RiotTuxedo

I don't know definitively. I don't work on VALORANT, I work on the Riot Games API. I just posted this cause I've seen some people confused about how someone shot them when they couldn't see anyone. Maybe a member of the VALORANT team will swing by and let us know :)

I noticed this right after I posted it /facepalm

For anyone else wondering, farther for physical distance and further for metaphorical, or figurative, distance. As in, if this gets noticed any further I'll get even more embarrassed xd

Oh hello Reddit! Glad y'all are finding this useful. I've got some examples in the Twitter thread if anyone's interested how this looks in game.

https://twitter.com/RiotTuxedo/status/1250637504895541248
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Thanks for understanding, but keep up the good fight. Priorities are based on what player's want so the more people want all content localized for every region the more likely it'll happen. Don't let me discourage you, but now you know why I work on helping third-party developers. The dev community does some great things for players.

/u/HOUNDfre as for your edit,

edit: can you actually explain why is it such a resource-draining job when third-party apps can already do this? I understand that no way im getting an honest answer here but whatever, asking doesn't hurt

There's two sides to this. Why can third-party apps do this and why does it take a lot of time for Riot to do this correctly. When a player modifies their own client, either by themselves or via a third-party app, then the changes are localized to them. If the client breaks it only affects them and they can easily just re-install the client or remove the app. If we do this and it's done poorly, it'll affect millions of players.

Now we're wandering into territory that I'm not the subject matter expert (sme) on so some of what I say ...

To my knowledge, the solution to this problem isn't as easy as enabling the option to select any language in any region. An implementation of this done poorly, could make the whole client experience worse. So from my perspective, it's either we leave it how it is or we commit to doing it the right way which will take more time than we can spare.

I understand that this is something that players want, which is why I came into this topic originally to say if you modify the client to enable another language it's unlikely you'll get banned. However if you download a program to do this for you and the program does something shady, you're also risking getting banned so exercise caution.

Because I felt like your impression was inaccurate. We're not ignoring it, I know the work to do this has been considered. So now I have the option of completely ignoring your comment or replying as best as I can while attempting to not sound dismissive or combative because I disagree with your assessment. Of the two options, I'd like to reply to you because the topic appears to mean enough to you that you left a reply, but I think maybe I shouldn't have. You didn't get an answer you wanted, I didn't really change your mind, and I probably do look dismissive or combative.

While I understand you believe this is something that should already exist in the client, there are reasons why it's not. The simplest of those reasons is that there is other work in the client that's higher priority.

The policies around third party apps are fairly nuanced, but typically yes bans are mostly related to breaking competitive integrity in some manner. You shouldn't get banned for enabling Spanish on NA, but I also can't say, "this app is okay" because not only would I have to vet it, I'd have to continue to vet any future releases and that's something we can't do for every app.

PLAYERS: In general, be cautious about any third party application you download. If it breaks competitive integrity you're likely to get banned, but if the app is literally just changing the language setting for your client you should be fine.

Also u/Jabukufo please register your app on the ...

Our first step is always to reach out to the developer and start a discussion. This article is so we don't have to do that for developers already in the ecosystem. But you're right if there's a developer whose intentions are good we'd work with them to ensure their product aligns with our policies.

My team mostly focuses on communicating with developers whose goal is to design apps that are inline with Riot's policies and contribute to a positive player experience. For those developers, we're outlining what those policies are and the areas where we believe the player experience can be improved. We offer guidelines to help guide developers toward healthy areas of development.

There's another team that handles the development of tools meant to break games and degrade the player experience; they're anti-cheat. You'll see them talk about their work from time to time, but the more they talk about their methods the easier it becomes to circumvent those methods.

Overwolf overlays aren't problematic in and of itself. What the overlay is does might be. This means one overlay might be fine while another isn't. In the article, we discuss the things we'd like developers to think about and avoid doing when making apps. Apps that display the rules of the game are fine. Offering general suggestions are fine. Offering suggestions based on in-game context is generally off limits, but if you have ideas that don't create a competitive advantage feel free to have a chat with us.

You're pretty close here. The wording we're using is we want to discourage third-party applications from reducing the diversity of the game, providing competitive advantages for players, and playing for the player.

Showing the rules of the game are fine. We did discuss highlighting champs in the shop and decided it might provide an advantage for players re-rolling quickly. I believe the TFT team was looking at doing something to highlight this as part of the game anyway so that every player had equal access to this (but don't quote me on that). We encourage developers to start a discussion with us as early as possible so we can give feedback on ideas.

As for the last section, you're spot on. Apps that play the game for the player are definitely things we like developers to steer clear of. They basically remove skill challenges and create less diverse games.

Kinda answered this here, but tl;dr is maybe.

Same caveat as the other response I put here. We're kind of wandering out of my area of expertise here, you're asking game designer questions and I'm not the best person to ask about this. That being said the goal isn't to obscure this data, in an ideal world I'd like to see Riot be even more transparent about this. From my perspective, this isn't something I think we're trying to hide, a lot of the game designers are on Twitter talking about their thoughts on the current state of the meta. I think in an ideal world there's complete transparency about what's too strong and too weak, it's constantly updated, and there's an ongoing narrative about what the current state of the meta is and what's being done to balance the game. I think the team already does this but I'd personally like to see it done even more so. Like I mentioned before, the devs constantly talk about the balance and in the patch notes there's rational for what's changing (whether or not we as player agree is another...

We're kind of wandering out of my area of expertise here, you're asking game designer questions and I'm not the best person to ask about this. However, I think the goal is for products that use the API to promote diversity in games. There's a lot of area where we think community products can go a long way toward improving the player experience and that's where we'd like to see effort focused. There are some examples of this already; composition builders, the overlays with the rules of the game, apps that highlight the matches won, apps that show your ranked journey. These are the kinds of apps that extend the experience and make TFT more enjoyable.

EDIT: I want to clarify a bit after re-reading your question. I think players will always form an opinion of what's good and bad and likely stick to those decisions. There's nothing wrong with that. But if an app is sending a message to player that anything but Nobles is a mistake, that's an issue for us. We'd li...

Good question. If you read the article, we dive into some of the policy we're creating for community sites making tools for TFT. You'll notice a lot of what we talk about is how tools can start to change the way the game is designed to be played. At a high level, in the article, we discuss reducing diversity, giving competitive advantages, and making decisions for players. All these things are bad from a gameplay perspective so we want to make sure we're exposing data so that community sites can make cool things for players while also ensuring these policies are being adhered to.

Your question was asked in the Developer Dis...

Hmm are you finishing in 8th?

Oh there's a lot to this question, I'll try and his the high level parts. All good questions though.

I don't necessarily think there's one right way to do things, as in most of software engineering there are tradeoffs to everything so it really just depends on your circumstances/constraints to determine which path you take to creating an API. You might ETL all this data into a separate data store for the API if isolation is a concern. You might make two separate APIs if you need to. It all kind of depends on your requirements.

Theory first. I personally like it when the client or primary product uses the same APIs as as made available to the public and the only difference is the permission set (in something like OAuth this means scopes). In general, creating a product that is API first ensures that the API is never an after thought and the product is designed in way for the data to be sharable while still meeting the product needs. If you do take a different approac...

There are a couple teams involved in making TFT match history a thing. My team focuses on making this data available through the API so that community sites can make tools that are useful to players while still remaining conscience of the gameplay (hence some of the policy in the announcement).

We're aiming to have this data in the API soon, so we're sharing the schema but the priority will be making sure it's stable in the client before it gets added to the API. I'm happy we're finally getting match history as well, the TFT team is moving at an incredible pace from what I've seen. They got a lot of plates spinning and I'm just happy to help where I can to get the value to you all, the players.