Legends of Runeterra Dev Tracker

Frank, Aaron, and Reuben all definitely come to mind for that yeah. They’re crazy good players. :)

You’re very right that definitive balance testing is hard to get until you see it live with a big population of players, and you’re also right to call out that even then some thing s stay undiscovered for years / like the fascinating reinvention of StarCraft’s Zerg vs Terran matchup by the player Savior many years after blizzard has stopped updating the game (and pros had been calling for balance patches to solve the unwinnable matchup before Savior found the answer). Great article on that is called “god of the battlefield” if you’re interested.

This is one reason designers often focus on how a deck feels to play against and play with, because ultimately that’s what matters the most. Some strategies might be technically balanced but still feel terrible to play against, or feel totally overpowered even when the data insists they’re not. Like that time they ...

Oh heck yeah. :)

Thanks. It's good to be here. :)

Oh cool, I should watch this. :)

Weirdly, I always feel this in a game where I don't play PvP regularly, and I find once I decide "I'm okay looking stupid, I'm just going to play some games and see what happens, I'm playing for the discovery" it usually goes away really fast.

I think you sum it up really well actually. Fleeting cards are better at some things, and activated abilities are better at some things; particularly, like you mentioned, cards with multiple simple abilities.

Thanks :)

It's the same with many bugs. If you spend 10,000 hours playtesting the first level of a game, the first 10,000 players are going to equal that in the first hour the game is released.

To geek out a bit about balance testing - if you've read Moneyball (great book) one of the biggest takeaways is how hard it is to tell the difference between an average hitter and a great hitter with the naked eye. Often the difference is only one extra hit every 2 weeks or so. It's very hard to notice that without statistical analysis of a huge number of games.

Likewise, the difference between a statistically dominant deck and a strong but fair one is almost invisible to the naked eye. A deck with a 53% win rate against the meta is very strong but pretty reasonable, a deck with a 62% win rate is extremely powerful. However, if you play 20 games the 62% win rate deck will likely only win 1 or 2 extra games than a 50% deck would. That's assuming both people playtesting have perfectly e...

Fleeting card generation is great, it just takes a lot more words and hand clutter to do certain things with fleeting cards than it does in a game with activated abilities on the cards themselves. So similar functionality but a lot more cumbersome which limits what we can do without it feeling overwhelming. Also, fleeting cards have other synergies involved since you can discard fleeting cards to other effects.

Glad you're enjoying our game. I liked it so much I came to work here, so I know the feeling. :)

That'd be super thematic. We've actually tried a lot of different angles on caring about your opponent's stuff like this (not sure if we've tried this specifically). In my experience working on various games, it usually comes down to the same issue:

When your opponents have keywords on their board, it'll feel great. When they don't, it'll feel frustrating. Matchups also become a lot more polarizing, with some matchups just not letting your character do much of anything.

For a point of comparison, imagine you see the following two quests were proposed for an event by a designer:

Quest A: Summon 30 Shurima units.

Quest B: Kill 10 Shurima enemies in ranked mode.

Quest A asks you to play a deck with Shurima units. Very doable. You can play a shurima-focused deck and do it fast, or you could play a deck with a few shurima cards and do it a bit more slowly. Either way, you can reliably progress your quest.

Quest B will only progress if you...

We weren't ignoring you about Tam Kench, we were just pressing the call security button under the table because how DID you get into the office anyway? :)

Yeah, like many games it has endless opportunity to go deeper due to matchups, timing, hidden information, and similar when you're ready for that - but to start enjoying the game you don't need to know all that.

Is it helpful to know that Kayle gets super powerful in the late game so you should try to end the game early vs her? Sure, but do you need to know that to play the game, and will knowing that at the entry level matter more than just landing more last-hits or keeping an eye on the objectives? Not really, so it represents a chance to go deeper when you're ready to do so - but new players can have a lot of fun before that by focusing on improving on the most obvious stuff that matters.

Wild Rift is a mobile take on LoL, and it is significantly streamlined with far fewer champions you need to learn all at once. Matches are about twice as fast, there's some significant quality of life features, and many that find the PC control scheme unintuitive find WR's very intuitive (and vice versa of course, I play both LoL and WR). I know a lot of people that bounced off LoL really enjoy WR.

Things can be hard and straightforward :)

I’ve introduced a lot of people to LoR and WR. To understand WR enough to have fun you just need tow know a few things:

• Kill minions to get gold. Killing players gets you gold too but it’s much riskier, so mostly just kill minions unless the rest of the team needs help somewhere.

• Use gold back at your home base to buy upgrades. Just buy the suggested ones until you are much more comfortable.

• Destroy towers so you can eventually win by destroying the enemy nexus.

• Killing the neutral monsters in the jungle gives your team buffs, so look up the few different monsters to learn what they do. The most important ones are ones in the center.

• Avoid fighting people higher level than you, or with a lot more gold than you (there is a handy way to check how much total gold everyone has in game)

• Find out if your champion is stronger in the late or ea...

Fun fact - Jayce wrote his undergraduate thesis on this. :)

Yup! Wild rift has a very solid tutorial. I recommend going through the jungle tutorials to get an idea of the map objectives, the game is pretty straightforward once you know a few basics.

While there’s endless depth for mastery you really don’t need to go too deep in order to have fun. Just bear in mind that some characters are better early and some are better late, and if someone is killing you easily stop fighting them. It’ll only get worse ;)