[2020] One for all Yone to allow us to use him

My explanation for the PT and CG disable.

If we disabled SR games, nothing with the state of PBE would have changed. The issues with game starts, store purchases, loot, and logins would have persisted, which was impacting upwards of 90% of the PBE population during the first hour or two that PBE was open today, up until we mitigated. Maybe in the future I'll do a write up with graphs and stuff on how impactful mitigations like this stabilize the game.

Practice Tool and Custom games with fewer players are exactly what was causing the issues. If the PBE allowed 100 games active, SR would allow a population of 1000 players to play. Only practice tool would mean 100 players are playing and 900 players are trying to get into game, with their attempted game start timing out over and over unless they were among the lucky few to start a game just as an active one ended.

PBE first and foremost is a server for us to get data on upcoming content, so that it's stable by the time we push it to live servers. This extends beyond Yone. The new skins and other cosmetics, Nexus Blitz fixes and changes, DX11 testing, not to mention the server testing all need soak time on the PBE, and none of those are effectively tested if all players are in Practice Tool.

Rotating Game Modes are rotating so that we don't have to maintain every single one every patch. When an RGM isn't on Live, it's likely littered with bugs introduced from all the patches since that game mode was last Live.

For that reason, OFA isn't something we can just enable. We'd have to dedicate resources to making the game mode stable again, not to mention having to do extensive testing to make sure Yone works in the game mode....before we've even put Yone on PBE for the first time.

For this event, we've also got Nexus Blitz already on PBE and we're still testing it for 10.16. The same team that made Nexus Blitz also owns the other RGMs, so they don't really have free resources to also debug OFA in addition to continuing to improve NB.

Not saying this couldn't be a long term thing we can't shoot for where OFA is enabled on PBE with each new champ release, but something would have to change. The team in charge of these game modes would need more resources and there would need to be a clear return on investment to dedicate non-trivial dev time to make sure OFA is stable prior to new champs hitting PBE.

Just dropped another comment in the main thread. Wanted to keep that one as a response to the initial post :)

Apologies in advance for the wall of text.

I think there's a misunderstanding on what we mean when we say lacking resources. Maybe saying the team's resources are currently dedicated to higher priorities is more correct. Every team should be utilizing as close to 100% of their resources as possible (to simplify, resources being budget and man hours of the different disciplines on the team). If the team wants to do something else, it's usually in trade for not doing another thing, or scaling it down. No team has additional resources just lying around for moments like this. The is the same whether you're at Riot or any other company. Resources that are sitting around not doing anything mean that someone is getting paid to not do anything, or money is sitting not being used to pay someone to do more things.

I wasn't at Riot until a year and a half ago, but considering for the longest time League was the only game you can pretty easily guess that League was the source of funds for LoR and VALORANT (vAlOrAnT). I'm willing to bet that Riot hasn't stopped using current game profits to grow elsewhere. There are many ways to grow a company beyond just making a current team bigger.

If a team is operating with a certain amount of resources and they don't think it's sustainable, it's on that team to make a case for why head count should increase, or their budget should increase. Or that team can decide to change their process to try and achieve more with their current budget.

I'm not on the team that owns the RGMs, and am not an experienced Producer so take the rest as with a grain of salt, but I can see valid reasons to not invest so heavily on making most if not all current RGMs permanent.

If we understand that engagement with RGMs initially spikes when it's released, then rapidly declines over several weeks after, then the value of maintaining the mode over time decreases over time. But the cost of maintaining the mode doesn't decrease (argument here that the team should be optimizing and reducing maintenance cost over time, but i doubt it matches the drop in player engagement). For every mode made permanent, the team needs to now increase its headcount for maintenance of every mode. To do this, evidence needs to be there that the players engaged meaningfully enough to be a worthwhile investment.

Nexus Blitz went through several stages of this during the iterations put out in I think 2018. Teamfight Tactics was a similar project, which ended up its own supported game.

I can't speak for what the return on investment [RoI] the other game modes in Smite, OW, Rocket League, etc. is or if having that many permanent modes is worthwhile for the game's sustainability. At Riot for the RGMs that have been put out, it seems to me that the RoI is better with a smaller team releasing these modes in a rotating fashion rather than a larger maintaining more of them permanently. Not saying the team owning RGMs is small, but they operate with less resources than needed for what you're wanting.

Hope this is insightful at least! Again, sorry, it's pretty wordy.

https://twitter.com/Riot_Porosite/status/1287174368066379776

It's my weekend and I'm not running PBE so I can't say exactly when Practice Tool we be reenabled on PBE. In general practice, our NOC monitors the CPU load and will reenable PT when it drops below an acceptable threshold.

Plenty more in that thread for related questions.