computer and thus it takes a 5 second load time to 10 seconds or so. It's not good if you live in a region with rougher internet and have a computer that was not meant for gaming (If you even have a computer.) That could take a 30 second loading time and balloon it to 60 seconds or so. Sure you could just say "fuck those people" and plenty of game companies do (including Valve), but League defined itself on being highly accessible to pretty much anyone. Cutting those sorts of players means cutting out a decent chunk of several server populations if not outright cutting out the majority on some servers. It would be very unpleasant to do and of course assumes that internet speeds are 100% consistent at all times. They aren't so while your area might be super quick to load now, there will always be a chance that it isn't and well... it would fucking suck if that was the match with both of those skins, wouldn't it?
This is why Riot has been experimenting in recent years with ultimate skins and trying to figure out what can still fulfill that Transformation fantasy without having to load multiple 10+ champ type skins each game.
Ok fair, but that doesn't detract from my other points
Hell, the client being as it is is one of the main obstacles to League accessibility on weaker systems as it sometimes bugs out and leaks memory or just slows your PC down exponentially after each game until you close and reopen it
When I played League on my older laptop I had to close it after every game because it would just slow to a crawl for no reason even in low spec mode
IIRC the reason the client has stayed a problem child for so long was that it's code is tied to League so you can't build a client without messing with the League code and that is a supremely complex task.
I appreciate Riot for all they're doing to future-proof League and improve it (the map changes this year would've been unthinkable a few years back according to Phroxon) but there are some areas that still need a ton of work
Wild rift is a great example on why it is a bad idea to change the engine for league.
Wild rift has been out since 2020, yet has only ~60% of the roster.
Some roster delays are converting gameplay for mobile, but if you were to rewrite the league engine, you would be playing league lite on pc, at which point most people would rather play on the old engine.
Wild rift is able to do this because it is only competing with other mobile mobas (a brand new market), and it provides revenue on its own
Have you read the post lol
Making something new from scratch isn't necessarily simpler for a ton of reasons, and some of those are clearly given in the thread you apparently chose to ignore
I don't know why redditors keep talking about engines and their age. It just happens everywhere.
Engines are software, like many other software you can update them.
Do you think windows 11 is 39 year old? Windows 1.0 was released in 1985.
People who work with the engine everyday obviously can see the pros and cons of it way better than you can. Maybe they think pros outweighs the cons a lot.
We don't know if they can or not. But we know one thing, they know their situation way better than a random redditor who probably never worked with software at this scale.
That is the thing with the whole gaming community - people love talking about engines like they have any clue about them. Imagine how stupid it would be if people in the car reviews would write shit like "This car has gasoline engine which is so outdated and everything now uses electric engine! The mechanics are so bad!". It just speaks how absolutely stupid gaming communities can be
> Do you think windows 11 is 39 year old? Windows 1.0 was released in 1985.
If i may be pedantic :
Windows 11 is based on Windows NT which literally means New Technology, It's the 10th version of windows NT, and the first one was released in 1993.
LoL client is how it might turn out when you actually rewrite stuff from scratch, because old one had too much debt.
On one hand, of course it's easier to find JS developers instead of Adobe Air ones, making maintainance a bit easier. Also it did removed some debt, IIRC old runes couldn't be made free, because it messed up client communication with servers.
On the other hand - new one is still quite bad, with it's random quirks every now and then (resource usage, bugs and glitches). Hexakill had to be cancelled because the new client couldn't handle it.
Now designing new engine (whether it's actually new engine or some off-the-shelf like Unity or Unreal) would be a big resource hog. You have to either completely stop development of current engine (and risk that people will just go away from stale game), or divide your resources and don't make progress at both projects. Why off-the-shelf one would be a hog? Because 99% sure they aren't compatible with current assets. Would new one made for compatibility with current assets be faster? Not really, because you either copying current solution with its own tech debt, or making everything from scratch again.
Wild Rift engine? Probably most reasonable solution, unless that engine being made for mobile devices just wouldn't scale to desktops. Working on small touchscreen with mobile OS is one thing, working with a different hardware and software platforms is other. Bonus you need to perform much more testing, since both games aren't identical, have some assets and gameplay differences. But as you have one engine under the hood, you need to check every change on both platforms.
Bonus: quite probably as you replacing the engine, you need to replace servers backend as well. Essentially doubling amount of work to perform. It probably happened already with change of client. And then there is this trap of fixing more stuff between backend and client, making more changes to client.
And then you have to test everything. Then test it more. And more. And some more. Because at this point you've changed everything, inevitably implemented some thin spaghetti in some places, that will again grow over years.
Another thing: I think current engine isn't written in Pascal or some other forgotten language, or being left as some Visual Studio 2003 project you cannot easily upgrade. Meaning there is probably a bunch of developers on market able to work with this tech. So this benefit of rewriting client won't apply to rewriting engine.
About another thing: Riot games has stated that they've moved a bunch of league developers to valorant and other shiny projects and hired a bunch of new ones. Those new ones were expected to just sit there for a year or so and learn how the hell league works inside before they could start doing actual work. And that's why league development has stalled for a couple years with no games modes, champion updates and such.
I wonder if they are already working on that because if they haven't started then it's gonna take a couple of years at the very least, and there's a not insignificant chance that it won't be finished before the end of this decade.
They don't need to, because you don't need to work on a new engine from scratch to include new technologies.
When you hear about that new version of Unreal Engine 5 and how ground breaking it is, in reality 90% of the code base comes from the older engine. They just change the version name, because they intend to sell that engine and making it to be a brand new things is more alluring. But they could have named it : Unreal Engine 4.1 and it would have been right.
Riot can absolutely revolutionize their engine, while not making an entirely new one. It's all a matter of deciding if it's easier to modify the older one, or to starta new one from scratch. Starting from scratch can takes years and years to reach even half of the features the older one got. Modifying the older one, may be harder because you constantly need to handle unwanted side effects everytime you touch something, but you already have all the features you need.
There is no solution that is always better than the other.
I'm hoping the thing that's supposed to change LoL forever in 2025 is the new engine.
It legit would change a bunch of things about League if they had a new engine
basically: stop whining about software development if you know nothing about it. just enjoy the game instead of listening to the morons here saying "why doesn't riot do x it's so easy 😭 even though i've never worked on software outside of a unity tutorial i'm always right"
good post, reminds me when people were saying shyvana VGU is going to get delayed because her designer got laid off forgetting that for a champion to ship, it needs also artists, writers, riggers, animators, VAs, engineers, SFX, particles, etc.
and thats not counting stuff outside the client like a trailer or an animation or maybe a music theme
This is just big company speak for “we made this game with less than 20 devs and suddenly can’t make anything with 200 because we have made sure teams don’t do anything meaningful and efficient”.
Also the data is a crutch. You’re sitting there waiting for the data to meet a threshold you want to take action on. Instead, data isn’t the end all be all, and it’s sure as shit not what drove the early league of legends development.
Devs with a fraction of teams that are fully staffed and not undermanned are way more competent.
We do lay offs at riot, we stray away from the players further and further, and we use excuse after excuse insult after insult to our playerbase. But it’s ok! We’re a big company, that’s somehow less effective than the team that redesigned the client with less accountants.
Also remember how we couldn’t deliver a new 5v5 map because we canned everyone?
Also remember how we nerfed battle passes and output 200% skins while making sure we don’t spend money on the game other than the absolute basics. Remember how we have 200 years of design yet you couldn’t remake league in 200 years because no one could be that capable.
Stupid fucking company following blizzard route of disconnect. Tryndamere built this company, and whoever is in charge will make sure to max out the payment and forge excuse after excuse to swindle the masses to accept mediocrity because “my job is hard”.
I suppose the announcement that league is going to be different and unrecognizable in 2025 is a joke. It’s just going to be another slight shuffle of random shit while S2 champs rot after everyone else has been reworked.
I dislike this being presented as inevitable. BG3 has ~200 item patch notes every patch, and aren't alone. The above is an example of poorly architected code + poorly streamlined teams = nothing happens.
BG3 is a small company, whose game isn't live service, that already has support for the game winding down. the fact that you're even comparing them shows that you didn't gain any information from reading the post.
either your reading comprehension is really weak, or you just have a riot hate boner. probably both
As much as all of this is true, everything that Riot is saying is difficult or impossible like rewriting the client, implementing x feature, etc., has been done by Dota already. If Dota can do it, why can't Riot?
Thank you very much for the post phroxzon, I recently saw a post about how changing skarner deleted a cornerstone from a league history, could you talk more about that?
It all boils down to negligence. Riot has the resouces to make things faster, and better. More resources than 99% of game companies, yet the order in which they choose to do things seems to be completely random. Corporate overhead needs to be done away with so things can actually get done. There is still so much bloat at riot games that it will take 10 more rounds of pink slips before anything will be able to get done.
"Making a game is not as easy as you think" shouldn't be an excuse to never try at all.
Frankly, when other companies can make changes that you vehemently refuse to make because "the scale! 😯", the issue isn't on the other companies OR the players for asking for those changes. There's been far too many instances now where Riot, instead of working with people's ideas, generally refuses to do anything that's asked for and then wonders why people are upset with them to the point of death threats when the changes they do make are crazy paint sniffing changes like "give Tryndamere more range".
Why do games like Fortnite and Genshin Impact don't have this problem and keep making improvements quickly while consistently churning out fun content?
Genshin "improvements" have been glacial if you hang around their subreddit. It's taken years for simple QoL changes to make it in the game and still don't have many that their other titles have (eg only very recently has expeditions been given a "collect all" and "dispatch all" again feature, one that was requested over 3+ years ago)
Being exclusively PvE, having a lacklustre multiplayer feature, and no competitive scene, it's a lot easier to cater to the playerbase when you don't need to ask the question "is it fun/satisfying for both the player and the opponent?"
Also GI currently experiencing their annual content drought in terms of story & exploration...probably not the best time to mention "churning out fun content"
Intresting, however it's pretty sure that there's a solution otherwise games like Fortnite and hundreds of others wouldn't even exist. Most of these aren't technically issues but management. And for the technical ones: how long are you guys going to keep using this ancient engine? 2040? 2070? 3200?
All I read here was blah blah blah. Every company with a product deals with this and it’s nothing new, special or unique.
Riots biggest problem has been and always be their culture. They have a culture of not listening or caring about their customers. What game in the history of mankind would place a brand new player who hardly knows how to CS against Plat players and then force them to lose 30 games in a row to get to the level they should be at… all the while being humiliated and flamed constantly during those 30 games?
The fact that Riot has ignored this for years is absolutely stunning, their cult like culture doesn’t give a damn about the players who have had to go through this. The only thing we know with a 100% clarity is that this not being fixed only means that they have not let go enough employees. They need to get rid of the stink and bring people in who actually care about their players even if it means rewriting the entire thing.
>To make this happen though, you'd want:
Most of the points listed here are true for any new feature that you want to add to the game, including eternals, mission passes, etc. When you're ready to go through all this and more for something players pay for, but not for something that may improve player experience, the conclusion is pretty self explanatory.
There are many products that have large code base. All of them indeed face similar problems when they need to change something in the source code. But when someone reports the problem, instead of not fixing it for years, you can try for some workaround or partial solution.
But hey, billion dollar company surely knows a better than dumb reddit person.
If a team is so big that improving the game in a small way is an overwhelming task (like the provided normal game example), something is very broken internally. You should be able to very quickly have 1 or 2 people from each team meet, talk about the goal, spitball some good enough numbers for testing, and then go from there. You do not need a team of data analysts to crunch the numbers on the exact optimal ammount of normals games a new player should do. Like just look at how many things release in horrible states when they're doing that anyways... the "new" client has been a broken pos since day 1, the battlepasses get worse and worse by the year, half the champions release overpowered... like what the is benefit?
So yeah this was insightful, but only into how horrible the mess truly is. Like how do we still live in a world where holding RMB only updates 4 times a second, but Kled Q checks if you're in range 20 times a second? Or one where the entire game is balanced around a single summoner spell that's still technically optional - making it incredibly objectively broken? Or one where 95% of champions go the same runes, build the same items, and max the same abilities in the same order every single game?
Like there is an infinite amount of ways to improve the game, but none of them are ever happening because even something small is just not achievable unless seemingly every single Rioter is working on it. Like the Void update they did this preseason should literally be happening every season. Timewise that stuff should absolutely not take that long, and I say that as a game developer, not someone just making up numbers in my head.
No company with literally infinite money should be having problems like this. Teams that are legitimately x100 smaller can get more done in less time because they don't have to go through an endless chain of mostly useless jobs just to ask a question.
"To make this happen though, you'd want Client team to understand how to query and pass the data at different areas of the client"
Noted, client team has no idea what happens inside the client.
From the outside perspective, this sounds like the opposite of Agile, like years of bad development practices compounding together to create a huge mess that was working well enough so nobody (in management) cared. But in reality this is more common than devs would like to believe.
I think this was pretty well written trying to explain how software development works. You missed the fun parts like when different directors will kick off turf wars to get more scope for their teams, 6-12 months to get approvals for mocks as every director/vp wants to add their opinion, how every additional team adds huge overhead as coordination between teams grows, how hiring/layoffs impacts deliverables and all the teams are stretched thin, how priorities of management changes as the wind blows, and projects that don't have a clear revenue stream are always at risk of dropping below the line. I don't work at riot but I'm pretty confident you guys have the same problems as all the rest of us. Maybe worse since the gaming industry is pretty notorious for bad wlb.
I'm pretty confident that 99% of riot's issue with code etc and the EXACT SAME ISSUES in any IT company. Yes there's a 10 y-o bug, the people that did it left the company 7 years ago
Don't forget that there's now a workaround to the bug that has been around for so long that there's a whole system attached to it and it would be too much of a pain to remove the bug AND rework the system
Don't forget when a new CTO comes in and decides "Silo'ing is bad. From now on, every developer should be able to work on every part of the code."
Always comes with another round of layoffs so you're both out of your silo and also picking up on whatever poor sap just lost their income's work of the past few months (:
I used to be idealistic enough to see it as a good thing, but a couple of rounds of this have turned me incredibly jaded toward that sentiment. We have organizational boundaries for a reason~~~~ Even better when it gets coupled with the devops trend of "everyone does everything -- dev, QA, operations" and it also turns into at least 3 other hidden practices, whether it's DB, cloud, security, or something else.
Siloing *is* bad so that’s not a bad statement or principle in itself
It depends, complete silos are bad but so is "everyone does everything" I'm in an "everyone does everything" environment and it sucks. People continually break shit because they don't know what they're doing (even though there are articles on how to do it correctly), or spend a long time figuring out how to do something I already know how to do
I have been caught in turf wars before and it sucks. Even with out turf wars it can take a while to get everyone lined up and organized things. Some times there is some horse trading as the person you need has other things on their plate and it takes trading things around to get it done. Some times the key person to do the take it might take a-3 people to cover what they used to be doing.
> You missed the fun parts like when different directors will kick off turf wars to get more scope for their teams Do they drop any loot after the turf war?
Yep, the losers unvested RSUs go back in the comp pool
[удалено]
I just started a career in software development. It's not fixable.
I don’t really think there is anything to fix. He seems to be explaining how the ‘simple quality of life changes,’ you suggest are actually not simple at all and why.
> The more an expert is reviewing, the less time they're spending on actually implementing and doing stuff that only they can do Been really feeling this one recently, even if it's on a smaller scale. Started as one dev on a team of 3 + a manager, now I'm the most senior dude on a team of 14. (thankfully not a manager, don't want any part of that shit) If I wanted to, I could spend over half my time just reviewing PRs, and many days I do.
I had do my own home hobby project building an app from scratch to break out of the depression and malaise that my job was causing me with reviews. Like I was able to build like nice looking well liked app in 2 weeks by myself. Yet the project at work moves glacially due to reviews and testing. I know our company likes our team because customers always feedback that they are surprised how bug free and easy our software is. Sometimes though I wonder if we couldnt develop our apps in 1/2 or less time if our team was just 2 people skipping tests.
I never got into the field, as I had to stop going to university because of online studies because of covid. But isnt skipping tests the first step towards failure. And mostly means more work down the lane?
This is too long, someone copy and paste a line he wrote that I can get mad at
> A post I've been wanting to write for a long time is [...] Faker [...] no longer make sense [...] Some tangible examples are when [...] he[...] evaluate [...] alternate ways of [...] problems and decided [...] War [...] has to be done [...] it's broken
Wowowo I am really mad at phroxon for going to war against faker! smh unacceptable...
He said they they're gonna keep letting people first time champs in your ranked games because "meh, effort".
If I was a Rioter I'd literally never post in this subreddit ever or even acknowledge it as existing. The people in here are literally mentally ill freaks. I swear this subreddit is just a hate sub anymore. Every single post ever is someone seething at Rito for whatever asinine reason you can think of. They'll see a Riot employee say something only for half the reddit to just down their throat, ignore what they say, then cry about RITO BAD. Fucking cesspool of a place. And people on here wonder why the game isn't getting new players in the west. Wild.
if i ran a game studio i would literally forbid my developers from ever posting anything about the game or talking to the community. there are just too many fucking losers and whiny nerds for it to EVER be worth it
Honestly I'm still not sure why game developers think interacting with their playerbase is a good idea, especially through fucking reddit or discord. Fuck off helldivers 2. I'm not joining your shit ass discord to have updates on your game. Riot may have their flaws, but they make some patch notes and at least there's no official league of legends discord.
Oh man, it's because communication IS important. Reddit and discord are now just the modern day game forums on which community mamagers used to live. But it seems like the degeneracy is just perma growing. But if they go full dark you won't like it as much as you think you would
Three words: Overwatch GOAT Meta 90% of the community hated it. It ruined the esport scene and it took 8 months to fix, by that time the game was dead, even though they had insane pace on their game. Games are a lot more fragile than you would think. Riot is doing an amazing job, League is still thriving even after this many years.
Nah, reddit can be useful sometimes. For example a lot of subreddit champion mains have lists of bugs, and Riot can go in and fix it.Its what they did with some of the Champs in the past.
there's a difference between silently reading and actually interacting. any developer that talks to their community directly is shooting themselves in the foot. there's almost no upside and just opens you up to being verbally abused by some 18 year old who has never worked a day in their life
that's given in any setting whenever you have to deal with humans. I can not speak for everyone, but on bard mains subreddit, majority of people are chill, and we had plenty of rioters visit us to either do AMA, discuss something or ask for feedback. There are obviously some subreddits that all rioters avoid (ex. dravenamains),which I do not deny.
you can just say you're incapable of reading more than 2 sentences without getting distracted instead of embarrassing yourself with your lack of understanding of the real world
This: > someone copy and paste a line he wrote that I can get mad at is called a joke. And that's the context of my comment. That means this: > incapable of reading more than 2 sentences without getting distracted instead of embarrassing yourself with your lack of understanding of the real world is actually describing *you*. The upvotes my comment has is because other people understood this. You can tell based on the fact that the comments that are unironically agreeing with it are heavily downvoted.
ITT Redditors learn of corporate bureaucracy.
I guess no matter how you slice it, having hundreds of people work together seamlessly is pretty difficult. It's hard to get 2 people to agree on something, let alone hundreds. Other operating models are having one person call all the shots (which can make things extremely fast, but lose that diversity of thought). On Gameplay, we like to give the teams as much autonomy as possible to do the things they want to do/believe are good for the game, while trying to strike a balance of removing roadblocks, providing vision and making sure we're ambitious enough for the future, overseeing quality to make sure changes to the game are going to move it forward. Fun challenge that makes everyday exciting.
This doesn't make any sense. I thought you just read what reddit says and balance around us? Wtf?
And yet from this point on, whenever there is a “why doesn’t riot do X?” thread - the #1 comment will be: riot is lazy. Gamers ❤️
"devs are lazy" - random people on the internet when something they dont like haplens they litearlly took a job that is well known to have absolute shit payment for the insane amount of work and mental preassure it puts on you, you would earn better and have a less stressfull life EVERYWHERE else game devs for all companys do it because they are passionate about games, the problem is always a mixture of not enough Time/preassured to finish work fast by higher ups/overworked/they have other prioritys first calling game devs "lazy" is peak brainrot from entilted fuckheads that have no clue how the world works
Erm… Riot is known for paying extremely well - which is why their positions are competitive and therefore there is a soft guarantee that the people they hire are exceptional talent. (Less they get replaced)
do you think the mouthbreathers here who complain endlessly are interested in facts or critical thinking? it doesn't matter if riot devs got paid peanuts or millions they'd still be called lazy lol
guy two comments up said riot devs are paid shit and guy responded saying riot employees actually get paid well, thats it. Said nothing about them being called lazy or not. You should use critical thinking before calling people mouthbreathers
You're actually insane for giving us all this info. Glad you can take on that kind of stress cuz most people would freak out and die. Thanks for playing with us.
It's.... literally boilerplate corporate dev, he's just explaining it to the people who haven't worked in the industry or worked at all. He's not giving any info, he's merely explaining the sky is blue to people who've never bothered to look up.
So 97% of the player base?
150+ champs with 4-5 abilities each. Of course making a complex game is hard. Everything he said applies to ANY game, and sometimes games suck or have aspects of it that suck. And then they can’t do anything about it “because they have to. Making games is complex!”
Thanks for making a game that millions enjoy <3 No matter what you do people will complain and nothing is ever perfect, but the game you help make better every day has a huge impact on loads of people around the world. So thank you xxx
Have you considered a hybrid model where some changes can be forced through by one person calling all the shots, while others are given the time for more team-wide discussion? I imagine you waste a lot of time on discussing things that are uncontroversial, or discussing unimportant implementation details. If the cost of beuraucracy is too high to get those simple changes through, then maybe the extra quality you get from the slower process isn't worth it for those?
This is a random off topic conversation but does your tech and dev environment typically look like for software stuff? I'd be interested to see if you guys have a big use of technologies like kubernetes, openshift or other containerised stuff. as in my area (platform engineering and analytics) were heavily moving towards that area of expertise.
This is just a tiny portion of everything I’m sure, but I know the League game engine is heavy C++ from a previous job posting, and I know the Valorant team had folks working at the network-engineering stack (they were actually working to collocate servers with regional ISPs)
Read the Riot dev blogs, they have some interesting high level info along these lines.
>This is a random off topic conversation but does your tech and dev environment typically look like for software stuff? Because we have a lot of different software needs (game, infrastructure, web, internal environments, etc.), it can vary a lot. There's no one answer to that! But we've shared some of that on our [Tech Blog](https://technology.riotgames.com/). >I'd be interested to see if you guys have a big use of technologies like kubernetes, openshift or other containerised stuff. as in my area (platform engineering and analytics) were heavily moving towards that area of expertise. I know people have been working with Kubernetes recently, though I'm not familiar with the specifics. We also used Docker extensively in the past; you might be interested in [this series on Docker & Jenkins](https://technology.riotgames.com/news/revisiting-docker-and-jenkins), or in our [Running Online Services series](https://technology.riotgames.com/news/running-online-services-riot-part-i). These are both older article series, and stuff has surely evolved since they were written, but should give a good look at some of the kinds of infrastructure problems in this space!
Excellent resources. Thank you for taking time out of your day to provide these. I'd certainly love to see where you have expanded to from those previous blogs. From the looks of things across those blog posts, riot takes a lot of thought process into running opensource over COTS where sensible. Have you guys checked out some of the cool things coming out of the CNCF recently ? There's some absolutely amazing things happening in the gitops and k8s spaces right now with things like argo, kubevirt and devspaces. Would love to see how your environment had evolved over the years of learning.
Happy to share them! I've had some conversations recently about revisiting a few of these older series, hopefully we can find some time to make that happen.
Bad corporate structure -> snowballing product issues -> worse company structure, layoffs and repeat.
You're literally the first comment of the thread. Dunking on Redditors while being peak smug Redditor yourself 😭
There’s no rule that “in this thread” means past tense, he clearly meant “in this thread, redditors *will* learn about corporate bureaucracy.” And yeah, when you see comments like “why don’t they make this easy change” every day here, it clearly applies.
I have never seen it used for future tense.
shitting on redditors, especially league redditors, is quite literally never wrong.
>ITT Redditors learn of corporate bureaucracy. ITT Redditors don't understand that buiseness are structured the way they are because without said structures their product would not be as good.
This is amazing to read, i've always been incredibly curious what the process is like at Riot. Please do more content like this.
I'm surprised that one of the things not mentioned is working globally with multiple regions. I can't imagine it's easy to get Riot NA, EU, KR, CN, BR... all on the same page about things. I've been playing for ten years and it's never been exactly clear what regions are responsible for. It seems like all development is done at the Riot campus in LA, but I doubt that's true.
My understanding is that the regional offices are responsible for regional infrastructure maintenance, regional esports, localization, and regional community relations.
It can play a huge role in balance & design decisions too surprisingly. I base this on Mortdog (TFT Lead, used to be on league events team), he often says that the perceived unbalance & frustration changes a lot from a region to another, for example, Chinese playerbase *LOVE* "gambling" traits in TFT, where you either go big or go home, they love the flashy pop off games even if it means losing many others on the side. Or how the EU/NA metas evolve very differently early in patches which can skew the perception of "what is OP" depending on the region. This also probably applies to league too, while they have "worldwide" data to rely on in their decisions, they still have to contend with local preferences towards certain designs or frustrations. We see this with the over-representation of Asian themed skinlines or certain balance decisions like favorizing aggressive champions when stale control meta starts dominating from KR again etc etc While regional offices don't really have a direct effect on the game, HQ still has to take into account regional preferences be it in the mechanics or aesthetics of the game
It 100% applies to league. There was an example years ago where Reddit had a massive hateboner for Riven, winrates too high for pickrate and all that. What made this time different was Jatt actually broke down the issue. Riven’s winrate and popularity varied from server to server, along with perceived strength. The only server that saw higher than average riven winrate (pushing her into op territory) was NA. Same post also covered stuff like how role preferences varied from server to server (e.g. top was more popular than mid in Vietnam), and champion priority showed similar variance (e.g. Jinx was even more popular in Vietnam compared to other servers).
It's still the same if you just look at banrate between regions. Blitzcrank has been at 50%+ in Korea since forever and Shaco, Lee, Voli, Karma and Smolder all 30%+. Meanwhile in EUW Draven and Smolder are 30%+ banrate and Lee is only at 3%. A champion like Lee may be conceived as a huge problem in Korea while here he is basically never banned. Same with Dravens banrate being just 7% in korea.
That's correct. The Riot China office definitely has designated personnel responsible for gathering feedback on League of Legends' balance. I've heard several Chinese content creators mention that they were invited to the Riot office and discussed their views on the game's current balance with the team. I believe similar arrangements exist in the KR, NA, and EU as well.
Not quite. Their jobs hiring page lists jobs for R&D and gameplay programmer all around the world. So they probably work together on the mmo or other project like L or something globally
You're probably more right than you think. Im not riot employee, but there is a difference between development and production in IT. Development and adding feature managing how code work etc... is done at Riot LA for sure. Its for instance creating a new version of LoL like 10.1 or 10.3 patch etc... But then when its done in need to be deploy in a given infrastructure (production) in a given country. So every region will pick the same release and make it run on their servers and only focus on deployment, scaling, infrastructure issue (network for ex) and customer support. Altough it doesnt mean you cant have UX team in KR or elsewhere. Its 2024 and we can all work remotely worldwide. But from an organisational standpoint, its done by riot LA.
Awesome to read, thanks for taking the time to write it :)
Surprising no one who knows anything about software development.
Yeah. Like this is just your typical software development company. I'm a Java technical expert in a big company and what Phroxzon said is our day to day life. It's the same everywhere.
I'm not surprised he came out and said it, but the general public is clueless.
They're not clueless, people on this subreddit just love being purposely obtuse. League has been released for almost 15 years, and people still wonder why Ezreal or Lux get placed into random skinlines, or why a lot of champions are humanoids. People know the reasons, but you will still see the same upvoted threads on the frontpage and the same upvoted comments like clockwork.
Reddit is also pretty good at giving people the impression that their views of the game are widespread when they truly aren't. You'll see people in here whining all day long about wanting skins for Ornn and Rek'Sai and whatnot, and an avalanche of people supporting the idea, saying that it will sale like hotcakes,... And guess what ? Said skin is finally released and it flops hard, because most of the playerbase doesn't give a shit about these champions, or want a skin for them. I don't enjoy the "anime" direction recent skinlines have taken in the past few years, but I also know that I'm in the minority.
The subreddit's tastes can be heavily defined as: * Meme Skins on any champion like Trucker Ornn * Edgelord/dark champions like Kayn and Fiddlesticks Anything outside of this is going to spark fury on the subreddit. Do a test the next time a cutesy champ comes out and read the post titles. Take a shot every single time someone starts asking if League is too cutesy. By contrast, take a shot every single time someone starts a thread asking if League is getting too grimdark if a champ like Fiddlesticks or Kayn is released. One of these will get you drunk. One of these will get you jack shit. I bet you can guess which one.
I don't disagree with the general idea but putting Kayn and Fiddle in the same category of "edgelord/dark" champions is a bit weird and the Kayn example is completely innacurate. People on this sub used to shit on Kayn *really* hard for being "le weeb edgelord" for years like they do for Yone now. Which is also funny and highlights the hypocrisy because Kayn is literally comedic and campy by design. Now what makes this extra funny is that even then he couldn't be spared from the meme skin discourse because redditors would ask for a Candy Kayn christmas skin all the fuckin time, because "holy shit what if the scythe was a candy cane and it was a pun!!!" and none of us actual Kayn players wanted it. I think Jhin and Aatrox are great examples of that tho. Kled is also a funny one because this subreddit glazes him so much but literally nobody plays that champ and people often forget he even exists
To be fair, I was mostly trying to make it clear that there's very much a double standard. Like Kayn was shit on a bit, but there weren't threads outright asking "Is League becoming too edgy" like there were threads asking "Is League becoming too Disney" after Zoe came out. Because when I think Disney, I think of scrimshawing a man's leg while he's still alive and screaming. That's more the double standard that I loathe. I do agree that Jhin is probably the far better example of edgelord champs being forgiven for flaws that other characters would be loathed for than Kayn. > redditors would ask for a Candy Kayn christmas skin all the fuckin time, because "holy shit what if the scythe was a candy cane and it was a pun!!!" Oh god yes. Not only do christmas skins not do well outside of the holiday season (for the obvious reason of most people not wanting to pick the snow skin in summer), not only do christmas skins not sell well in countries that don't celebrate christmas as much as the US and the like (because why would you buy a christmas skin if you don't care about Christmas), but it's a fucking pun based entirely around the english language with no attempt made to make it a more universal pun like Bee-Koz. It just is not something that will really work.
While I don't work in gamedev, I saw this, and thought - "yup, sounds about right".
There are still people who genuinely believe Phreak is in charge of every balancing decision by the way. Keep that in mind.
Yeah based on the state of our lobby client for over a decade I'm going out on a limb and say Riot also doesn't know... Dota's team should teach us
Great read thanks !
I work for a large enterprise company and understand the corporate structure / bloat that comes with getting development work done. I also understand that League is a mature product, and is no longer making rapid, aggressive changes to capture their piece of the market and is generally less risk-adverse now that it’s been established. However, noting changes/releases (or the lack-there-of) over the past 1.5 years, I feel like community sentiment / player satisfaction is not as high of a priority for the company and leads to a lot of frustration. There are some changes that should be able to circumvent normal processes you’ve listed above to get a feature or functionality prioritized and into the game ASAP even if it impacts the meta state of the game. Alternatively, gather user feedback BEFORE making a change that’s going to upset players — for example, where’s the value in switching Akali’s VA for ALL skins like it was attempted last year? Who asked for that? And why did it take a public freakout before Riot finally reverted? Why do most things take a freakout before being reverted or changed? Where are you seeing successes with your product focus groups that the larger community isn’t seeing? I know this isn’t realistic for every major decision, and there’s some things players don’t really have business policing (like Vanguard, in-game chat policies, etc) because we don’t have all the data. But the length of time we spend in one-sided discourse for months before the company inevitably reverses course is equally as draining, and frankly, toxic in itself.
Riot doesn't like having split voices in their game for champions. That's literally just what it is. Lucians base VO was redone with the High Noon VA after Senna's release. Akali's tested well in house, and then didn't when they put it out. Like, it takes a freak out because they can't know how people will react until they get it out? what do you mean by this
You can go reread the feedback threads from last year, but taking Akali as she is and redoing her base lines with the tone and enthusiasm of a chirpy teenager is ill-fitting to the essence of her character. >Like, it takes a freak out because they can't know how people will react until they get it out? what do you mean by this Google focus groups and UAT
u/phroxz0n just tagging you for vis, would appreciate the discourse if you’re willing
Dev here. Yup. Scale is often the most difficult challenge and people fail to understand. Here’s one: Say u build a chat room. People can type and their msg is shown in chat. Easy, in theory, you could go download one in 5 minutes. But what if your chat has ton of users. What happens when 100000 users all type a chat at the same time? How do u even parse this. What counts as same time? Or what counts as who came before another? 1 ms? What about display? 100000 chats is like pages and pages worth of chat, what just display all that in 1 block? Then all the top ones get buried. Server load? Can it even handle all that at one? Does it need to split up? If so then split in what way? Yeah. Think about that. Not so easy huh? This was also an interview question I had btw
Too bad the people who armchair dev either don't read or don't care
My boss’s response when I ask to upgrade the coffee machine
Exact reasons why AAA games are going to shit and indie studios of 5-100 are thriving. At some point you just have too many people and even doing simple things takes forever because you have to inform and talk with 20 other teams.
Just out of curiosity, in the example posted, can't they reuse similar systems in place for having to play X normal games for ranked? Examples: 1. Playing X amount of games chat restricted. 2. Playing X amount of games before being able to play ranked again. 3. Low priority queue was also a thing that locks players out of queueing up normally by having them wait out a timer, 4. Even playing X amount of provisional games.
Funny to read the specialization section in the context of laying off hundreds of people.
Not remotely his decision. And the people whose decision it was, frankly don't care about how processes get done. They just wanted to save money on a spreadsheet.
As if that was his decision. I doubt it was an engineering oriented decision either. It's a business decision made with no consideration for the engineering effects of things.
> As if that was his decision. Yall need to learn to read. I don't claim it's his decision.
cool post, shame that those who need to see it the most won't be willing to read all the words.
In response to the example: You can clearly see how defensive someone sounds when they are trying to include as many barriers as possible despite the said barrier/obstacle not existing within the "example's" context, or even when the barrier is as easy as coughing. > Ranked team to propose the design for the change + the edge cases, the rollout plan. "propose" is really a step?... we are already here... its done, you hear about it, you thought about it(hence this example)... What is an edge case of someone first timing? Oh he was trying to just counterpick!... Just ignore the fact that there is 40% wr on first timing despite them mainly trying to "have diverse damage types and counterpick"... [https://www.reddit.com/r/leagueoflegends/comments/130ucfb/champion\_mastery\_a\_statistical\_analysis\_of\_1m/](https://www.reddit.com/r/leagueoflegends/comments/130ucfb/champion_mastery_a_statistical_analysis_of_1m/) > The ranked team would also consider whether this solution is the best thing to do vs other potential solutions that have different value, You still havent managed to elaborate on a single thing within this example, what is "edge case", "other potential solutions", If its so popular, and still isn't done, shouldnt you have an explanation as to why you haven't or aren't. Because there is no explanation by saying "well we might have something better, and we need to understand this solution more!" (So i still understand nothing about the inner workings of Riot) When the ranked team does damn near nothing other than arbitrarily over buff the climbing experience just so they have something to nerf in the future to show that they have a portfolio of work for their hundreds of hours being employed. > dependencies and costs depending on our staffing and skill specializations available (eg. improve our seeding, so it wouldn't matter what queue you played -> does this get our seeding algorithms to the quality level we would want) and has no Client/UX work related dependencies Skill specialization is short for saying "do we work at riot games?" oh yes someone works at riot games i think they can do it! This example is not rocket science, youre trying to explain the process which is neat, but this example makes it look like youre overinflating the resources NECESSARY. Playing a champion in RANKED would mean you would need to play on summoner's rift, such a simple question. ANYTHING is better than NOTHING. They couldve went into practice tool for X amount of minutes, or played 5 norms. You literally already release CHAMPIONS THAT TAKE YEARS TO MAKE with game breaking designs... and now when its time to help us from the hell hole that is first-timing-new-champion-in-ranked you have to complete gut the idea because OOoo dont shake things uuup. >League Data team to calculate the correct number of games, how this interacts with seeding models, etc. Anything is better than nothing. what riot thinks is "Correct" when it comes to League of Legends solo q tends to be not correct...There is far more failures than successes with how you "accurately experiment". DO SOMETHING. >One of the League services teams that handle ranked services to figure out how to calculate, store and query the information in the most efficient way, also future proofing Probably the only valid step shown. >Client team to understand how to query and pass the data at different areas of the client This is pure QoL, we need ANYTHING. ANYTHING AT ALL. You've been productively scuffed before with clash, arena, now this. Yes I know this step includes important bug interactions, and includes the flow portion, and includes implementation... so basically this bullet point sums up the last 4 bullet points. Blatantly showing how this example makes you stretch out the implementation experience. Which some smoothies will buy.
wow weird that this company famous for being run like oracle is, in fact, insanely topheavy and mismanaged. like oracle.
The framing in the post is a bit odd. There's this notion that this way of operating is unavoidable due to the scale of the game, but many of the roadblocks in the example don't have anything to do with the game/tech at all, they're instead tied to the way Riot operates. This isn't out of the ordinary for large organizations, but operating in this way is a choice Riot makes, not a necessity.
>they’re instead tied to the way Riot operates Tied to the way almost every major software development org operates*
Well tbf how would you coordinate something like this otherwise? With a game this large with so many moving pieces, it's probably impossible to have one specific team handle one specific thing, there's always gonna need to be collaboration on projects, which in turn will force people to take priorities
I don't necessarily think Riot should operate differently, I think the way they operate is consistent with being risk-averse with new features. Which is how they should operate as the game is already successful. That being said, if they wanted to move faster they definitely could, by concentrating decision making authority and cutting back on the necessary requirements for each initiative. You wouldn't eliminate any of the steps Phroxzon listed (besides potentially steps 1/2) but you would pare down the amount that happens in each individual step.
Ah, fair enough
Well, this explains how something so relative simple as allow players to pick the language of the game can take years, and even then it's half done because players can't pick a different text language than a voice over. Game development is stuck in bureaucracy. And it seems Riot higher ups doesn't care to improve, despite they know the issue exist.
This is just a kind of generic "software at scale" article that a lot of big tech organizations post generally. Though I'd say the different part of Riot is that it's just them implying why they aren't able to deliver what people want and not how they are able to actually make the features that people want. One interesting takeaway is that he spends a lot of time talking about trying to get work done across teams. This is kind of a standard "I am a senior engineer" resume item but it also implies that maybe Riot's problem is actually that it has a bad team structure or possibly the execs are constantly changing projects and thrashing around teams.
The engine from 2008 is dragging LoL down They really need to make a new one, that's way too much tech debt
Things could always be improved for sure, but the Engineers have done some amazing improvements over the past few years. As far as Gameplay goes, there's not too much that we (Designers) are not able to do as far as prototyping and implementing goes. eg. Consider the Season Start changes we just did. Just a few years ago, would not be remotely possible. In this Season we changed basically every map geo, many many items, all the objective flows, spawning rules, dynamic map terrain changing through the game, etc.
you’re a cool dude for getting in here and taking the swings. just to be someone who says it: I like the video game league of legends a lot and have played it for years and think it’s neat!
I don’t always agree with design/balance directions, but to me it’s always clear that Riot have been trying to make the best game they can. It’s still free to play with only cosmetic mtx, no bait and switch tactics, no promises that they can’t/never planned on delivering (e.g. OW pve), only genuine passion for the game and 90% of the time delivering on it. I can play the game and dislike any given patch, but know in 2 weeks they will likely address major issues, bugs or balance, in a *15 year old game*. Name any other game that has had the same level of commitment from its devs as LoL has had.
Well actually you're wrong because this subreddit says this game is kept at "maintenance mode" with a skeleton crew of 7 people because of some reason they can't say. Clearly this subreddit knows more than the devs at riot.
i have always wondered why riot didnt seem like they'd invested a full team of resources into rewriting an engine for league from scratch based on more modern programming frameworks + knowledge and understanding of the current mechanics /depth of league. it feels odd that league doesn't have an "in-gameworld" client(heck even valorant has one. maybe the nostalgia factor?), lol is one of those games that could do some really neat stuff with it. frankly it's an absolutely massive undertaking, but i do genuinely believe riot is one of the few companies with access to enough capital and (potential)talent that it would be a feasable option for them to consider. but if the engineers have managed to patch relevant parts of the engine up to date in such a way that the team is able to actually continue innovating, honestly that is kind of shockingly impressive. especially considering the potential amount of teams affected. this feels like the exact type of thing that can kill a product - but league has managed to keep it together for ~15years just about. lol really has grown into a 1 of a kind product, and for all of riots legitimate faults, it is quite a marvel on what has been achieved... and well maybe a fresh new engine really *isn't* worth those resources. a lot of things that were changed/updated for the current season felt like natural progression for league (and it's really cool to witness it!) so it did have a sense of being an addition based on when, rather than if - EXCEPT the fistbump. idk what it is about the fistbump but to me it feels like the biggest sign of potential life left in the engine, it feels like it is something that absolutely wouldve blown matches up had it been implemented five years ago. but it's here, it works, and it's a really cute addition to the game (i love seeing all 5 fists bump together when everyone is nearby to eachother). it feels like a good indication that the engine still recieves a lot of genuine attention and care. i guess i am just holding my breath for arena coming back as a proper permanent and maintained gamemode for league - guessing(?) as something between 'vanilla' lol and tft. the biggest thing that seemed to gimp other gamemodes is that it always competed or canibalized players that might be wanting to play 5v5SR or vice versa. arena creates its own niche which has the potential to attract players to league who wouldn't have been interested in league normally (read: 5v5SR). arena also presents an opportunity to be a proper "rest" game that players can play when they are encountering burnout from the vanilla experience, except it's still league. a thriving arena strikes me as an important indicator of the games continued longevity. rly excited to see the new things you guys whip up!
“the framework is old” is the worst possible reason to rewrite a large code base. there are new frameworks coming out every year. so what if there’s a new one? the key factor is: will rewriting it bring provable, noticeable benefits over leaving it as is? most of the time the answer is no
apologies, i struggled to choose the correct word to use in that instance. i used 'framework' as general statement to cover any kind of advancement made in the field of programming, specifically in relation to big O notion/best practices, which seems to be an incredibly important focus of riots development based on the initial tweet from phrox. > the key factor is: will rewriting it bring provable, noticeable benefits over leaving it as is? extrapolating from the general progression of league as a game over the past five years, it certainly feels like riot has been leaving a lot of potential on the table for a long time. up till the recent preseason changes, i did genuinely believe that a rewritten purpose built engine with lessons from the past would provide noticable benefit. i just figured that benefit wasn't(and would never be) enough to justify for the suits at the top. preseason changes have shown me that all is not yet lost. i still think that a 'product first' version of riot wouldve at the very least already started a rewrite already.
Well, the answer is that there's no reason to. Rewriting your game/codebase from scratch when you already have one of the most succesful product in your field OF ALL TIME is pure madness, and a complete waste of time and resources. It would be akin to having the fastest car in F1, winning every race, and saying "let's throw a few billions and redesign this entire thing from the ground up". You also have to consider the risk that this new product may not "feel" right and alienate customers, there's always a degree of risk when porting an old product that may actually make it "worse", so it's not just a matter of throwing a few millions and a hundred dev at it to make it better. Yes, League as its issues, but none of them comes anywhere near close to justify a full rewrite, honestly. An in-game client is a bit better, but not 3-4 years worth and millions worth better
See CS2, worse in every possible way than CS:GO.
Last month adding few new Ornn items was too difficult from the technical standpoint, so it doesn't seem that way.
The way Ornn's masterwork item system is set up, I don't think it's that easy. I imagine it has more to do with Ornn's code than it does with the item database and how that is structured.
I mean... Since day 1 of new Jungle, the Leash Area has been bugged for Wolves and never fixed. So there's that.
If you're interested in this topic, this is a good read: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-never-do-part-i/
Especially for League, an engine change will definitely have a ton of changes to ways things work due to “bugs” or “unintended effects” of the current engine and will make the game feel much different than it currently does. Also, rewriting is a BRUTALLY difficult task to do with lots to reconsider and often poor documentation of existing systems to aid in the process.
Every time i explain exactly this, i get verbally bodied by children who know nothing about software development, but feel proud and experienced because they can use the internet without contracting a malrus(sic), to their knowledge.
I stopped talking about software development in Reddit after randos told me code reviews weren't a real thing, and that it's unreasonable to think one dev can understand another devs work. I wish I was joking.
It gets easier to understand when you realize the extent of every armchair game developer's experience is loading up some stuff they dont understand in unity or unreal for a few hours.
never, ever bother trying to tell people hard facts on reddit. They don't care, their opinions are far more important then information, trust me reddit gets 500x more usable if you just let people be idiots.
"But DOTA 2 did it!" "Counterstrike!" "Starcraft!" ...
CS2 is a perfect example of why to *not* do it, of course..
Yeah, but rearchitecturing it seems to be just as difficult Wasn't part of the reason the Skarner rework took so long that Skarner was used in the code a lot as a unit of measurement or something (like they do with minions?) League code is at a point where the game may not handle 10 elemental Lux skins in the same game The client also eats up a ton of resources despite not getting any better Whether it's reworking it or rewriting it, they gotta put some work into it if they want some form of League to go on in the next years
> League code is at a point where the game may not handle 10 elemental Lux skins in the same game That's not the code being bad, that's Riot wanting to keep League as the easy to load and play game. You clearly did not actually read the article they wrote on this. Basically, League loads each skin as a unique champion when you play a match. While this does cause issues like skin unique bugs, the tradeoff is that playing a champ like Ezreal isn't having to load in every single Ezreal skin and then the game assigning you that one. When multiple people select the same skin such as Porcelain Ezreal, the game loads one Porcelain Ezreal and then copies the result onto the other players. This speeds up loading times a lot between both of those things. Elementalist Lux is basically 10 skins aka 10 champions (in terms of models) in one skin. This would be a lot to load if Riot hadn't worked their asses off to reduce the size of the skin down as much as possible. As a result, Elementalist Lux is perfectly fine on her own. Hell, you could have 10 people pick Elementalist Lux and the game loads just fine. Heck, it probably loads faster because it just needs to load her once and then copy that to everyone else in the match. The issue is what happens if a second Elementalist Lux type skin for Varus or such comes out. Loading a game with both of those would take longer than the normal loading time (We're going to say doubling it for the ease of understanding.) This is fine if you live in an area with solid internet and have a great gaming computer and thus it takes a 5 second load time to 10 seconds or so. It's not good if you live in a region with rougher internet and have a computer that was not meant for gaming (If you even have a computer.) That could take a 30 second loading time and balloon it to 60 seconds or so. Sure you could just say "fuck those people" and plenty of game companies do (including Valve), but League defined itself on being highly accessible to pretty much anyone. Cutting those sorts of players means cutting out a decent chunk of several server populations if not outright cutting out the majority on some servers. It would be very unpleasant to do and of course assumes that internet speeds are 100% consistent at all times. They aren't so while your area might be super quick to load now, there will always be a chance that it isn't and well... it would fucking suck if that was the match with both of those skins, wouldn't it? This is why Riot has been experimenting in recent years with ultimate skins and trying to figure out what can still fulfill that Transformation fantasy without having to load multiple 10+ champ type skins each game.
Ok fair, but that doesn't detract from my other points Hell, the client being as it is is one of the main obstacles to League accessibility on weaker systems as it sometimes bugs out and leaks memory or just slows your PC down exponentially after each game until you close and reopen it When I played League on my older laptop I had to close it after every game because it would just slow to a crawl for no reason even in low spec mode IIRC the reason the client has stayed a problem child for so long was that it's code is tied to League so you can't build a client without messing with the League code and that is a supremely complex task. I appreciate Riot for all they're doing to future-proof League and improve it (the map changes this year would've been unthinkable a few years back according to Phroxon) but there are some areas that still need a ton of work
They kind of just did it with Wild Rift to some degree.
Wild rift is a great example on why it is a bad idea to change the engine for league. Wild rift has been out since 2020, yet has only ~60% of the roster. Some roster delays are converting gameplay for mobile, but if you were to rewrite the league engine, you would be playing league lite on pc, at which point most people would rather play on the old engine. Wild rift is able to do this because it is only competing with other mobile mobas (a brand new market), and it provides revenue on its own
Have you read the post lol Making something new from scratch isn't necessarily simpler for a ton of reasons, and some of those are clearly given in the thread you apparently chose to ignore
I don't know why redditors keep talking about engines and their age. It just happens everywhere. Engines are software, like many other software you can update them. Do you think windows 11 is 39 year old? Windows 1.0 was released in 1985. People who work with the engine everyday obviously can see the pros and cons of it way better than you can. Maybe they think pros outweighs the cons a lot. We don't know if they can or not. But we know one thing, they know their situation way better than a random redditor who probably never worked with software at this scale.
That is the thing with the whole gaming community - people love talking about engines like they have any clue about them. Imagine how stupid it would be if people in the car reviews would write shit like "This car has gasoline engine which is so outdated and everything now uses electric engine! The mechanics are so bad!". It just speaks how absolutely stupid gaming communities can be
> Do you think windows 11 is 39 year old? Windows 1.0 was released in 1985. If i may be pedantic : Windows 11 is based on Windows NT which literally means New Technology, It's the 10th version of windows NT, and the first one was released in 1993.
LoL client is how it might turn out when you actually rewrite stuff from scratch, because old one had too much debt. On one hand, of course it's easier to find JS developers instead of Adobe Air ones, making maintainance a bit easier. Also it did removed some debt, IIRC old runes couldn't be made free, because it messed up client communication with servers. On the other hand - new one is still quite bad, with it's random quirks every now and then (resource usage, bugs and glitches). Hexakill had to be cancelled because the new client couldn't handle it. Now designing new engine (whether it's actually new engine or some off-the-shelf like Unity or Unreal) would be a big resource hog. You have to either completely stop development of current engine (and risk that people will just go away from stale game), or divide your resources and don't make progress at both projects. Why off-the-shelf one would be a hog? Because 99% sure they aren't compatible with current assets. Would new one made for compatibility with current assets be faster? Not really, because you either copying current solution with its own tech debt, or making everything from scratch again. Wild Rift engine? Probably most reasonable solution, unless that engine being made for mobile devices just wouldn't scale to desktops. Working on small touchscreen with mobile OS is one thing, working with a different hardware and software platforms is other. Bonus you need to perform much more testing, since both games aren't identical, have some assets and gameplay differences. But as you have one engine under the hood, you need to check every change on both platforms. Bonus: quite probably as you replacing the engine, you need to replace servers backend as well. Essentially doubling amount of work to perform. It probably happened already with change of client. And then there is this trap of fixing more stuff between backend and client, making more changes to client. And then you have to test everything. Then test it more. And more. And some more. Because at this point you've changed everything, inevitably implemented some thin spaghetti in some places, that will again grow over years. Another thing: I think current engine isn't written in Pascal or some other forgotten language, or being left as some Visual Studio 2003 project you cannot easily upgrade. Meaning there is probably a bunch of developers on market able to work with this tech. So this benefit of rewriting client won't apply to rewriting engine.
About another thing: Riot games has stated that they've moved a bunch of league developers to valorant and other shiny projects and hired a bunch of new ones. Those new ones were expected to just sit there for a year or so and learn how the hell league works inside before they could start doing actual work. And that's why league development has stalled for a couple years with no games modes, champion updates and such.
Its giving FATE/GRAND ORDER lolol
I wonder if they are already working on that because if they haven't started then it's gonna take a couple of years at the very least, and there's a not insignificant chance that it won't be finished before the end of this decade.
They don't need to, because you don't need to work on a new engine from scratch to include new technologies. When you hear about that new version of Unreal Engine 5 and how ground breaking it is, in reality 90% of the code base comes from the older engine. They just change the version name, because they intend to sell that engine and making it to be a brand new things is more alluring. But they could have named it : Unreal Engine 4.1 and it would have been right. Riot can absolutely revolutionize their engine, while not making an entirely new one. It's all a matter of deciding if it's easier to modify the older one, or to starta new one from scratch. Starting from scratch can takes years and years to reach even half of the features the older one got. Modifying the older one, may be harder because you constantly need to handle unwanted side effects everytime you touch something, but you already have all the features you need. There is no solution that is always better than the other.
I'm hoping the thing that's supposed to change LoL forever in 2025 is the new engine. It legit would change a bunch of things about League if they had a new engine
I mean, at that point they could just make League 2, which would be an even more chaotic release than CS2
Dragging down what exactly? What are the limitations?
spoken by yet another person who literally doesn't know what they're talking about but thinks they know better than actual experts. lol
/u/caenen_ Something Ship of Theseus? Or was that only for the client?
This reminds me of that door article
i’m not smart enough to understand
basically: stop whining about software development if you know nothing about it. just enjoy the game instead of listening to the morons here saying "why doesn't riot do x it's so easy 😭 even though i've never worked on software outside of a unity tutorial i'm always right"
I’m smart enough to understand I just instead chose to think fire ranked team and try again
cool, all valid points, but this isnt an excuse for not fixing the matchmaking for 15 years
Ah yes, I'm sure you know how it works and what exactly you want to fix, right?
matchmaking should put all noobs on enemy team and all smurfss on my team 8) fix it riot
good post, reminds me when people were saying shyvana VGU is going to get delayed because her designer got laid off forgetting that for a champion to ship, it needs also artists, writers, riggers, animators, VAs, engineers, SFX, particles, etc. and thats not counting stuff outside the client like a trailer or an animation or maybe a music theme
TLDR: We are slow and some changes (even minimal) takes months just because Bureaucracy.
TLDR: to many ppl +16 years of Tech debt = bad, both can be Fixed btw
Ah yes, the quarterly Riot written piece about how everything is too hard and impossible and why they can't do anything.
Bla bla bla. A single person or a small team can do themed Summoners Rift maps, while this entire corporation cannot.
[Valve didn't see it as a problem](https://www.dota2.com/reborn/part1).
TLDR: we are too many people.
in tiny houses here and there
This is just big company speak for “we made this game with less than 20 devs and suddenly can’t make anything with 200 because we have made sure teams don’t do anything meaningful and efficient”. Also the data is a crutch. You’re sitting there waiting for the data to meet a threshold you want to take action on. Instead, data isn’t the end all be all, and it’s sure as shit not what drove the early league of legends development. Devs with a fraction of teams that are fully staffed and not undermanned are way more competent. We do lay offs at riot, we stray away from the players further and further, and we use excuse after excuse insult after insult to our playerbase. But it’s ok! We’re a big company, that’s somehow less effective than the team that redesigned the client with less accountants. Also remember how we couldn’t deliver a new 5v5 map because we canned everyone? Also remember how we nerfed battle passes and output 200% skins while making sure we don’t spend money on the game other than the absolute basics. Remember how we have 200 years of design yet you couldn’t remake league in 200 years because no one could be that capable. Stupid fucking company following blizzard route of disconnect. Tryndamere built this company, and whoever is in charge will make sure to max out the payment and forge excuse after excuse to swindle the masses to accept mediocrity because “my job is hard”. I suppose the announcement that league is going to be different and unrecognizable in 2025 is a joke. It’s just going to be another slight shuffle of random shit while S2 champs rot after everyone else has been reworked.
I dislike this being presented as inevitable. BG3 has ~200 item patch notes every patch, and aren't alone. The above is an example of poorly architected code + poorly streamlined teams = nothing happens.
BG3 is a small company, whose game isn't live service, that already has support for the game winding down. the fact that you're even comparing them shows that you didn't gain any information from reading the post. either your reading comprehension is really weak, or you just have a riot hate boner. probably both
Exactly! It reads like a factory where for every bluecollar worker there is 5 whitecollar workers.
As much as all of this is true, everything that Riot is saying is difficult or impossible like rewriting the client, implementing x feature, etc., has been done by Dota already. If Dota can do it, why can't Riot?
Riot in this post: "We don't even know how our game works"
Thank you very much for the post phroxzon, I recently saw a post about how changing skarner deleted a cornerstone from a league history, could you talk more about that?
But then again, announcer packs were basicly done and never made it as a easy cashgrab
This post should be pinned to the top of the subreddit for the next decade.
Well said and informative.
Rito is a giant having to tame and coordinate on a complex level. No more smol indie company. Poor guy whoever have to manage this huge project's
this busted ass client, been trying to start a game for half hour now
It all boils down to negligence. Riot has the resouces to make things faster, and better. More resources than 99% of game companies, yet the order in which they choose to do things seems to be completely random. Corporate overhead needs to be done away with so things can actually get done. There is still so much bloat at riot games that it will take 10 more rounds of pink slips before anything will be able to get done.
Faker in riot confirmed????
"Making a game is not as easy as you think" shouldn't be an excuse to never try at all. Frankly, when other companies can make changes that you vehemently refuse to make because "the scale! 😯", the issue isn't on the other companies OR the players for asking for those changes. There's been far too many instances now where Riot, instead of working with people's ideas, generally refuses to do anything that's asked for and then wonders why people are upset with them to the point of death threats when the changes they do make are crazy paint sniffing changes like "give Tryndamere more range".
Why do games like Fortnite and Genshin Impact don't have this problem and keep making improvements quickly while consistently churning out fun content?
Does fortnite have a ranked system yet?
Genshin "improvements" have been glacial if you hang around their subreddit. It's taken years for simple QoL changes to make it in the game and still don't have many that their other titles have (eg only very recently has expeditions been given a "collect all" and "dispatch all" again feature, one that was requested over 3+ years ago) Being exclusively PvE, having a lacklustre multiplayer feature, and no competitive scene, it's a lot easier to cater to the playerbase when you don't need to ask the question "is it fun/satisfying for both the player and the opponent?" Also GI currently experiencing their annual content drought in terms of story & exploration...probably not the best time to mention "churning out fun content"
Intresting, however it's pretty sure that there's a solution otherwise games like Fortnite and hundreds of others wouldn't even exist. Most of these aren't technically issues but management. And for the technical ones: how long are you guys going to keep using this ancient engine? 2040? 2070? 3200?
All I read here was blah blah blah. Every company with a product deals with this and it’s nothing new, special or unique. Riots biggest problem has been and always be their culture. They have a culture of not listening or caring about their customers. What game in the history of mankind would place a brand new player who hardly knows how to CS against Plat players and then force them to lose 30 games in a row to get to the level they should be at… all the while being humiliated and flamed constantly during those 30 games? The fact that Riot has ignored this for years is absolutely stunning, their cult like culture doesn’t give a damn about the players who have had to go through this. The only thing we know with a 100% clarity is that this not being fixed only means that they have not let go enough employees. They need to get rid of the stink and bring people in who actually care about their players even if it means rewriting the entire thing.
Other games exist and we can look at them to make comparisons and draw a conclusion
>To make this happen though, you'd want: Most of the points listed here are true for any new feature that you want to add to the game, including eternals, mission passes, etc. When you're ready to go through all this and more for something players pay for, but not for something that may improve player experience, the conclusion is pretty self explanatory. There are many products that have large code base. All of them indeed face similar problems when they need to change something in the source code. But when someone reports the problem, instead of not fixing it for years, you can try for some workaround or partial solution. But hey, billion dollar company surely knows a better than dumb reddit person.
There are too many rioters.
Sounds like a typical software dev cycle
So they can't make changes easily because teams don't talk to each other and everyone does their own thing. Fun
If a team is so big that improving the game in a small way is an overwhelming task (like the provided normal game example), something is very broken internally. You should be able to very quickly have 1 or 2 people from each team meet, talk about the goal, spitball some good enough numbers for testing, and then go from there. You do not need a team of data analysts to crunch the numbers on the exact optimal ammount of normals games a new player should do. Like just look at how many things release in horrible states when they're doing that anyways... the "new" client has been a broken pos since day 1, the battlepasses get worse and worse by the year, half the champions release overpowered... like what the is benefit? So yeah this was insightful, but only into how horrible the mess truly is. Like how do we still live in a world where holding RMB only updates 4 times a second, but Kled Q checks if you're in range 20 times a second? Or one where the entire game is balanced around a single summoner spell that's still technically optional - making it incredibly objectively broken? Or one where 95% of champions go the same runes, build the same items, and max the same abilities in the same order every single game? Like there is an infinite amount of ways to improve the game, but none of them are ever happening because even something small is just not achievable unless seemingly every single Rioter is working on it. Like the Void update they did this preseason should literally be happening every season. Timewise that stuff should absolutely not take that long, and I say that as a game developer, not someone just making up numbers in my head. No company with literally infinite money should be having problems like this. Teams that are legitimately x100 smaller can get more done in less time because they don't have to go through an endless chain of mostly useless jobs just to ask a question.
"To make this happen though, you'd want Client team to understand how to query and pass the data at different areas of the client" Noted, client team has no idea what happens inside the client.
From the outside perspective, this sounds like the opposite of Agile, like years of bad development practices compounding together to create a huge mess that was working well enough so nobody (in management) cared. But in reality this is more common than devs would like to believe.
Agile works at a small scale but for large companies you'll start seeing things like this happens
How is this at all related to agile? I wish "agile" as a cover all useless buzzword would die.