League of Legends Dev Tracker

Yes, we have MLE types, Date Engineers, Data scientists.

Your shop is powered by ML, for example.

Yes!

I think it's been a constant challenge to think about getting that balance right.

To let you in on a secret of how I have changed my thinking is that I remembered that we are a "player focussed" game company and not a "champion focused" game company. Our champions are great. I love our IP. Don't tell anyone though, but they are not real. And they are certainly not our audience or players. So, given that I stopped thinking about giving "champions" skins, I think about us giving players skins. And while I wish every player could have everything they wanted, there are only so many developer hours. The lowest play-rate champions have very, very few "I only play this champion" mains. Most players play a few champs. So most players have something for themselves even if they wish they had one for their champion. The second insight is that we are going to lose economic profit on those weaker champions, but it is the only way we can show those players we care about them. We take th...

Hey! Good luck with the degree! I enjoyed mine a lot even if I enjoy memeing about MBAs! My advice: Take every technical class you can and care about your grades. Futures and Options? Hell yes!

Haha. Yeah. Sorry I didn't see it during the time. I got through a bunch.

Item has significant overlap with BT, and generally is stat-ed in a way that makes it too squishy for most fighters/bruisers to reasonably consider in all but extremely snowballed games (which botrk is moving into with it's melee mod). Believe moving it to a more hybridized offensive/defensive profile serves the item system better. Resists also synergize with lifesteal and the raw health items fighters tend to build.

its not shipping 10.5, we'll be tuning it further since right now its almost certainly too pushed for testing

Hey! Thanks for asking. These are solid questions. These are exactly the type of things we discuss at work.

1) Dynamic pricing. From a microeconomics perspective it is certainly very efficient at getting at the "willingness to pay" of the individual players, and given some of these games have a limited lifespan without these revenue models their financial viability might be significantly challenged. However, these models also over time can undermine players sense of trust and fairness. "Why did I pay x for that when that player paid x/2?" On League we discuss about our goals for players to be happy about their experience with monetization before, during and after, and without creating issues for people who don't or can't monetize. Monetization has to suit the product that you are developing, I personally think that predatory monetization practices can be very effective at driving money in the short term, but not the long term. I am personally attracted to the long term per...

God bless, and good luck with your MBA!

I’m texting u/dzareth rn telling him to get back on because these are actually cool questions.

While I’m here, on 2) I think it depends on longevity of support—premium-priced games that turn into long-supported games may very well merit some sort of ongoing monetization. These can be ethically done, if you’re smart. The decision to go FTP or “premium” priced should mostly be determined by how niche you think your game is. Niche market games should probably charge an entry fee, at least in today’s market

On 4) I personally think LoL 2 should never happen. Ongoing support and “Ship of Theseus” style replacement of the parts seems more player focused. That said, definitely bookmark this post so you can come back and call me a liar if we release League 2 ten years from now

Sorry for the confusion! Looking back at the segment it is even more jumbled than I thought because me, Mark, and Azael all bring up slightly different arguments before we've finished talking about any single one >.<

On the bright side, since so many people were confused, im getting a new segment started soon with Phreak where we make clean visuals to explain some of these things with concise language that hopefully will come out in the next month or so! I also find the lol wiki had some really useful tidbits of info if you are interested in these sorts of things.

Ahahaha thank you! I've tried to give my explanation of "this" to flowers but he won't have any of it. Here's how my mind works: "This" always refers to the thing that is closer to me for some reason, on my side. And "that" is always the far away answer or something that isn't mine. And I'm always backwards because I'm on the "that" side of the show! Ty for coming to my Ted talk xD

1) This is a great question. At Riot the easiest way to make something happen is honestly to show how the players are experiencing the product and how we can improve that experience. I love TFT and I also believe that the mobile product is fantastic, but I tend to disregard my own personal tastes and beliefs and try to understand what our players want. (And TFT mobile is what many want) This is when the conversation becomes nuanced. Players want many things. Sometimes some players want some things and others want the opposite. There are opportunity costs. Tech challenges. Dependencies. And the heart of influence becomes in listening, understanding and making sometimes incredibly difficult trade-offs. It's exhilarating and hard. We don't always get it right. But we are always trying.

2) Yes, reach out. I'll be happy to come.

There is this pretty pervasive view that "mobas" are on a downward trend, but League is not on a downward trend, I honestly feel like we are still growing... Just not meteorically like in the early years. I just also think that given how people play League that it's going to be around for a long time.

My hope is that we continue to serve our players so that you all still find League a great use of your gaming hours!

I think we are making other games because we know y'all enjoy many games and we would like to see if we can bring League's approach to the player to other genres.

Those sorts of jobs tend to be managed through contracting orgs, which makes it complicated. I would absolutely LOVE to get folks like our custodians in a Reddit AMA one day. Would be tons of fun.

Making games is a fascinating blend of technical, design, creative, business, product, marketing and other fields all at once. I have a computer science background and so I enjoy learning about the technical, but even if I didn't the engineers would help me to understand. I think having a holistic viewpoint is essential. I think fostering an inclusive viewpoint for all disciplines is critical too. I manage managers today and occasionally code in SQL or python or what have you. But it really shouldn't be what I spend my time on. I'd be the worst one at that and it's not gonna be what the team needs from me (even if I miss that part of the job).

I have many favorite champs and mostly play top-lane. Garen is always rewarding to play.

I don't have an answer for you specifically for IT, but I was one of the two people on my team who handled the internship program for Application Security in 2017; I have some general advice for you.

The very first thing to do is to make your application stick out. For the internship position, we were interviewing for we had roughly 200 applicants.

About 100 of those were clearly not applying for an internship (i.e they were just sending their CV to every open inbox they could), so we threw those out.

About 20 of the remainder had clearly taken the effort to tailor their application to Riot but were unfortunately not looking to apply for the application security position so much as they wanted to work at Riot, which is admirable, but we really needed an application security engineer intern.

The remaining 80 were a bit harder. Of the 80, we had to remove any that would require a visa to work in Ireland as it's complicated to get a work visa ...

The answer is always "it depends", but yeah there are people with math backgrounds here for sure!

I wasn't in the industry. I've answered this more in other questions and I'm running out of time today! Thanks for asking the question, and good luck in following the dream.

I worked at McKinsey so I can speak directly to that!

I loved working at the firm--ultimately I was tired of travel and realized that if I didn't try to follow my childhood dream of making games I'd probably look back and regret it.

Consulting is great: a lot of difficult and varied challenges, but high-pressure environment which I really learned a lot from. There's a lot of variance in the work: I worked in strategy, operations, marketing, sales, insurance, banking, mining, logistics, grocery, retail, high tech.

... but here's the thing: making video games is so much more meaningful to me. It's as cross-functional, but it's in an industry that I fundamentally enjoy. The hours are more sustainable, and there is no required travel (in my role).

I studied computer science in undergrad and an MBA later on. I work across actual financials: revenues and costs, economic profit, telemetry and research findings, etc. I am more focused on the recommendation and I think about the right tool for the job.

Keep an eye out for roles, I think there are definitely roles for people with a solid accounting background. Careers website might list them all.

My hiring decision was based on my professional qualifications for the role, and today when I make hiring decisions that's my only factor. The exception would be for certain jobs where there is a specific business need for gameplay knowledge (such as the "balance team"). Of course, most people are highly passionate gamers at Riot.