[2019] Riot's use of TFT as an excuse to not do new RGM's is really annoying.

I’m a big believer in no-bullsh*t communications, especially when we’re making a hard choice about prioritizing one thing over another (like in this case). That’s why we wrote this blog post which says exactly what you pointed out, u/-Basileus.

But, if I’m being self-critical, I think there’s one thing we at Riot haven’t figured out how to communicate yet. It’s this: when we do something for just ONE part of our audience, how do we explain that to the REST of our audience in a way that resonates? The no bullsh*t approach isn’t enough, I think.

While lots of things we do are for you (who might love SR and RGMS), some of the things we do are for the person next to you (who loves TFT) and some of the things we do are for someone you don’t even know.

I don’t know how to communicate this stuff in a way that resonates. Trying it out though.

It's a really great question. Maybe one way to make those product announcements would have been to say "we don't believe everyone will want to buy these things. BUT some of you will buy it and love the product, and so we're trying to make something that those people will want to buy." Would people respect that? Hard to say.

Probably our advocates would understand, and our engaged detractors would take offense. I wrote a blog post recently breaking down how different parts of online game communities respond whenever developers make an unpopular change to their game. Link if you're interested.

For Little Legends there was one other no-bullsh*t thing we could have said, which was essentially "because TFT is being added for free, if we don't add a new monetization feature specifically to support this mode, then it might actively cost the company millions of dollars." Would saying that have resulted in less backlash and more community understanding? IDK, man.

Game companies with multiple games make trade-offs at the expense of one game in favor of another all the time. Valve, Blizzard, Nintendo, whatever. They all have to do it, because they'd be batsh*t crazy not to. They just don't come out and tell you when they've done it.

That's what I'm writing about here: is there really value in talking in a "no bullsh*t" way about trade-offs and prioritization in cases like this? It's possible that it's not worth it.

I'm still thinking through it, tbh.

I think you’re touching on something that’s super real. Few people can realistically stick with the SR ranked grind beyond 4-5 seasons. Hell, I’m personally gonna churn out into normals only next season, I think.

I don’t have any answers for you and I don’t wanna rehash the “why Nexus Blitz wasn’t hitting the bar” conversation right here but I actually agree with you we’ve gotta find a way to better serve players like you.

Ahhhh, there’s just so much to address here. First:

Like when Dominion was cancelled, nobody played it really

Well... some people did. And they feel about Dominion exactly the way you feel about NB.

I hate that I'll never to get to play it again

We’ve said we’ll bring it back as an RGM at some point in the future, just not planning to make it permanent because it wasn’t holding players’ interest past the first week in either of the tests we ran (and also it failed to surpass ARAM in popularity even at its peak)

And then when you say things like "We're not gonna let you play this anymore because you just aren't important enough." It hurts

Come on man, we’ve never said that and never would.

This, for me, is the million-dollar question: How do Engaged Detractors get made?

Obviously, whenever you get backlash to any decision, it's not JUST engaged detractors contributing. It's always a mix of people who have a legitimate concerns, EDs acting in bad-faith, people who just like contributing to the backlash for the fun of it, and people who may have misunderstood your intentions.

Each of those audiences is worth thinking about. I'll probably write more about this soon. Need more time to think it over.

Hey it's me, the guy who does data for LoL and informed the NB call (as a hard NB main)

By the end of the first and second run NB was around 3% of hours. The second run was looking better until we turned missions off and then it went down to the same spot as the first run.

As for TFT, yeah it's more like a new game so I don't doubt LoL players will not care as much for it. TFT is doing great several month post launch, 20-40% of hours depending on the region and holding steady. It also added net hours to the pie whereas every other LoL-like mode tends to just move hours around save for ARURF.

Not really because we saw it drive engagement when it was on. By the time we got to the end, it was such a small % of hours that there were few reasons big enough to save it.

All this being said, the group that did play the mode REALLY did play it a ton so I totally understand the passion.

Odyssey was similarly ~3% (a bit lower) by the end. Odyssey dropped off real fast though, as you can expect from somewhat limited content. When we look at other data it actually decayed in a similar way to a Path of Exile content drop (a premier PvE game) but at an even faster rate.

that subreddit looks fascinating. thanks so much for sharing it with me.

You're right, the team that is working on making and supporting TFT is the same team that would do RGM stuff. I'm not in the position to comment with full context on that decision so this is more my personal understanding (not Riot's stance): Yes we could turn them on but that isn't free and as (un?)believable as it is, each mode needs people to work on it each time we turn it on even if it's QA for how OFA Sylas will work or something. It's not just a switch to flip.

And to reiterate, we intentionally moved resources onto TFT and if you don't like TFT then you'll feel abandoned and, honestly, rightfully so. At the same time we, as Riot, want more folks to enjoy our products. Having players engage with LoL and now TFT let's us fund things like new games that we are working on. It sucks we can't be super transparent about that stuff and only ask you to trust us but so it is.

Last OFA as around 12.5% of hours by the end and ARURF was around 20-25% by the end of the last long run.

But in China, OFA was ~20% of hours and ARURF closer to 50% by the end of the runs. The global view is very important. NB was struggling to crack 2% in China when we turned it off. Odyssey at 3%.

Everything we do is a trade off and every trade off has a cost and we do our best to get the most value out of each trade off we make.

One thing we try to do to proportionally serve players is look at Games since Last Skin (one of many things, not the only thing by any means). It's a good way to combine time and popularity. Frankly, some champions just aren't popular...like by a lot. Taliyah is currently 1/10th as popular as Akali and 1/20th as popular as Ezreal. And at her best, the most popular she has been outside her launch (mid 2018), she was 1/5th as popular as Ezreal...and factoring in China it was still under 1/10th.

I do find it a bit harsh to imply the vast majority of players are easily satisfied and blindly applaud us. They are satisfied because we satisfy them because our decisions aim to satisfy as many players as possible compared to the cost. Everything players give back to us goes into making more things for them. That's how businesses work. But we have to pay our employees, pay for our office, pay to run esports, pay to make new games that won't generate anything for their entire dev time while LoL foots the bill.

Hey! You're absolutely right, technical complexity is the reason RGMs aren't able to just be flipped on.

The best analogy I can make is that RGMs "rust" over time. This happens in a ton of different ways: they sometimes rely on niche parts of the game engine that don't work well anymore, or systems whose code has been refactored or deleted since the last time they ran. Sometimes they were built in ways that cause problems with new or reworked champions (Sylas & new Mordekaiser ults are great examples of this). Sometimes, because of the rapid development cycle of RGMs, lots of duct tape and bubblegum gets used to make things work, and teams (including the Modes team itself!) go back and clean up that stuff once the mode has turned off, to keep things tidy. The rate at which things rust varies widely, too. Some modes, like Nexus Siege, have rusted so much that the fastest way to ship them again would probably be to start over from scratch.

Whenever we talk about shipping an RGM again (with no changes!), we're really talking about the following process:

1. Figure out if the mode even launches, and if it doesn't, put engineers on it until it does
2. Have a bunch of QA folks thoroughly test the mode to figure out what works and what doesn't
3. Make a list of all the rust-induced bugs we need to fix, and start working on those
4. Make a list of all the design decisions we need to make ("How should Sylas v Sylas work in One for All??") and start doing design work to prototype and then build solutions, with time built in for playtesting and iteration
5. Once all that stuff is done, do another QA pass to see if any of the bugfixing or design work introduced more bugs (these are called "regressions")
6. Do the (extensive) infrastructure, administrative, and organizational work needed to make sure the server queues still work, that changes, mode announcement and patch notes get localized, etc.
7. Mode ships! Have people on standby to bugfix, micropatch, provide support, answer questions on the forums, etc.

As you can see, that's a long list, involving a lot of people and a lot of hours. And that's okay! That's why we come to work. The question that we have to ask, though, is, "Is this the best thing we can be doing with our limited development time? Or could we have done something else, that more people would enjoy and engage with?". Sometimes, going through the effort of relaunching an old RGM is worth the cost, and is the best thing we can be doing. Sometimes it isn't, and our efforts are better spent working on new stuff. Either way, it's a tough call to make.