Legends of Runeterra Dev Tracker

Thanks for digging this up. It's a fun example of how many times when we cite a successful game doing something a certain way as justification... The actual devs are wishing they'd done it differently in hindsight.

Mtg does but they didn’t about 20 years ago when the layout was created. They would put the cost on the left side if starting from scratch according to their head designer.

Craw Wurm or bust.

Actually, MTG's head designer is on record saying that doing this was also not ideal and it's why their "Future sight" frame put them on the same side. Naturally it'd be too weird to have mana costs in different places between old and new cards overall, so the ship sailed for MTG though.

This is a good example of something that might not be "ideal" but also isn't a BIG deal. Keeping relevant info for play timing on the same side of the card in a physical came that relies on manual card fanning is a slight improvement in usability, but it's not a disaster if you don't do it.

We plan on adding all League champs to LoR eventually, yes, in the form of the Path of Champions. At this time, there are no plans to do so for PvP.

this is very heartwarming :)

Not the point. If you want to say “please remove the nightmare rewards and put them on the weekly vault so I don’t have to play nightmares to get the decreases”, you might as well say “give me more stuff for normal weekly quests already in tpoc and remove the same amount of stuff from nightmares”.

That’s fine to ask for, but it’s not about the PvP vault at that point. It’s just asking for more stuff or easier to get stuff in general for what you’re already doing. This post is about the weekly PvP vault, and why you can’t just expect riot to let you trade out PvP rewards for PvE rewards there as if they were equivalent. PvP rewards are a free bonus for PvE players.

It's the weekly PvP vault. The rewards are for PvP. PvE's reward pacing exists separately and is balanced accordingly. The result is that you can earn PvP rewards as a free bonus, which is good for encouraging people to check out PvP eventually.

It feels weird because it's called the "Weekly Vault" and not the "Weekly PvP Vault", but that's because there was only PvP for years and the name never got updated. The fact the game showers you with free PvP cards as a bonus even for playing PvE is a nice extra.

I know you're saying "But I just want more stuff that's relevant to me because I don't care about PvP". That's not the point. There is going to be some kind of budget for how many rewards to hand out for PvE. If they give it to you in the weekly vault, they have to take it from somewhere else.

Saying "but I'd be giving up pvp cards that I don't plan to use anyway" misses the point. The PvP rewards are good for PvP players already, and are included as a bon...

If they changed the name to something like "Weekly PvP Vault" - which is what it is, it just wasn't called that before becuase pvp used to be the only mode - people wouldn't feel it's weird that it only gives PvP resources.

Fun fact - I pitched Eternal's devs on expanding their PvE modes into something like path of champions ~8 years ago. The people I spoke to told me that people only spend money on cardgames to beat other people, and that no one would spend on a PvE mode.

Collectors have outnumbered players since before the speculation boom of a few years ago. "Collecting pokemon cards" without playing has been a thing for a very long time.

I agree with readability being key for default cards, but cards used like a commander don’t need to be repeatedly referenced. You quickly learn what they do by art and then only read them if you need to check details on some specific timing or nuance. A lot like a tooltip for an ability in league. It does increase the effort of each read, but the sheer visual impact is worth it if the art is great. Pokémon’s special illustration rates from 151 are enchanting.

The default Bandai Namco card tempting of games like DBZ is the worst of every world. It’s hard to read and looks a mess.

I think something similar to your approach would work great for lower rarity cards, but the equivalent of “champion” cards in LoR would benefit from a full art treatment. You could potentially have a default version that’s not full art as well as a very rare full with different art, like Pokemon does, but that limits their supply to an expensive collector’s item.

Pokemon's cards are crazy beautiful too. It's a major reason that collectors of that card game vastly outnumber players (which is why the competitive formats are so cheap, since far more people open packs than play with cards).

I think readability is significantly underrated in physical cardgames, but poke'mon's full art cards are a huge hit for a reason. I like how readable your text box is for the default card and the keywords on the box look pretty great without having to be a whole separate bar, but take a look at Poke'mon's "Illustration Rares" from the 151 set for inspiration on the highest rarity cards for the highest rarity cards. The readability is challenging but very worth it for a collector or a player that just wants their highest rarity cards to look beautiful.

As long as the whole game isn't that hard to read, it's fine to do it in small doses at high rarities and the payoff is great.

Because PvP needs puts huge additional constraints on the design (some stuff you can do to AI jsut fine is NOT fun when some player does it to you) and the hours required for balance testing are immense.

Let's say 4 designers test 1000 hours each with a new champion. They pair off so that's 2000 total hours of games. Assuming a 40 hour work week, that's 25 weeks of dedidcated balance testing. About 6 months of time spent on it.

The first 1000 players will equal that testing in a few hours after launch. it's a BIG commitment to do so much balance testing and iteration that you can make cards resilient enough for the broader community.

In PvE balance still matters, but the target is way wider. In PvP the difference between a deck with a 48% win rate and a 52% win rate is massive. One is low tier and one is quite high tier. However that's only going to matter about 5 times in every 100 games. it's very hard to eyeball that difference from brute force testing. I...

How'd you get the gemstones?

This is so cool seeing people start filling these out. I first saw the mockups of completed constellations in this system about 1.5 years ago, figuring out what 4+ star progression should look like. We wanted it to be something that wasn't just functional, but beautiful and expressive, a little different for each champion. Seeing them become maxed out for real is wonderful. Great job!

Hello former Rioter Dan Felder, who was highly involved in monetizing LoR. I didn't read your name at first.

No worries. I came into the project after the PvP economy was already in place. I was heavily involved with designing the PvE monetization strategy, but I'm not on the team anymore. I'm only speaking for myself.

I've since learned even $1.3m isn't enough to run the game, at least not without a lean team[...] I know you have NDA, but can you give me a rough idea of how far off I am?

Just going to talk in some game development generalities here, because people do underestimate how expensive high quality games are to make.

A decent ballpark estimate for Total compensation for a typical game dev in LA (not specifically Riot, just in general), factoring in salary, stock, bonuses, healthcare, other benefits, and licenses/equipment etc, is ~$15k per month, or $180k per year.

This meme is hilarious, but I just want to gently push back on the idea that Project K is somehow bad times for LoR.

1. The teams share a lot of synergies and brainpower, naturally. So this just helps both games get more bang for the buck. We also expect to continue sharing things like art assets, which will help LoR even more.

2. At the same time, the teams don’t really overlap on resources (other than design obv) because the products are so different, so there’s no material trade offs happening. Both teams have their own lane and Riot would be thrilled for both games to thrive. From the game teams’ perspective, either team succeeding means both teams are winning.

3. Riot is always evaluating game opportunities across the spectrum - MOBA, fighting games, mobile and console platforms - this time we found something we think is super awesome in the physical gaming space, that happens to be able to leverage existing Riot stuff to jumpstart th...