[2022] Instead of trading champions you should be able to trade pick order

RELEVANT STORY: I had proposed this when I was working on the champion select redesign on PC, but my initial design was a bit too complex (you could trade positions and champions) so we shelved it. I moved to WR not long after and seeded the idea with our designers working on champion select on WR. They did a great job of simplifying it and making sensible limits so it was shippable. It's always been our hope that we could experiment with some new features in WR that were riskier on League and inspire some changes if players enjoyed those features on WR.

You might ask... why you be dumb and not just do this on League PC first? The answer is not actually spaghetti code. It's really more about the opportunity you have when rebuilding the game from scratch for a new audience. When we are looking at features we often use a value/cost lens. You want to do stuff that has a high value to cost ratio. Consider this pick order features:

On PC you have a champion trade feature already and let's value it at 1.0 to simplify things. Cost is 0.0 because we already have the feature. We think that position trade might be a 1.5 value feature and we would replace the champion trade giving a net 0.5 value, but we have to rebuild the trade function so the cost is 1.0. So to get 0.5 more value than the status quo you need to spend 1.0 dev cost == 0.5 value/cost ratio

On WR we have no trade feature of any kind. So we can either build the League PC equivalent champion trade with a value of 1.0 and a cost of 1.0. OR we can build a position trade feature with a value of 1.5 and a cost of 1.0

Build champion trade == 1.0 value/cost ratio Build position trade == 1.5 value/cost ratio

This is obviously an artificially simple example with made up numbers, but hopefully it illustrates how we had different tradeoffs for WR than League PC and could make different choices to maximize player value. On PC where a position trade feature might deliver 0.5 new value/cost, you have to compete against a lot of new features that have a more favorable value/cost. On WR we had to make some kind of trade function from scratch, and updating to position trade didn't cost any more.

I think you're assuming here that value == player money spent. That is not how we think about it. Value == player value (i.e. things that players will actually enjoy having and will keep them playing the game). Obviously we do need our games to bring in money so we can get paid and pay the bills, but that is very rarely a factor in these kinds of features conversations. Example, on Wild Rift we might be trying to decide between creating an elemental rift specific scoreboard or an improvement to the ping system. None of that is going to directly make money for us. However we'll probably choose the elemental rift scoreboard because it will make the elemental rift dragons easier to understand and we think that elemental rift will be fun for our players (based on experience with League PC) and result in more engagement so we think the work is high value. Ultimately that's going to be good for our bottom line, but it's impossible to assign any kind of monetary benefit to an individual feature like that so it doesn't factor into our decisions.

Battle pass, events, skins. All that stuff is done by completely different teams which have no impact on what we focus on. There are a lot of reasons why it might feel like you're not getting a lot of quality of life features. I don't think trying to sell more stuff to players is a big factor. TBH a lot of it is that as our other games have spun up we've pulled people over from League (as well as hiring externally) and left them short staffed. Getting good people is hard and isn't something you can just do quickly.