The_Cactopus

Ahhhh, there’s just so much to address here. First:

Like when Dominion was cancelled, nobody played it really

Well... some people did. And they feel about Dominion exactly the way you feel about NB.

I hate that I'll never to get to play it again

We’ve said we’ll bring it back as an RGM at some point in the future, just not planning to make it permanent because it wasn’t holding players’ interest past the first week in either of the tests we ran (and also it failed to surpass ARAM in popularity even at its peak)

And then when you say things like "We're not gonna let you play this anymore because you just aren't important enough." It hurts

Come on man, we’ve never said that and never would.

I think you’re touching on something that’s super real. Few people can realistically stick with the SR ranked grind beyond 4-5 seasons. Hell, I’m personally gonna churn out into normals only next season, I think.

I don’t have any answers for you and I don’t wanna rehash the “why Nexus Blitz wasn’t hitting the bar” conversation right here but I actually agree with you we’ve gotta find a way to better serve players like you.

Game companies with multiple games make trade-offs at the expense of one game in favor of another all the time. Valve, Blizzard, Nintendo, whatever. They all have to do it, because they'd be batsh*t crazy not to. They just don't come out and tell you when they've done it.

That's what I'm writing about here: is there really value in talking in a "no bullsh*t" way about trade-offs and prioritization in cases like this? It's possible that it's not worth it.

I'm still thinking through it, tbh.

It's a really great question. Maybe one way to make those product announcements would have been to say "we don't believe everyone will want to buy these things. BUT some of you will buy it and love the product, and so we're trying to make something that those people will want to buy." Would people respect that? Hard to say.

Probably our advocates would understand, and our engaged detractors would take offense. I wrote a blog post recently breaking down how different parts of online game communities respond whenever developers make an unpopular change to their game. Link if you're interested.

For Little Legends there was one other no-bullsh*t thing we could have said, which was essentially "because TFT is being added for free, if we don't add a new monetization feature specifically to support this mode, then it might activel...

I’m a big believer in no-bullsh*t communications, especially when we’re making a hard choice about prioritizing one thing over another (like in this case). That’s why we wrote this blog post which says exactly what you pointed out, u/-Basileus.

But, if I’m being self-critical, I think there’s one thing we at Riot haven’t figured out how to communicate yet. It’s this: when we do something for just ONE part of our audience, how do we explain that to the REST of our audience in a way that resonates? The no bullsh*...

tbf Doublelift looked like a TFT Varus until that quadra near the end

we out here trademarking random bullsh*t just to throw y'all off

uWu

I just really love the names. Who the f*ck wouldn’t wanna cuddle a hushtail

I really wanna watch her process the very first time she picks up a new game. Like, she became godlike at TFT before anyone else. Rank 1! How does that big brain go about learning a new game? Could probably learn a lot from her.

Based on what I’ve read it seems like she’s world class at a ton of games. She’s a legend

I'M ALWAYS ADVERSARIAL AND DON'T YOU EVER SAY OTHERWISE

edit: I accidentally deleted the original post above here (was trying to turn off inbox replies) but I’d also posted it here on twitter

Sure, maybe. Maybe after these things come out it'll turn out that we deserve the flame—it wouldn't be the first time.

We won't know for sure until they've been out in the wild for some time, though. Mostly because we decided a long time ago that we shouldn't make knee-jerk changes based on Reddit reactions. Besides, being a nearly 10-year-old game means we take the long view on sh*t like this.

Totally unrelated, here's Reddit in 2017

And here's Reddit in 2019

...

I’d have to go check the numbers again to get an exact figure but yeah it might have been over 100x difference. Nexus Blitz was many times more popular than TT and TFT is many times more popular than Nexus Blitz ever was (even at its height, before it rapidly dropped off). So it’s not close.

I used to agree with this but over time I realized that if you do that every time people complain then it starts to just feel like hollow words. “We’re listening! We hear you, summoners!” You’ve seen it here and in other game communities. Now my belief is that taking action is the best way to show you’re listening.

That said, I still think engaging directly on a place like Reddit can be useful IF you’re able to draw people into a productive conversation. Because then you have an opportunity to ask smart questions that deepen your understanding of your audience.

Yeah I get it. I think that team would be wise to just read and see what/if anything changes once people get their hands on the system on PBE. Some parts of the feedback probably will, or it’ll get more directed and specific.

It’s been my experience having worked on many, many campaigns for League that sometimes, if you jump in right away into discussion, you fall into the trap of being defensive instead of listening.

I mean putting together a spotlight seems like something a unpaid intern could do so Idk why you guys act like its something that NEEDS to be cut.

I wasn’t an unpaid intern when I wrote the spotlights. Neither were the video capture team, editors, audio mix guy, or the localization team.

Posting on Reddit, though... that part is actually unpaid lol. So here we are.

I saw the 6 other Eternals reaction threads but I don’t really see the connection to this topic. The people who made champion Spotlights aren’t working on Eternals, and I don’t work on Eternals.

But I know the people on that team and I’m sure they won’t be happy until they’re confident they’ve made something that people feel good buying. Funny thing about selling cosmetics in this game: if a lot of people don’t want to buy it, it doesn’t make money. So it’s in our interest to get it right, even if it takes time. Same process we’ve always gone through when we introduce a new RP product.

Believe it or not, it took a lot of backend work. Engineering time, just to make sure it wasn’t breaking every time we changed something else in the game (even things you’d think would only affect Summoner’s Rift). We weren’t actively balancing TT but that would’ve been only a fraction of the total opportunity cost of the mode if we had been.

Yeah mostly this.

It’s not the year of cost-cutting—it’s the year of reprioritizing in favor of high impact sh*t. Dropping support for Twisted Treeline so we can go HAM with support for a mode like TFT (which is played by roughly 100x as many players) would be another good example.

I’ll miss the rework spotlights too, though. I spent like two years co-writing them with Phreak. But dropping them is the right call imho.