devtrackers.gg
Hi Guys, this post by u/AtreusIsBack earlier to the subreddit made me want to expand on how riot could retry Nexus Blitz as I believe their tests were poorly managed.
So in my opinion Riot failed Nexus Blitz (hereto refereed to as NB) and their data does not show it's true engagement and potential of the game mode. NB fills a very specific gap missing in Riots games (IE it's a short game ~20min max), and I believe there will always be market in the player base for a game of this type. I'll speak to 4 main points which I believe they failed to account for and/or worsened the stats themselves with poor planning or management.
First the run time of the 2 iterations of NB. The Alpha went from July 31st to Sept 11th 2018. 4 weeks to test how this game mode would be received, with half being during the first weeks of school. Now i'm sure a fair few of you, like me, are out of school now, but were Uni or High school students when you first started league. Now think about how little time you had during the first week of moving into res or back into your apartment... that's when NB was launched. And it was so well received, that Riot brought it back that same year. Now lets talk about the 2nd and arguably the more important of the 2 samples, December 5th 2018 to January 8th 2019.
(This Chart represents the total number of game hours played per day, per mode post launch)
Now I've played a bit during winter vacations, but lets be honest. The player numbers drop during this time period... significantly. So Riot recently released a graph (above) when explaining their decision to continue design hours for TFT. Now this graph shows the # of game hours played per day post launch that Riot references when talking about the decision to not put more development into NB. However this graph is inherently skewed against NB, and there should be a second accompanying graph made that notes how many % hours these represent during their respective global launches. If NB still represent such a minuscule differential, those that support the game mode would have to suck it up, but I doubt it.
Second, Riot was still getting used to using their new "missions" feature at this time. They inundated the players with a huge amount of RNG reliant mission requirements. So during what would be a time of the year with a lower player base that likely would be unable to play every day, they forced (Ok forced might be exaggerating, but missions were a new feature to us as well, and was I going to not complete them all? I don't think so) time consuming missions that required multiple plays. This lead to a noted burnout so once these missions were done, if a player had time to play a game they had become more likely to play ARAM or SR just to get a break from NB.
In third, I believe Riot is now more aware and capable of micro patching new game modes. They proved with TFT that micro patches help weed out the bugs and OP outliers which spring up in a game mode that is brand new, and whose play style may not have been fully hashed out. Now I personally don't remember NB being too unbalanced which is good because it was also released during Riots winter break, but I do believe Riot releasing it at a better time of the year with some micro patches would largely improve the reception of the game mode.
Last point, is that Riot was unfortunate in the year of NB's release. Does anyone else remember how in those days this subreddit had at least 1 post a day of "League of Legends surpassed in PC bangs" or some kind of news of the lowered player base. Well that year, the amount of triple A games that were released was absolutely massive. God of War, Monster Hunter world, Res Evil 2 remake, Red Dead 2 & Spiderman were all released. I think it's safe to assume a noticeable portion of the player base had split for a number of months to grind these other games. So when Nexus blitz was released I believe that League of Legends had some of it's lowest player numbers in recent years, and for sure lower than the current player base numbers. Now this could happen again sure, but I believe if Riot release NB again during a not Winter Break time period, that it would do noticeably better.
Thanks for those that read.
TL:DR - Riot released Nexus Blitz during end of summer break and first week of school, and then re-released it during Winter break and pointed to the numbers going "those are low". If they used % of total game hours per day as well it might look better. 2 they made way too many RNG missions, which burned out the player base. 3 Riot now know they should do small patches while getting used to a new game mode 4 They should re-release the game mode now and see how it goes, since the player base is less split compared to that time when a huge amount of Triple A games had been released (God of War, Monster Hunter, Res Evil 2 remake, Red Dead 2, Spiderman etc... I guess Fortnite would've had a big impact too)
External link →