[2019] My friend doesn't seem to want to play with me anymore and it feels really bad...

If you are on NA add me. I play every night :)

I am an idiot. You have to be in EU to be playing in clash. I will be there for work next week though and making a new account so shoot me a message if you want to play.

DM me your summoner name and I'll add you when I make my EUW account. I fly out next week and will be there for about 2 weeks, then back in EU again for 2 weeks during worlds semis and finals

What do you mean? I literally just made a new account and will be leveling it... by hand

It probably doesn’t help, but a similar thing happened to me. I got into League in 2009 when a friend convinced me to install it. I had never played a moba before, and I was terrible. We played for a few weeks, but eventually when we got to level 30 he immediately outranked me and he wasn’t interested in playing normals.

It was a huge bummer. It’s weird because I’d rather play a match with him and lose than play alone and win, but I realize that’s not the approach most people take. Hopefully you can find new friends to play with!

Sure. Riot ThuggInUggs

I am in NA - just going to EU soon so if you are in NA add me :) and im kind of a piece of sh*t but at least I can try and be nice sometimes

Congrats on the child. Remember to start an RP fund for them now so they have lots of skins when they start playing.

Are you too a support main who likes to play pyke?

Straight up, without players I don't get to go to a job I love every day. Players do that for me every day so if I can play a game with someone and help brighten their day, I am in.

Shoot me an FR - we can get a 5 man and challenge your old friends to a game. Winner gets admin in the discord server :p but for real, thats a big feels bad, but if they are acting like that you are probably better off without them. If you wanna get some games HMU

ahh no just want to play in general once I am over in NA

Vape Nation in the house

You don't need to lie to me. You are taking a break, sure... but we all know its impossible to uninstall :p

Yeah I totally see how time and real life can make playing tough. Really cool to see how many people still stay connected to the community after they stop playing

Not gonna lie, you have the most memorable summoner name on my friends list.

Preface: I just got done feeding my newborn at 4am, this might turn into a rambling wall of text.

Oh man, I think about this a lot lately. I've been playing League almost a third of my life (account created December 26th, 2009, and I'm 31 years old). It's hard to remember my life without League, purely just because it has been so long. I've been playing League longer than I have known my wife, which is just.... interesting.

I've been working at Riot for three and a half years, which has been a whirlwind. Compared to when I first started playing, I thought of League as "The Blitzcrank Game". He was the only champion I played, and I had no understanding whatsoever of how mobas worked. Honestly one of the reasons I fell in love with the game was the fact it was free, as back then I was finishing college, I was dumping all of my money into student loans and finding my first job. Within the past 3 years I've gone to Worlds twice, seen K/DA explode (Pentakill is still better, don't @ me), played TFT and Clash, and bought more merch than I can reasonably fit in my home-office.

So when I walk into work each day, I don't think "Ho hum, time to go sit at my desk and do the adult things", it's closer to "Holy sh*t I get to help out at the place that has brought so much fun and joy to my life, and hopefully keep bringing that excitement to more players around the world." Growing up, my dad always said "If you find a job you love, you never have to work a day in your life", and I feel lucky to have that.

That said, the hardest part with all that nostalgia is to not succumb to it. Been at Riot for three years, sure, been a player for ten, so when Clash has some issues on launch weekend it's really hard to not fall back into "just a player" mentality and start shouting "f*ck you and your spaghetti code rito". At those moments I walk down the hallways and see the Clash team cranking away doing everything they can to fix the problems and remember that many of them have also been at Riot for a short number of years, just like me, and they certainly aren't responsible for the Ragu sauce that's clogging up the system at the time, they're just engineers doing everything they can to clean it up. And, while we're being honest, the code I wrote 10 years ago in my life is worse than spaghetti. Magic numbers everywhere.

Right now my biggest fear is if and when I need to move on to my next job. I don't know anything else that I'm as passionate about as League, and so any other job would probably feel like a step down in regards to how excited I get to go into work every day. Fingers crossed that we have a long road ahead of us.

Oh, and I finally ranked up to Gold last season so I was within 1 ranked tier and was able to play with my buddy again.

tl;dr - It's alright

Oh yea, I don’t blame him for wanting to play ranked and having more fun doing that, it’s just a bummer about skill disparity.

Na. Setting up euw account this week

I understand. Tbh I'm so bad it hardly counts as abusing him

Sure :)

Will do

Done. Account is ThuggInUggs

I am human alliance mage on whitemane. Wait. No. I am a support

He works as a professional hacker, so I am in fact quite jealous of his job.

Yes. Why play Naut... he is weird diver man, pyke is chad stabby pirate man

I mean we all start somewhere right? There is plenty of stuff that I did wrong before realizing why it was wrong. Thankfully I’ve had some pretty great mentors over the years who have pointed out where I needed to improve.

Can't believe my best friend BoatStuff has forgotten me :/

No need to apologize! Tone doesn't always come through via text (read: reddit), and I'm probably just jaded from people sh*tting on me historically.

I'm a software engineering manager working on the data team. When I started I was a software engineer, the change to manager has only been within the last year. I'll try to answer your questions the best I can :)

Would doing an internship at one of the Big N help application chances, despite having absolutely zero experience with game development?

Absolutely. At its core, game development is still software engineering, and there are a lot of teams at Riot that are ancillary to the games themselves, RDX as an example. While Riot isn't quite the small-indy company it used to be, it's not like it's 100% game engineers. If you're willing to work on CI/CD systems, network automation, data management, etc, there are a lot more options you have.

I've heard some really really tragic stories about applications to game development companies (friend from MIT applied to google with a 3.9 GPA and multiple times rank 1 on NA server but was rejected) and I'm concerned if they look for anything specific.

At the end of the day, GPA and League rank aren't going to affect your chances at a job. The two biggest things that will help are showing you have a growth mindset, and passion. It's easier to tech someone tech than to be a good team player. As an example, when I was being interviewed I talked about how I automated my home servers (just a few Raspberry Pis) using Ansible, and being able to speak to the problems I had, and how I worked through them. Having pet/side projects is a great thing to be able to show off your passion, authenticity, and desire to learn. If you have those, you're most of the way there.

when i was 3, and i was playing starcraft for the first time, you need to enter a profile name. i didnt want to put my own name, and i saw "blizzard" on the side of the box. i put in just "blizz" since i didnt know how to pronounce blizzard. so, no.

We’re done, Blizz. You better not even look at me in the hallway, I will never smile at you again.

im so sorry, Mr BoatStuff... i dont know if i can continue on without your smiles :/

<3