Dan_Felder

I didn’t think it was polite to call and tell you that ;)

From a design standpoint (my job) - Mostly just planning to make a great game people love playing, the best we can for our players and ourselves (cause we play too). We were going to do that regardless of what new games release. :)

Im really glad people like eating at our restaraunts but I don’t expect them to do it for every meal forever. Marvel snap is a delicious snack, LoR is a wonderful turkey dinner.

Mmmm turkey…

There’s a lot of new games coming out right now, and I don’t mind folks checking them out. I do too. I want everyone’s games to get a chance to be seen and explored. We’ll just make the best one. :)

Just wanted to check to make sure. We try to give folks a good interview experience. :)

Did you apply to something without hearing back?

Remember, LoR launched in 2020 but it was in development for a lot longer. More than six years. That’s a long time for anyone to work on one game. Most folks naturally want to try new things after a while.

It is? Someone should have told me. This’ll be hard to explain to our new hires. :)

When I'm more excited for a daily quest than for a vault, you've did something wrong.

Busy at the moment so can't go deep but wanted to say I strongly agree with this, particularly the tension around platinum vaults. People are often super tense when opening those, worried about getting duplicates. It also creates a sense of guild when taking a champion to 3-stars because you worry about the increased chance of wild fragments.

Those are both design failures, and I'm the person most responsible for them. I originally set those systems up based on some other assumptions about progression that ended up changing late in the process. Can't go into details but it's definitely on my radar to improve this when we get a chance. The trick is finding a way to improve it isn't just a quick fix creating new problems down the road, which would delay cool stuff we've got planned.

Ok

Oh yeah, their stickers largely have mechanical implications; ways of modifying the cards that other cards can care about. Stickers are a game resource there. I think I've not seen a purely cosmetic digital version of it before. It's interesting because one could potentially put stickers on any card, when most cosmetics can only apply to a single card.

Wait, stickers?

I've never heard of a digital cardgame doing that. Are there examples you can' point me too? That sounds interesting.

Not sure why you got downvoted, ideally players would never lose excess fragments by getting several rewards in a row. A solution like yours would definitely help prevent that. It's just a lot more time-consuming. Changing the cap was simple enough we could get it done while doing other exciting stuff, and will still catch the vast majority of problems.

It's also worth noting that the rewards as we know them weren't designed to work how they currently do. We originally intended that players would "tap to claim" many of the rewards players currently get all at once at the end of the run or when checking their mail.

"Tap to claim" means players can control the flow of rewards one at a time, and know exactly which quest or condition they completed to earn the reward. This helps them learn where all their rewards come from and how to get more. Some players don't even know chapter quests exist.

We haven't gotten this in yet but I haven't given up hope that we o...

I wrote a big explanation above, since you pointed out one of the other bonuses of the system. It does kind of feels like you've pre-decided that we only care about money though.

I'm not sure why someone playing LoR would think that, because there's a lot of very easy ways we could make money if that's all we cared about. It's just not who we are. Probably helps that a lot of us play Path ourselves too. :)

We care about building a great game that's also sustainable. We're always looking for designs that do both. Fragment limits encourage players to spend their resources instead of hording. That makes the game both more fun for a lot of players and more sustainable for everyone.

Riot is incredibly focused on "Player Experience First" - it's a core riot value and designers need to be ready to explain how their designs support it. It's brought up constantly in meetings. I love that about working here.

Fortunately, it's often possible to make designs that designs are good for both players and the sustainability of the game. That's not a conspiracy, just sustainable design. :)

The main goal of wild fragments was to give players some guaranteed fragments of their favorite champion on a regular basis, since the first "fully random" version (never intended to be final but we weren't sure what we'd supplement it with yet). This is why we were originally thinking about a "wishlist" system where players would select one or more champions to either increase their odds of rolling or guaruntee a percentage of fragments per day.

This would have worked great in theory but would be kind of annoying for players. They'd have to pre-select champions ...

I'm super biased but also super excited!

I like how it rewards deckbuilding skill as well as play skill. It gives players a lot of ways to excel. I'm also very excited to see what they come up with. I hope they don't break the format of course but... maybe break it a little? :)

Thanks :)

Because a lot of people get paralyzed that they might need them more later for a hypothetical future champion or similar. Same reason people hoard items in rpgs. It affects a lot of people: https://youtu.be/rgU4Oum8SLg

I sure know I finished elden ring with a stack of 50 rune arcs I never spent. We also noticed in testing many people were incredibly reluctant to spend universally valuable resources until they hit a cap, and we want to encourage people spending wild fragments as soon as they can.

Our original thought with wild fragments was to guarantee some ...

Yup. :)

I thought folks on this subreddit and the path of champions subreddit made some good points. We originally set the limit to the cost of the highest star upgrade so that people could save up for it but still would feel it made sense to spend the fragments as soon as possible. But being at 40 meant that it was a bit too easy to accidentally lost fragments if you were saving up for it but got two rewards in a row.

Now it's much harder to lose fragments while saving up for the third star. If you are sub-40 you need to get 11+ fragments AND another reward all at once.

I’m just messing around here, I hope the winking emote makes that clear. I’d never comment on unannounced stuff like this seriously, whether info is false or true. I respect our team.

On leaking in general - both false ones and genuine - it sucks when it’s false and sucks when it’s true. it makes it harder for us to tell our team members what we’ve got coming up or ask others for early feedback. I don’t want to spend a lot of time worrying about sharing ideas with coworkers and I want to be able to talk to respected members of the community in official channels. Every time a leak happens it makes it harder for us to make a good game.

But in general for games, don’t believe half the stuff you hear from unofficial sources. Most leaks for all games aren’t real. False leaks generate more attention at less risk than someone risking their dream job for a real one.

Close. ;)