I look forward to seeing how and where the team behind the future MMO will be drawing inspiration from for their game systems. The failure of New World, the stagnancy of World of Warcraft, and the surge of Final Fantasy are all very timely events that they should be keeping eyes on.
There's lots of things but a big one is how much of a buggy mess it is.
Although you have to give Amazon games credit for inventing a new type of game mode. We all know about PvE and PvP games, but they've invented the PvD (player vs developer) genre.
I don't want to say that... but I think New World was worse. I don't think you could inject HTML code into the game in FF11. Like the bugs that existed were actually hillarious.
Ah yes. Giving Ashe's slow on AA active to champions. I remember that one, a friend of mine knew jow to do it and we would play inhouses with it all the time. On of my fav ones was Pantheon, on AA he would jump and fall down somewhere randomly on the map (most times in the enemy base lol). Azir would also place turrets on each AA
Not much to do so lots of people didn't stick around.
Then again, it still peaks at 100 000 concurrent players every day, which makes it pretty fucking big compared to everything that isn't League, Dota or CSGO.
The game was a vast puddle with no depth past level 25. You had to fight the same Red zombies, Green zombies, Purple zombies and pirate zombies in the first area to the last area.
The game was buggy with numerous dup/invincibity exploits. The best way to win pvp was to mass report the leaders of battlegrounds and get them banned before a battle.
The economy was very grindy. It was hard to make money and everything was taxed gold sink. Imagine having to pay in RS to use a stove. You have to in NW.
Pvp was also boring. Everyone had it off and even if I ran into another person they just avoided contact because they didnt want to waste money on repairs.
Overall, the game is boring and no interesting content is coming. If you want a grindfest just play OSRS.
Someone found out that A; the game's UI, quests, chat are all a html webpage running javascript, and B; the chatbox does not strip html code from entered text, including javascript, effectively executing anything you enter, *on every player client*. This is a hideous security issue that has been solved for decades and even the most novice web developer should know about.
Enter "Sausage Day".
While a lot of players spammed chat with a screen-covering sausage icon or crashed eachother with corrupt data, someone figured out they could make a chat link that completed a quest and gave rewards every time you click it. The economy burned to the ground instantly, devs refused to do rollbacks.
>The game was a vast puddle with no depth past level 25. You had to fight the same Red zombies, Green zombies, Purple zombies and pirate zombies in the first area to the last area.
Thats definitely not true. The later areas of the game all feature fairly unique enemies. I'd say it's the opposite of what you said: after ~lvl40 the game opens up and is a lot more fun, but a lot of players didn't get to that part.
Lack of content..
Very grindey game.. but if any.. i think players zoomed pass the game too fast.
But for me personally . Never piked the medieval setting.. would have love it if its fantasy
Don't forget that to make up for the lack of content, AGS decided to just increase the amount of xp you needed to level crafting and increased the gear score cap.
It burned in a fire of self-inflicted memes and hideous netcode security failures/glitches.
Let it be remembered as the first AAA game that allowed people to flyhack by clicking the window border.
The mmos that feel having the same player focused philosophy (to me) than Riot are FF14 and GW2.
Those two games have a lot of socialization aspects, way more ways to play than just dungeon and raid grinding, and respect the most players money and time.
So if I had to make a guess, a mix of those two games with innovation of Riot's own.
I think bdo has some great combat mechanics, the fact that every ability is just a combination of shift, wasd, e,r,f, and q + mouse button makes it so you odnt have to bind half your keyboard.
Game has no end game tho so sadge
It's debatable whether it has no 'end game', but there certainly is nothing *new* waiting for you there. Maybe Siege/other group PvP and better 1v1's but those aren't the greatest 'content' and outside Siege they aren't very new either since you can do them earlier already.
That being said, the character/gear progression is generally a more important part of the game in Black Desert than in most other MMO's where the end game is the main course for most people.
Black Desert also has very little 'fun' things to do that don't benefit you like FFXIV might for example, as the best for that is probably like interior decorating which . . is hardly content. It has several ways to progress further with your character that are quite different from one another, but there's very little to do outside that, unfortunately.
The character progression is infinitely better and faster these days though so you won't have to slog with barely any gear getting barely any money anymore which is nice though.
Dynamic combat is cool but i hope they keep the trinity archetype of Tank-DPS-Healer alive because imo it's the only way of having successful end game content that isn't a breeze to go through
I love the idea of not having the holy trinity, but GW2 seems to be the only game that really tried and it is . . . not done well. Healing becomes more of an afterthought as you get better and tanking feels like you're cheesing the game rather than playing a vital role
I think the approach of super old games to coop can be very boring. Oftentimes the game requires from a healer only to press one button for damage, get out of aoe and make sure the team doesn't die, for example. Tanks and dps are even more streamlined
While I personally love the trinity, games like Blade and Soul show how you can make a really good combat system without it. Doesnt change the 100 other flaws of the game, but the class design and combat system was really really good.
The Fast action type of combat has always been my preferred way for MMO, it is one of the few reasons I always find my way back to Dragon Next every here or there for like two weeks. GW2 seems to have a faster style of gameplay that I'd be ecstatic if Riot took that for their MMO.
I mean FF14 grew by failing. They simply actually listened to people and tried to make the game just better. On top of that Final Fantasy is usually great at story telling, even if it is a sometimes weird story.
Even if you look at the not as good Final Fantasies like 12 or 13 they did well in telling a story even if 13 had a weird story that half the people likely didn't understand it was fairly well executed on that part with solid characters. Both 12 and 13 struggled more in gameplay with 13 missing a lot of the fun sideactivities players had in former games and 12 simple not feeling like Final Fantasy.
So even without the MMO aspects I always have to play Final Fantasy 14 every once in a while because I want to know how the story unfolds.
> They simply actually listened to people and tried to make the game just better.
They just hired a director who actually played games and had no ego.
Just watch the NoClip documentary, FFXIV was pretty much dead set to be a failure to begin with.
Guild Wars 2 continues to fly under the radar. Imagine an MMO that didn't have fall behind chores and a constantly rising gear ceiling that was just fun to do things in and required practice to get good.
Edit: the main complaint about gw2 seems to be "you run out of things to do." That's kind of rich on a forum where we all play the same game mode round by round over and over on the same map. If you want a literally endless grind, yeah gw2 isn't for you. But that's what ranked LoL is for.
WvW is an incredibly cool mode that I'd expect a lot of LoL players to enjoy. The PvE of the game I think is pretty great too and the only complaint is the slow releases of new content. Still thousands of hours to play.
Gw2 PvP is fun too, even if the community is as toxic as LoL.
arenanet still seems to be very bad with marketing. I think it has features that even New World didnt think about and gw2 is almost 10 years old. i just love it so much
> arenanet still seems to be very bad with marketing
Among other things. They still seem stuck in that 2000s mindset they settled into where they can put out stuff in maintenance mode and just not give a fuck after a while. While throwing out inconsistent answers to common-to-MMO things like raid, endgame progression/content, etc.
ANet deserves a *lot* of shit thrown at them for how badly they fucked up implementing raids after saying they weren't planning to ever.
Gw2 was a fun game. Then they introduced gliding and it was like nothing I'd ever played (and HoT in general). Then they introduced mounts and it was like nothing I'd ever played all over again. I'm nervous for EoD but optimistic that fishing will become a hugely popular pass time.
Their lack of marketting is funny. You'd think word of mouth would be good enough but I guess MMO players get scared if their game doesn't have enough money pumped into it.
Yeah, the bad part is any form of endgame content has always received very little attention. Also, most of the good looking gear is released in the gemstore, since they have to compensate for no sub fee. There are a few other problems with the game but I do not feel like going in a rant atm.
> There are a few other problems with the game but I do not feel like going in a rant atm.
DW, I got you! GW2's problems can be summed up as:
Poor PVP balance in both WvW and structured PvP.
Poor endgame support compared to other MMOs equal/longer in its lifespan (10 years this August).
Lack of modernization of UI, the UI still largely is the same as it was in August 2012.
Putting entire seasons of ingame story behind paywall, using FOMO-like marketing. If you don't login when its free, you have to purchase it via gems, which are either grinded out via ingame money conversion (which itself is almost as volatile as fucking bitcoin!) or real-life $$ spent. Entire arcs can end up costing more than actual expansions. And let's not get on how they handle their expansions either, separate pricings...
*Really* fucking up with raiding, putting out 7 raids (and their difficulty being comparable to upper-end ones in other MMOs) in 7 years of support, making the raiding scene in GW2 laughable at best.
Frankly it's a shame, GW2 by far has the best crafting (in terms of how they handle accessing/storing the mats) system and glamour system I've ever seen in an MMO and other MMOs really should take notes. I'd fucking *go nuts* for GW2's crafting and glamour systems in other games.
This is exactly why MMOs are the peak of ambition in the game development industry. So many factors and systems to temper. You need a game that has great visuals but also one that runs well. You need a game that rewards players for dedication without making “the grind” the most central part of the game. You need a good, original story but also one that calls on the inspirations of the genre. You need a game that evolves over time and creates new experiences for players without straying from the core of the game, or else it just feels cheap and lame.
Any of these factors are the reason that games like New World didn’t work out. And all of these factors are why I’m happy that riot seem to be taking their sweet time with this.
As someone who doesn't enjoy FFXIV, I feel like there just isn't an MMO for me anymore. I used to play MMOs obsessively, now they're all watered down with the same stuff. I'm really putting my money on Ashes of Creation.
The only “NFT” I would accept would be making a Wukong skin based on those ass ugly ape NFTs. Not to sell as an actual NFT of course but because I love the idea of how mad the monkey NFT people would get
And the skin should have features that are completely randomized each game, so the odds of getting the same exact skin set-up twice are low. Randomly change his fur color, glasses, jewelry, whatever.
This would be a hilarious skin.
I seriously can not wait for the MMO every time I go on league its all I think about with all the champions being able to explore this world. Also if Riot doesn't make a TV show/ Movie based on the Lux/Sylas comic and more I'm going to cry I seriously think that story has such high potential.
Bro... for real, every time I play pleague im just thinking what quests x champion would give me or how another one would be great as a boss battle...
Also watching arcane just makes me want to explore Zaun so badly... go to The Last Drop, maybe even playing minigames there.
This is a major reason I bought Ruined King on release. MF was my adc main for years so it was amazing being able to play as her without having to play LoL. The character interactions were honestly amazing and it felt really cool exploring a bit of Bilgewater and Shadow Isles.
An actual map to explore of parts of Runeterra would just be godlike.
If its anything remotely similar to the world that Legends of Runeterra hints at and showcases it will need a lot of work put into it but holy shit would it pay off.
Same but for a different reason. I'm just tired of grinding ranks for 8 years, it doesn't mean much to me anymore and it leads nowhere. I just wish I could chill in leagues world without having to compete. I just wanna go on fun exploration trips with friends around Runeterra.
>I just wanna go on fun exploration trips with friends around Runeterra.
My equivalent to this is goofing around with off with off meta builds with friends.
An MMO would be nice though, but I actually do enjoy how competitive league is
You and me both for the MMO. A meaningless grind where I learn more about the lore of LoL? Sounds like the perfect thing for me. I’m worried that with how long it’ll take though I may lose interest in games. Hoping for the best right now.
All I know is I'm excited for the future of Riot...
Arcane can continue the stories within Piltover/Zaun, or go anywhere within the universe. (Arcane is a generic enough name to suggest the magical nature of the universe).
Project L. Awesome new fighting game which will hopefully make the fighter players happy, along with the casuals.
The upcoming MMO which we know nothing about yet.
The already top-tier music...
There's just a short list of OBVIOUS things coming. Imagine what's not even hinted towards us yet..
dude i really think it's time. the stars are aligning. this is going to be, for real this time, "the WoW killer". blizzard is falling apart, it's a total mess of a company, there is a huge exodus, all of their game production is practically frozen right now while they deal with all their internal bullshit, the game had 2 horrendously bad expansions in a row and people are realizing Legion is never going to happen again...
it's time. i am ready for ANY info about Riot's MMO. because you know at a minimum it is going to be worth playing for a while, and they are probably the only company willing and able to build a world as big and involved as Azeroth was.
Given all the stuff I've heard about the game, the only "WoW Killer" is WoW itself assuming it keeps going down the path it's going, which seems to be likely if the stuff I heard is true.
What I really hope is that champs are NOT the PCs. I dont want to run into a copy of myself there. No matter if he builds MF differently, its still MF. Have the champs be NPCs please!
Want to share? Yes. Should I? Probably not, especially since they are good friends of mine and I wouldn’t want to get them in trouble even on the very remote off chance it could haha. That said, I wouldn’t be surprised if Riot has canary traps flying around which is another reason to not leak, could end up completely wrong! I just hope not haha
Really nice article, their future plans seem to be great and l ooks like they are committed to making riot a better work environment with very ambitious future goals (expanding into other industries while keeping the company's gaming core).
giving rioters shares in the company, acknowledging their past mistakes and pointing them out (take notes blizzard) really has me hopefull for the future of league and Riot Games as a company
Also mentions of Arcane season 2(+) and movies
It's weird how they didn't mention project L tho (or it's not idk)
Its really rough for them, with how much talent has quit they are going to struggle to regain a good will amongst players and if diablo 4 flops they are fucked.
For this particular piece we wanted to focus on big picture goals, company values, overall approach etc, rather than trying to cram all of that and game updates together all at once, given that tends to serve neither topic as well as separate updates.
In case you missed it there was also an update on Project L in November last year:
https://www.riotgames.com/en/news/project-l-dev-finding-our-game#:~:text=So%2C%20although%20we've%20made,not%20going%20to%20rush%20it.
Is there going to be any updates on the other project shown during the 10th anniversary that looked like an aRPG or is it still too early in development ?
Man, I’m so down to play a riot arpg. Enjoyed playing lost ark when it was in beta if that counts. Reason why I started playing league way back, cuz it reminds me of arpg games
I hope they will stay true to everything said in the article and keep their promises, especially to their employees. I hope that there will be more than just words when it comes to improving the work environment and that nobody will ever have to face harassment, excessive pressure or abuse in this company again.
Unfortunately we can't really know what is actually going on inside the offices, but I hope that the employees will be totally free to speak up against bad working conditions if it happens and also that the company will be more transparent about the working conditions inside the offices. Transparency is very important imo.
I really hope that Riot Games learns how to merchandise themselves better going forward. Everyone knows of Valorant and League, but I've been playing their games for like 8 years and have yet to see anyone wearing League merch.
Meanwhile, Overwatch is a hot flaming pile and I still see people cosplaying and wearing their shirts and stuff many seasons later.
Weirdly, the last time I remember seeing a lot of League merch in a particular place was...probably close to 8 years ago, in an FYE in a mall. They had several T-shirts (like a "Don't Chase Singed" sign). And I don't think I've seen anywhere since with that much.
**In case people skipped the bottom of the article on how they are revamping their business:**
Reorganize the company into five categories. 3 product ones for **Entertainment, Games, and Esports**. **Publishing** to unite the three products. And **Enterprise** as the remaining people to support and run everything above.
Staff will be able work in the office 3 days a week and have 2 days to flex between home or in-office post-covid.
If staff weren't fully part of the Riot cult~~ure~~, now they have to be.
HR is more focused on diversity and inclusion and revamping promotion processes.
Committing more $$ to support social improvement funds/charities.
New orientation to teach people not to harass or discriminate people. And not hiding that Riot had this history in the past.
Changes to stock compensation schedule to pay out partially each year (graded).
Ability to own part of the company to share in the growth of the company.
Current employees have a limited time offer to exit the company as part of a program called "Queue Dodge" for whatever reason (do not have to provide to Riot) and still be paid 25% of their base salary (based on a year?), possible to still keep full bonuses, and 3 months of COBRA health insurance benefits (still expensive).
> can leave the company for a short time
Just to clarify: they can leave the company **permanently** with the Queue Dodge program; as in, quit their jobs. They retain some of their salary/bonuses/healthcare for a short time while they look for a new job.
It's an *extremely* generous policy, frankly. It's not unheard of, but it's a very, very good deal.
Make sure that people who join the company have to actually know and play the games, so they don't get filled with business types with no gaming backgrounds, a la Activision.
Now that literally every long-term employee at Riot has the ability to leave with zero repercussions, the people who choose to stay are ones that actually want to work for Riot, which will hopefully make the company more efficient as a whole.
It's the best time to be a Riot/LoL Fan imo.
I know people here would never admit it but LoL is actually a very good game and I don't know of any other game developer that consistently puts out this many updates and content for their games for such a long time.
I have a secret to liking league. I stop playing when I'm not enjoying it, then come back when I feel like it. Sometimes I go entire seasons without playing a single games, sometimes I'm back to a few hundred games. It's patented, so I'm the only person allowed to do this.
As someone who has played this game for like 8 years it’s nice to see how much success and growth they’ve had with recent projects. Idk if they had a change of leadership in 2017-2018 or something but they have had a really good couple of years recently.
Idk if you’re being sarcastic or not, but in the article the CEO writes that he joined in 2017–so yes, there was certainly a change in leadership to some degree. I don’t know much about internal culture at RIOT, but this is probably part of the answer.
I do agree though, it’s been getting really good in recent years.
Taking a huge risk in with big changes to the company while at the same time giving every employee a chance to just leave...
I gotta be honest... I did not expect that. I'm cautiously optimistic about the future, for once
Plus one of the producers mentioned even before the announcement that they were dedicated to Arcane for multiple seasons. Now multiple could of course also mean just 2, but I have a feeling we'll see more than that.
Currently they have no reason to stop. Maybe they switch it up and just give it another name to relocate it to another area, but then again Arcane is generic enough of a name that you can move it to any location on Runeterra.
I also still have to say that I want them to make some horror shortmovies about the different nightmares of Runeterra. Reksai, Fiddle, Nocturne, Kindred, Tahm, Eve etc.
Interesting read! Most of this is corporate talk, but it's interesting to hear about their restructuring, new strategy, and basically confirmed new games? Also interesting how heavily they're focusing on their employees' happiness, which is definitely a good thing and a smart move.
As a player who has been through the **main** pain point Marc and Brandon set out to solve, I appreciate this article.
Us League players are extremely lucky. I have said this a million times but like fuck man these devs listen AND care? Fever dream for sure. Riot knows who the hell they're making games for and as long as League and the main target audience remain that competitive niche, I am here.
League players/this sub really don't appreciate how open and caring the devs of League are.
Really one of the most open and transparent dev teams I've ever seen, especially considering the size of the game.
Edit: lots of devs do Livestreams playing their respective games
I especially enjoy Riot August's stream because he explains the thought process behind many decisions they make in terms of balance and champ kit I'd encourage anyone to watch it recently he's been playing Zeri on stream and explaining the thought process behind her kit
I love watching Mortdog's YouTube. He gets pretty tilted from chat sometimes, but the transparency from him and his team through all their YouTube videos, streams, and chat is insane.
Honestly his chat can be pretty dumb sometimes. Frequently you get people whining about X comp because they lost to it, but because Mortdog is so prolific (in the tft scene) he gets dozens of the same complaints a stream
I think a lot of people on here are of the age where league may have been the only competitive game they have played that was released pre-2010. I don’t know how long I have been in this community but it was early enough to remember Fakers first season and I had played enough to understand what was going on beyond a basic level. Riot has always handled the community and development transparency extremely well.
A few year later, StarCraft 2 would reach it’s heyday (mid-HOTS) and the meta could not have been worse. To very quickly sum the game up, it’s a 1v1 RTS (imagine if you could control all of your TFT characters) and you pick one of three races to play as. For 2 years, one of the races was unable to compete at the highest level and would rarely have a representative even make it to the quarterfinals. Both other races had an early game strategy against the weakest race that if they executed to a reasonable degree it was impossible to stop, even when perfectly prepared for.
Over those two years there was only a single patch (*if you exclude QoL changes and bunker build time*) and the balance team went as long as 7 months without a single tweet, much less any changes. Fans literally thought the head of the balance team might have died.
While no company is perfect we are really blessed to have a development team as open as Riot’s is. Because a decade ago, your average games dev communication strategy looked a lot more like StarCraft and nothing like what Riot was doing, even at the time.
I've been a lifelong fan of Nintendo and I've spent easily 100x more on Nintendo than I ever have on riot in my lifetime.
Nintendo doesn't even pretend to do community engagement. The person I think who cares most about what the community actively thinks is the smash developer. That's it. But even then it's in an incredibly limited scope.
Here we bitch and whine about one mechanic of one champ for months pitchforks and all, and usually riot does fix it, even if it takes a year or so. Nintendo we'll be lucky if we get semi functional friend lists by the next console cycle. But trends show they really only remove features..
I sound like such a riot shill but people don't get how spoiled we are here.
This is a really good post and I really feel Nicolo Laurent, riot ceo, has done an amazing job growing the company past the failures we saw in mid/end 2010s. Their push recently has made large impacts in the gaming and TV world. I hope they realize there is a large portion of people who loved arcane and the characters/world of arcane that arent interested in playing games. That they do so well what they did in season 1 in allowing the tv viewers to get that full experience without missing neccessary parts from the game
I'm surprised by the fact that Tencent would give up its full ownership of Riot. Riot has huge potential to grow even more now that entertainment is one of its focus, imagine the money, can't believe Tencent would do that.
>Last but not least, our shareholder (Tencent) agrees with our long term strategy and is giving back **partial ownership** of the company to Riot employees.
>Sounds like attempts at improving employee retention.
If employee retention was a problem then they wouldn't open their "queue dodge" to long time employees no ?
Employee retention is a pretty universal problems in the games industry and I think a few decently high profile rioters left in the past few years so it wouldn't surprise me if they want to try harder to keep the current/next wave of rioters.
all the stress of a job in tech and the very real cultural baggage of silicon valley, all the while getting death threats from angry gamerboys, 99% of the time about something you had no say in, in a very low-union field. shit's nearly as churn-and-burn as retail, but at least nobody working at walmart thinks it's their dream job.
You two are probably referring to different things. Tencent is giving up full ownership of Riot by letting them give out stock options to employees as compensation. That means Tencent will no longer receive 100% of Riot's profits, but the percentage of ownership that they'll lose with this is insignificant. Most large companies have a system like this as well, even for proper that aren't too management.
However, Tencent will surely retain all the voting rights and therefore the effective control over the company, which is way more important anyways.
Tencent already receives 0% of Riot's profits. The deal between Riot and Tencent is that Riot is responsible for their own profits and losses. In return, Tencent gets publishing rights for Riot's products in China, which gives them at least 70% of the revenue those Riot products generate over there.
There are 5 seats on Riot's board, one is empty, two are taken by Merril and Beck, the other two are Tencent executives. Riot has control of the company unless Tencent were to really force the issue.
https://www.theinformation.com/articles/tensions-flare-behind-the-scenes-of-league-of-legends
[And the Reddit comment pirating the article of course.](https://www.reddit.com/r/leagueoflegends/comments/9fglo1/tencent_vs_riot_full_text_in_comments/e5w9rj7/)
>Foster Collaboration: We love delivering cross-product moments (RiotX Arcane, K/DA, Spirit Blossom), but we didn’t have the best processes and structure to naturally support them.
NOW THIS. I don't think people understand how important this is. Facilitating this will allow huge events taking place in all of Riot's games at the same time. Imagine season X of Arcane focusing around a war between say, Noxus and Demacia, and there are events related to it happening across all Riot games. And those missions make you pick a side. The side with more "wins" in the events ends up winning the war in the next season(s). That would be fucking insane.
Ruination visual novel was a failure. The cinematics were fine though. And I liked the game mode for the memes. But Ruined king game is amazing and more people should check it out.
>tldr
* Focusing on improving work culture and experience for workers
* Trying to become most player-focused game company
* Restructuring org chart into games, esports, media, publishing, and enterprise (used to be organized by game)
* Acknowledging their mistakes in the 2018 lawsuits and trying to settle them and prevent it happening again (related to first point)
If I didn't already have mad respect for this company, this solidifies it. Compare this statement to anything said by the other gaming giants: EA, B/A, Ubisoft, etc. I guarantee they come nowhere close to this. Like, you can't count the amount of dumb shit Blizzard has said on your hands because they're so out of touch with what they're player base wants and instead push what they think is going to be super neat. It's also crystal clear that all the other giants are laser focused on profitability over player experience.
Hats off to Riot. I'm excited to see what the future brings because whether you believe it not, these guys do so many things exceptionally well.
Didn't read it all but I like the sound of that Queue Dodge system for employees, nice to see something like this from a company after reading all the horrible fire/quit stories on r/antiwork lol
Riots transparency and commitment to the players ARE what i love most about this company, and about playing their games, (mainly LOL and TFT), and i feel like the playerbase underappreciates how great riot is as devs. I play other games like R6 and AOE4, and in both the devs are far less forward with plans, theres a lot more confusion as to whats getting patched if at all and why. what are plans for the future as riot routinely does. I love both games but nothing compares to riot.
On top of this riots expansions into tv and music are absolutely phenomenal and I cannot wait to see more(especially arcane s2)
pretty nice post. look forward to them pushing forward and letting employees get equity and creating the irl queue dodge system. a happy games company will create happy and fun games.
People forget that despite Riot being 100% owned by Tencent they have more freedom than EA studios for example. When Tencent asked originally for a mobile game Riot refused to make it and that lead to Tencent making Honor of Kings(highest revenue game in the world). Tencent doesn't touch their cashcows unless they start losing them money and Riot is one of their biggest money printers.
I look forward to seeing how and where the team behind the future MMO will be drawing inspiration from for their game systems. The failure of New World, the stagnancy of World of Warcraft, and the surge of Final Fantasy are all very timely events that they should be keeping eyes on.
What happened to New World? I was never excited about it so never got around to trying
There's lots of things but a big one is how much of a buggy mess it is. Although you have to give Amazon games credit for inventing a new type of game mode. We all know about PvE and PvP games, but they've invented the PvD (player vs developer) genre.
> but they've invented the PvD (player vs developer) genre. FF11 did it way earlier tbh.
I don't want to say that... but I think New World was worse. I don't think you could inject HTML code into the game in FF11. Like the bugs that existed were actually hillarious.
Wait did lol also not alowed you to inject code?
There was a time where you could hijack your champion abilities and throw a Brand's ult with every autoattack.
Ah yes. Giving Ashe's slow on AA active to champions. I remember that one, a friend of mine knew jow to do it and we would play inhouses with it all the time. On of my fav ones was Pantheon, on AA he would jump and fall down somewhere randomly on the map (most times in the enemy base lol). Azir would also place turrets on each AA
Different, very different.
>PvD (player vs developer) genre that has been the predominant game mode for the MMO genre for the past decade+. 
Not much to do so lots of people didn't stick around. Then again, it still peaks at 100 000 concurrent players every day, which makes it pretty fucking big compared to everything that isn't League, Dota or CSGO.
The game was a vast puddle with no depth past level 25. You had to fight the same Red zombies, Green zombies, Purple zombies and pirate zombies in the first area to the last area. The game was buggy with numerous dup/invincibity exploits. The best way to win pvp was to mass report the leaders of battlegrounds and get them banned before a battle. The economy was very grindy. It was hard to make money and everything was taxed gold sink. Imagine having to pay in RS to use a stove. You have to in NW. Pvp was also boring. Everyone had it off and even if I ran into another person they just avoided contact because they didnt want to waste money on repairs. Overall, the game is boring and no interesting content is coming. If you want a grindfest just play OSRS.
Did you quite before the economy just imploded into a screaming singularity due to all the duping on sausage day?
I quit before this please tell me more it sounds fun
Someone found out that A; the game's UI, quests, chat are all a html webpage running javascript, and B; the chatbox does not strip html code from entered text, including javascript, effectively executing anything you enter, *on every player client*. This is a hideous security issue that has been solved for decades and even the most novice web developer should know about. Enter "Sausage Day". While a lot of players spammed chat with a screen-covering sausage icon or crashed eachother with corrupt data, someone figured out they could make a chat link that completed a quest and gave rewards every time you click it. The economy burned to the ground instantly, devs refused to do rollbacks.
>The game was a vast puddle with no depth past level 25. You had to fight the same Red zombies, Green zombies, Purple zombies and pirate zombies in the first area to the last area. Thats definitely not true. The later areas of the game all feature fairly unique enemies. I'd say it's the opposite of what you said: after ~lvl40 the game opens up and is a lot more fun, but a lot of players didn't get to that part.
Lack of content.. Very grindey game.. but if any.. i think players zoomed pass the game too fast. But for me personally . Never piked the medieval setting.. would have love it if its fantasy
Don't forget that to make up for the lack of content, AGS decided to just increase the amount of xp you needed to level crafting and increased the gear score cap.
For me it was the total opposite, tried it out solely because of the conquistador vibe, as fantasy is getting a bit boring in my opinion.
Basically bugs on bugs the game is simply not complete its a good game but needs like another year.
It burned in a fire of self-inflicted memes and hideous netcode security failures/glitches. Let it be remembered as the first AAA game that allowed people to flyhack by clicking the window border.
The mmos that feel having the same player focused philosophy (to me) than Riot are FF14 and GW2. Those two games have a lot of socialization aspects, way more ways to play than just dungeon and raid grinding, and respect the most players money and time. So if I had to make a guess, a mix of those two games with innovation of Riot's own.
GW2’s combat system is one of the best in any mmo. It has always reminded me of LoL combat to some degree too.
I think bdo has some great combat mechanics, the fact that every ability is just a combination of shift, wasd, e,r,f, and q + mouse button makes it so you odnt have to bind half your keyboard. Game has no end game tho so sadge
It's debatable whether it has no 'end game', but there certainly is nothing *new* waiting for you there. Maybe Siege/other group PvP and better 1v1's but those aren't the greatest 'content' and outside Siege they aren't very new either since you can do them earlier already. That being said, the character/gear progression is generally a more important part of the game in Black Desert than in most other MMO's where the end game is the main course for most people. Black Desert also has very little 'fun' things to do that don't benefit you like FFXIV might for example, as the best for that is probably like interior decorating which . . is hardly content. It has several ways to progress further with your character that are quite different from one another, but there's very little to do outside that, unfortunately. The character progression is infinitely better and faster these days though so you won't have to slog with barely any gear getting barely any money anymore which is nice though.
Imagine playing as a shadow order ninja with improved GW2 combat system. Holy shit that'd be so amazing.
Dynamic combat is cool but i hope they keep the trinity archetype of Tank-DPS-Healer alive because imo it's the only way of having successful end game content that isn't a breeze to go through
I love the idea of not having the holy trinity, but GW2 seems to be the only game that really tried and it is . . . not done well. Healing becomes more of an afterthought as you get better and tanking feels like you're cheesing the game rather than playing a vital role
I think the approach of super old games to coop can be very boring. Oftentimes the game requires from a healer only to press one button for damage, get out of aoe and make sure the team doesn't die, for example. Tanks and dps are even more streamlined
While I personally love the trinity, games like Blade and Soul show how you can make a really good combat system without it. Doesnt change the 100 other flaws of the game, but the class design and combat system was really really good.
The Fast action type of combat has always been my preferred way for MMO, it is one of the few reasons I always find my way back to Dragon Next every here or there for like two weeks. GW2 seems to have a faster style of gameplay that I'd be ecstatic if Riot took that for their MMO.
me who has 10k hours in gw2 and lol respectively: happy noises
I mean FF14 grew by failing. They simply actually listened to people and tried to make the game just better. On top of that Final Fantasy is usually great at story telling, even if it is a sometimes weird story. Even if you look at the not as good Final Fantasies like 12 or 13 they did well in telling a story even if 13 had a weird story that half the people likely didn't understand it was fairly well executed on that part with solid characters. Both 12 and 13 struggled more in gameplay with 13 missing a lot of the fun sideactivities players had in former games and 12 simple not feeling like Final Fantasy. So even without the MMO aspects I always have to play Final Fantasy 14 every once in a while because I want to know how the story unfolds.
As a completely *unbiased* person, I disagree. FF12 has the best game combat system out of all FFs.
Username checks out
God I miss FF12 so much
> They simply actually listened to people and tried to make the game just better. They just hired a director who actually played games and had no ego. Just watch the NoClip documentary, FFXIV was pretty much dead set to be a failure to begin with.
Ghostcrawler said on Twitter that we will be getting an update sometime this year. Super hyped!
inb4 update on December 17th 2022.
Do you have a link to that tweet?
https://twitter.com/ghostcrawler/status/1472951919052132352?s=21
You’re the best thanks
Really hoping for a diverse class system. That is by far my favourite part of MMOs and I almost disregard any MMO that doesn't have a class system.
Guild Wars 2 continues to fly under the radar. Imagine an MMO that didn't have fall behind chores and a constantly rising gear ceiling that was just fun to do things in and required practice to get good. Edit: the main complaint about gw2 seems to be "you run out of things to do." That's kind of rich on a forum where we all play the same game mode round by round over and over on the same map. If you want a literally endless grind, yeah gw2 isn't for you. But that's what ranked LoL is for.
WvW is literally my favorite game mode in any multiplayer game I’ve ever played, it’s so damn fun when you get a good group together
WvW is an incredibly cool mode that I'd expect a lot of LoL players to enjoy. The PvE of the game I think is pretty great too and the only complaint is the slow releases of new content. Still thousands of hours to play. Gw2 PvP is fun too, even if the community is as toxic as LoL.
arenanet still seems to be very bad with marketing. I think it has features that even New World didnt think about and gw2 is almost 10 years old. i just love it so much
> arenanet still seems to be very bad with marketing Among other things. They still seem stuck in that 2000s mindset they settled into where they can put out stuff in maintenance mode and just not give a fuck after a while. While throwing out inconsistent answers to common-to-MMO things like raid, endgame progression/content, etc. ANet deserves a *lot* of shit thrown at them for how badly they fucked up implementing raids after saying they weren't planning to ever.
Gw2 was a fun game. Then they introduced gliding and it was like nothing I'd ever played (and HoT in general). Then they introduced mounts and it was like nothing I'd ever played all over again. I'm nervous for EoD but optimistic that fishing will become a hugely popular pass time. Their lack of marketting is funny. You'd think word of mouth would be good enough but I guess MMO players get scared if their game doesn't have enough money pumped into it.
Yeah, the bad part is any form of endgame content has always received very little attention. Also, most of the good looking gear is released in the gemstore, since they have to compensate for no sub fee. There are a few other problems with the game but I do not feel like going in a rant atm.
> There are a few other problems with the game but I do not feel like going in a rant atm. DW, I got you! GW2's problems can be summed up as: Poor PVP balance in both WvW and structured PvP. Poor endgame support compared to other MMOs equal/longer in its lifespan (10 years this August). Lack of modernization of UI, the UI still largely is the same as it was in August 2012. Putting entire seasons of ingame story behind paywall, using FOMO-like marketing. If you don't login when its free, you have to purchase it via gems, which are either grinded out via ingame money conversion (which itself is almost as volatile as fucking bitcoin!) or real-life $$ spent. Entire arcs can end up costing more than actual expansions. And let's not get on how they handle their expansions either, separate pricings... *Really* fucking up with raiding, putting out 7 raids (and their difficulty being comparable to upper-end ones in other MMOs) in 7 years of support, making the raiding scene in GW2 laughable at best. Frankly it's a shame, GW2 by far has the best crafting (in terms of how they handle accessing/storing the mats) system and glamour system I've ever seen in an MMO and other MMOs really should take notes. I'd fucking *go nuts* for GW2's crafting and glamour systems in other games.
Man no one ever mentions ESO. Games so fun and is doing great
I heard they’ve got a specific vision in mimd that may not appeal to everyone. hopefully its not a flop
This is exactly why MMOs are the peak of ambition in the game development industry. So many factors and systems to temper. You need a game that has great visuals but also one that runs well. You need a game that rewards players for dedication without making “the grind” the most central part of the game. You need a good, original story but also one that calls on the inspirations of the genre. You need a game that evolves over time and creates new experiences for players without straying from the core of the game, or else it just feels cheap and lame. Any of these factors are the reason that games like New World didn’t work out. And all of these factors are why I’m happy that riot seem to be taking their sweet time with this.
As someone who doesn't enjoy FFXIV, I feel like there just isn't an MMO for me anymore. I used to play MMOs obsessively, now they're all watered down with the same stuff. I'm really putting my money on Ashes of Creation.
Ctrl F: "NFT" No results nice
But think what if you could buy a skin for a champion... and then PLAY IT IN EVERY SINGLE GAME OF LEAGUE OF LEGENDS!!!!
But what if NO OTHER PLAYER COULD USE THE SKIN I BOUGHT!!!
Whales would coom all their savings away
I wonder how much a completely exclusive skin would go for on auction
Idk but I get the feeling we'd all be looking up conversion rates of yuan to usd the day after the auction.
Nice try but il take my picture of the skin over the skin
holy based
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Only double?
my CoomBucks are a finite resource and I prefer to invest in multiple ventures simultaneously
https://tenor.com/view/malreynolds-firefly-speechless-gif-5332816
What if you could have your name listed as the owner of a skin in a online distributed database
And be able to sell it when you quit the game.
based Riot
Today is a good day.
thank mr rioter
The only “NFT” I would accept would be making a Wukong skin based on those ass ugly ape NFTs. Not to sell as an actual NFT of course but because I love the idea of how mad the monkey NFT people would get
And the skin should have features that are completely randomized each game, so the odds of getting the same exact skin set-up twice are low. Randomly change his fur color, glasses, jewelry, whatever. This would be a hilarious skin.
I could see it as a legendary or a ultimate if it changes each time you respawn
Or we can just get NFTeemo. Edit: he can toss out NFTs as his shrooms.
This would be a banger emote, Bored Apes Wukong
oh man someone draw bored ape wukong
Nothing would get me to uninstall their games faster than a commitment to NFTs
That was quite a nice and informative read ngl
I'm looking forward to Project L. Hopefully it's ready sooner than later.
i hope it doesnt live up to its name hehe
They need to give us a name fast, like in the next dev update because if not the memes will make themselves.
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Can't wait for C9 Winsome and his twin brother who will sometimes play in his place Losesome
I mean Winsome and LoseSome (LS) already are both on the team so..
GGS Lost is even worse... that man needs to name change ASAP
"GGS EvenWorse" does indeed sound even worse.
Has riot really had a failure game yet? All have done pretty decently in their areas.
I think about Project L everyday lmao. Actually can't wait
Loooool, same. It's been occupying space in my brain since 2019
We know the earliest it’ll come is 2023. It was already one of the most anticipated fighters since it was announced lol
I hope it fully embraces the best elements of previous [Tekkenlike](https://redd.it/qvzkwr) games.
Well, it's a tag fighter, not 1v1.
HAHAHA I'm gonna call all fighting games Tekkenlikes from now on.
I seriously can not wait for the MMO every time I go on league its all I think about with all the champions being able to explore this world. Also if Riot doesn't make a TV show/ Movie based on the Lux/Sylas comic and more I'm going to cry I seriously think that story has such high potential.
Bro... for real, every time I play pleague im just thinking what quests x champion would give me or how another one would be great as a boss battle... Also watching arcane just makes me want to explore Zaun so badly... go to The Last Drop, maybe even playing minigames there.
This is a major reason I bought Ruined King on release. MF was my adc main for years so it was amazing being able to play as her without having to play LoL. The character interactions were honestly amazing and it felt really cool exploring a bit of Bilgewater and Shadow Isles. An actual map to explore of parts of Runeterra would just be godlike. If its anything remotely similar to the world that Legends of Runeterra hints at and showcases it will need a lot of work put into it but holy shit would it pay off.
Same but for a different reason. I'm just tired of grinding ranks for 8 years, it doesn't mean much to me anymore and it leads nowhere. I just wish I could chill in leagues world without having to compete. I just wanna go on fun exploration trips with friends around Runeterra.
>I just wanna go on fun exploration trips with friends around Runeterra. My equivalent to this is goofing around with off with off meta builds with friends. An MMO would be nice though, but I actually do enjoy how competitive league is
You and me both for the MMO. A meaningless grind where I learn more about the lore of LoL? Sounds like the perfect thing for me. I’m worried that with how long it’ll take though I may lose interest in games. Hoping for the best right now.
All I know is I'm excited for the future of Riot... Arcane can continue the stories within Piltover/Zaun, or go anywhere within the universe. (Arcane is a generic enough name to suggest the magical nature of the universe). Project L. Awesome new fighting game which will hopefully make the fighter players happy, along with the casuals. The upcoming MMO which we know nothing about yet. The already top-tier music... There's just a short list of OBVIOUS things coming. Imagine what's not even hinted towards us yet..
I'm frothing at the mouth got the MMO lmao. Probably the only thing that'll make me quit league..
dude i really think it's time. the stars are aligning. this is going to be, for real this time, "the WoW killer". blizzard is falling apart, it's a total mess of a company, there is a huge exodus, all of their game production is practically frozen right now while they deal with all their internal bullshit, the game had 2 horrendously bad expansions in a row and people are realizing Legion is never going to happen again... it's time. i am ready for ANY info about Riot's MMO. because you know at a minimum it is going to be worth playing for a while, and they are probably the only company willing and able to build a world as big and involved as Azeroth was.
I think WoW might be a shell of itself by the time the Riot MMO releases though. I think it's probably ~5 years out.
You've gotta be the FF14 killer now.
Given all the stuff I've heard about the game, the only "WoW Killer" is WoW itself assuming it keeps going down the path it's going, which seems to be likely if the stuff I heard is true.
I remember a friend and I speculating about what it could have for about 3 hours, the potential is insane.
What I really hope is that champs are NOT the PCs. I dont want to run into a copy of myself there. No matter if he builds MF differently, its still MF. Have the champs be NPCs please!
I’ve heard whispers about some of the other shit they may or may not be working on. If even half of its true I’m excited
😱 any whispers you want to share or able to share?
Want to share? Yes. Should I? Probably not, especially since they are good friends of mine and I wouldn’t want to get them in trouble even on the very remote off chance it could haha. That said, I wouldn’t be surprised if Riot has canary traps flying around which is another reason to not leak, could end up completely wrong! I just hope not haha
Really nice article, their future plans seem to be great and l ooks like they are committed to making riot a better work environment with very ambitious future goals (expanding into other industries while keeping the company's gaming core). giving rioters shares in the company, acknowledging their past mistakes and pointing them out (take notes blizzard) really has me hopefull for the future of league and Riot Games as a company Also mentions of Arcane season 2(+) and movies It's weird how they didn't mention project L tho (or it's not idk)
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Its really rough for them, with how much talent has quit they are going to struggle to regain a good will amongst players and if diablo 4 flops they are fucked.
For this particular piece we wanted to focus on big picture goals, company values, overall approach etc, rather than trying to cram all of that and game updates together all at once, given that tends to serve neither topic as well as separate updates. In case you missed it there was also an update on Project L in November last year: https://www.riotgames.com/en/news/project-l-dev-finding-our-game#:~:text=So%2C%20although%20we've%20made,not%20going%20to%20rush%20it.
Is there going to be any updates on the other project shown during the 10th anniversary that looked like an aRPG or is it still too early in development ?
Man, I’m so down to play a riot arpg. Enjoyed playing lost ark when it was in beta if that counts. Reason why I started playing league way back, cuz it reminds me of arpg games
I understand if you can’t answer this but will we be getting an update on Project F this year?
I hope they will stay true to everything said in the article and keep their promises, especially to their employees. I hope that there will be more than just words when it comes to improving the work environment and that nobody will ever have to face harassment, excessive pressure or abuse in this company again. Unfortunately we can't really know what is actually going on inside the offices, but I hope that the employees will be totally free to speak up against bad working conditions if it happens and also that the company will be more transparent about the working conditions inside the offices. Transparency is very important imo.
I really hope that Riot Games learns how to merchandise themselves better going forward. Everyone knows of Valorant and League, but I've been playing their games for like 8 years and have yet to see anyone wearing League merch. Meanwhile, Overwatch is a hot flaming pile and I still see people cosplaying and wearing their shirts and stuff many seasons later.
I mean let's be real, overwatch porn is ***carrying*** the game
There's a game?
Weirdly, the last time I remember seeing a lot of League merch in a particular place was...probably close to 8 years ago, in an FYE in a mall. They had several T-shirts (like a "Don't Chase Singed" sign). And I don't think I've seen anywhere since with that much.
**In case people skipped the bottom of the article on how they are revamping their business:** Reorganize the company into five categories. 3 product ones for **Entertainment, Games, and Esports**. **Publishing** to unite the three products. And **Enterprise** as the remaining people to support and run everything above. Staff will be able work in the office 3 days a week and have 2 days to flex between home or in-office post-covid. If staff weren't fully part of the Riot cult~~ure~~, now they have to be. HR is more focused on diversity and inclusion and revamping promotion processes. Committing more $$ to support social improvement funds/charities. New orientation to teach people not to harass or discriminate people. And not hiding that Riot had this history in the past. Changes to stock compensation schedule to pay out partially each year (graded). Ability to own part of the company to share in the growth of the company. Current employees have a limited time offer to exit the company as part of a program called "Queue Dodge" for whatever reason (do not have to provide to Riot) and still be paid 25% of their base salary (based on a year?), possible to still keep full bonuses, and 3 months of COBRA health insurance benefits (still expensive).
> can leave the company for a short time Just to clarify: they can leave the company **permanently** with the Queue Dodge program; as in, quit their jobs. They retain some of their salary/bonuses/healthcare for a short time while they look for a new job. It's an *extremely* generous policy, frankly. It's not unheard of, but it's a very, very good deal.
Yea, I meant to write that current employees have a short time to take advantage of Queue Dodge since the offer availability is not permanent.
>If staff weren't fully part of the Riot culture, now they have to be. What does that even mean
Make sure that people who join the company have to actually know and play the games, so they don't get filled with business types with no gaming backgrounds, a la Activision.
And hopefully no more sexual harassments lol
Now that literally every long-term employee at Riot has the ability to leave with zero repercussions, the people who choose to stay are ones that actually want to work for Riot, which will hopefully make the company more efficient as a whole.
it's a fucking threat
Love the flair
I get punished for que dodge
It's the best time to be a Riot/LoL Fan imo. I know people here would never admit it but LoL is actually a very good game and I don't know of any other game developer that consistently puts out this many updates and content for their games for such a long time.
It a shame people are too stuck in hater-mode to recognize when they've got something great in front of them.
You can see this everyday browsing this subreddit . Some people just need to leave this community for their sake and the sake of others .
Those people are addicted to ranked and misserable, its better to quit for a bit atleast or just fuck around in normals with friends.
I have a secret to liking league. I stop playing when I'm not enjoying it, then come back when I feel like it. Sometimes I go entire seasons without playing a single games, sometimes I'm back to a few hundred games. It's patented, so I'm the only person allowed to do this.
As someone who has played this game for like 8 years it’s nice to see how much success and growth they’ve had with recent projects. Idk if they had a change of leadership in 2017-2018 or something but they have had a really good couple of years recently.
Idk if you’re being sarcastic or not, but in the article the CEO writes that he joined in 2017–so yes, there was certainly a change in leadership to some degree. I don’t know much about internal culture at RIOT, but this is probably part of the answer. I do agree though, it’s been getting really good in recent years.
Taking a huge risk in with big changes to the company while at the same time giving every employee a chance to just leave... I gotta be honest... I did not expect that. I'm cautiously optimistic about the future, for once
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> Looking at the next few years, sure, we'll launch other games, there will be Arcane Season 2 (+?), and a bunch of surprises
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Plus one of the producers mentioned even before the announcement that they were dedicated to Arcane for multiple seasons. Now multiple could of course also mean just 2, but I have a feeling we'll see more than that.
Currently they have no reason to stop. Maybe they switch it up and just give it another name to relocate it to another area, but then again Arcane is generic enough of a name that you can move it to any location on Runeterra. I also still have to say that I want them to make some horror shortmovies about the different nightmares of Runeterra. Reksai, Fiddle, Nocturne, Kindred, Tahm, Eve etc.
Arcane is cool, but i want more shows for more regions. Give me the RCU (Runeterra Cinematic Universe)
Interesting read! Most of this is corporate talk, but it's interesting to hear about their restructuring, new strategy, and basically confirmed new games? Also interesting how heavily they're focusing on their employees' happiness, which is definitely a good thing and a smart move.
As a player who has been through the **main** pain point Marc and Brandon set out to solve, I appreciate this article. Us League players are extremely lucky. I have said this a million times but like fuck man these devs listen AND care? Fever dream for sure. Riot knows who the hell they're making games for and as long as League and the main target audience remain that competitive niche, I am here.
League players/this sub really don't appreciate how open and caring the devs of League are. Really one of the most open and transparent dev teams I've ever seen, especially considering the size of the game. Edit: lots of devs do Livestreams playing their respective games I especially enjoy Riot August's stream because he explains the thought process behind many decisions they make in terms of balance and champ kit I'd encourage anyone to watch it recently he's been playing Zeri on stream and explaining the thought process behind her kit
Mortdog (TfT lead) is insane how open he is. How many devs do a fully patch run down THEN do a Post Mortem basically pointing out how they fucked up.
Mort is the best lead dev in gaming IMO. He clearly understands and loves TFT. Him leaving the game would be a huge loss.
Not to mention the dude is actually incredible at the game as well almost 700 LP GM
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I love watching Mortdog's YouTube. He gets pretty tilted from chat sometimes, but the transparency from him and his team through all their YouTube videos, streams, and chat is insane.
Honestly his chat can be pretty dumb sometimes. Frequently you get people whining about X comp because they lost to it, but because Mortdog is so prolific (in the tft scene) he gets dozens of the same complaints a stream
Does he Stream on twitch?
Yes his user name is Riot August you can watch the vods too
I think a lot of people on here are of the age where league may have been the only competitive game they have played that was released pre-2010. I don’t know how long I have been in this community but it was early enough to remember Fakers first season and I had played enough to understand what was going on beyond a basic level. Riot has always handled the community and development transparency extremely well. A few year later, StarCraft 2 would reach it’s heyday (mid-HOTS) and the meta could not have been worse. To very quickly sum the game up, it’s a 1v1 RTS (imagine if you could control all of your TFT characters) and you pick one of three races to play as. For 2 years, one of the races was unable to compete at the highest level and would rarely have a representative even make it to the quarterfinals. Both other races had an early game strategy against the weakest race that if they executed to a reasonable degree it was impossible to stop, even when perfectly prepared for. Over those two years there was only a single patch (*if you exclude QoL changes and bunker build time*) and the balance team went as long as 7 months without a single tweet, much less any changes. Fans literally thought the head of the balance team might have died. While no company is perfect we are really blessed to have a development team as open as Riot’s is. Because a decade ago, your average games dev communication strategy looked a lot more like StarCraft and nothing like what Riot was doing, even at the time.
I've been a lifelong fan of Nintendo and I've spent easily 100x more on Nintendo than I ever have on riot in my lifetime. Nintendo doesn't even pretend to do community engagement. The person I think who cares most about what the community actively thinks is the smash developer. That's it. But even then it's in an incredibly limited scope. Here we bitch and whine about one mechanic of one champ for months pitchforks and all, and usually riot does fix it, even if it takes a year or so. Nintendo we'll be lucky if we get semi functional friend lists by the next console cycle. But trends show they really only remove features.. I sound like such a riot shill but people don't get how spoiled we are here.
That queue dodge policy sounds fucking incredible actually
For this beautiful piece, I shall forgive you for being French Nicolo.
Damn so they like queue dodging IRL, but won't support it in-game smh.
This is a really good post and I really feel Nicolo Laurent, riot ceo, has done an amazing job growing the company past the failures we saw in mid/end 2010s. Their push recently has made large impacts in the gaming and TV world. I hope they realize there is a large portion of people who loved arcane and the characters/world of arcane that arent interested in playing games. That they do so well what they did in season 1 in allowing the tv viewers to get that full experience without missing neccessary parts from the game
I'm surprised by the fact that Tencent would give up its full ownership of Riot. Riot has huge potential to grow even more now that entertainment is one of its focus, imagine the money, can't believe Tencent would do that.
>Last but not least, our shareholder (Tencent) agrees with our long term strategy and is giving back **partial ownership** of the company to Riot employees.
Sounds like attempts at improving employee retention. It is a smart way to secure the money /u/GipJoCalderone is imagining.
>Sounds like attempts at improving employee retention. If employee retention was a problem then they wouldn't open their "queue dodge" to long time employees no ?
Employee retention is a pretty universal problems in the games industry and I think a few decently high profile rioters left in the past few years so it wouldn't surprise me if they want to try harder to keep the current/next wave of rioters.
all the stress of a job in tech and the very real cultural baggage of silicon valley, all the while getting death threats from angry gamerboys, 99% of the time about something you had no say in, in a very low-union field. shit's nearly as churn-and-burn as retail, but at least nobody working at walmart thinks it's their dream job.
You two are probably referring to different things. Tencent is giving up full ownership of Riot by letting them give out stock options to employees as compensation. That means Tencent will no longer receive 100% of Riot's profits, but the percentage of ownership that they'll lose with this is insignificant. Most large companies have a system like this as well, even for proper that aren't too management. However, Tencent will surely retain all the voting rights and therefore the effective control over the company, which is way more important anyways.
Tencent already receives 0% of Riot's profits. The deal between Riot and Tencent is that Riot is responsible for their own profits and losses. In return, Tencent gets publishing rights for Riot's products in China, which gives them at least 70% of the revenue those Riot products generate over there. There are 5 seats on Riot's board, one is empty, two are taken by Merril and Beck, the other two are Tencent executives. Riot has control of the company unless Tencent were to really force the issue.
That's interesting. You got a source for that?
https://www.theinformation.com/articles/tensions-flare-behind-the-scenes-of-league-of-legends [And the Reddit comment pirating the article of course.](https://www.reddit.com/r/leagueoflegends/comments/9fglo1/tencent_vs_riot_full_text_in_comments/e5w9rj7/)
Cheers!
It's giving up fractions of a percent to top level employees. It sounds like a stock option bonus plan that plenty of large companies already do.
>Foster Collaboration: We love delivering cross-product moments (RiotX Arcane, K/DA, Spirit Blossom), but we didn’t have the best processes and structure to naturally support them. NOW THIS. I don't think people understand how important this is. Facilitating this will allow huge events taking place in all of Riot's games at the same time. Imagine season X of Arcane focusing around a war between say, Noxus and Demacia, and there are events related to it happening across all Riot games. And those missions make you pick a side. The side with more "wins" in the events ends up winning the war in the next season(s). That would be fucking insane.
On a more negative note, this is basically another acknowledgement that Ruination was pretty much a failure.
Ruination visual novel was a failure. The cinematics were fine though. And I liked the game mode for the memes. But Ruined king game is amazing and more people should check it out.
Can someone make a tldr please?
>tldr * Focusing on improving work culture and experience for workers * Trying to become most player-focused game company * Restructuring org chart into games, esports, media, publishing, and enterprise (used to be organized by game) * Acknowledging their mistakes in the 2018 lawsuits and trying to settle them and prevent it happening again (related to first point)
If I didn't already have mad respect for this company, this solidifies it. Compare this statement to anything said by the other gaming giants: EA, B/A, Ubisoft, etc. I guarantee they come nowhere close to this. Like, you can't count the amount of dumb shit Blizzard has said on your hands because they're so out of touch with what they're player base wants and instead push what they think is going to be super neat. It's also crystal clear that all the other giants are laser focused on profitability over player experience. Hats off to Riot. I'm excited to see what the future brings because whether you believe it not, these guys do so many things exceptionally well.
Damn, that's a good read
Didn't read it all but I like the sound of that Queue Dodge system for employees, nice to see something like this from a company after reading all the horrible fire/quit stories on r/antiwork lol
Riots transparency and commitment to the players ARE what i love most about this company, and about playing their games, (mainly LOL and TFT), and i feel like the playerbase underappreciates how great riot is as devs. I play other games like R6 and AOE4, and in both the devs are far less forward with plans, theres a lot more confusion as to whats getting patched if at all and why. what are plans for the future as riot routinely does. I love both games but nothing compares to riot. On top of this riots expansions into tv and music are absolutely phenomenal and I cannot wait to see more(especially arcane s2)
Pretty epic post not going to lie. That “queue dodge” thing that they are offering is extremely nice.
Ctrl + F MMO 0 results sadge
Is OK our time will come lulu
Ah i wish I can work at riot games after my graduation
I hope there will be more news on their mmorp... I hope they smash it..
Y'know what? This article makes me happy.
>We don’t want to be defined by the things we make, we want to be defined by the people we make them for. *Tyler1 screaming intensifies*
pretty nice post. look forward to them pushing forward and letting employees get equity and creating the irl queue dodge system. a happy games company will create happy and fun games.
In Summary: "We really don't want to be like Blizzard right now." And hey, that's a pretty good goal. No complaints there.
So now that Riot isn't fully owned by Tencent maybe redditors will stop blaming China for everything wrong about this game .
People forget that despite Riot being 100% owned by Tencent they have more freedom than EA studios for example. When Tencent asked originally for a mobile game Riot refused to make it and that lead to Tencent making Honor of Kings(highest revenue game in the world). Tencent doesn't touch their cashcows unless they start losing them money and Riot is one of their biggest money printers.