I no longer trust Riot to learn from their mistakes and grow as individuals or a company.
Grumpy Old Man time? Grumpy Old Man time!
Want the secret for lasting relationships? Friends, romance, business it doesn't matter!
- Honesty
- A drive to improve.
Find someone with willingness to fix mistakes and grow as a person. Be that person yourself. Its hard but it pays off. Riot used to be like that. The company culture encouraged it. But that has changed the last season or three.
Let us return to the primordial mud which shaped Riot and I. The Warcraft 3 mod community, birthplace of Defense of the Ancients, Dota All Stars, FootMan Frenzy, Legion TD, the works. It was a glorious mess. A soup of creativity and merciless manipulation of the poor game engine. Guinsoo and Icefrog get the glory but there was a whole community of dedicated modders.
I was fascinated. I tried my hand at modding to little success. My talents lie elsewhere, but game development continues to fascinate me. I began a decades long habit of lurking on boards and forums where developers post.
As befitting a company that rose from chaos and haywire Riot was a mess in season 1. League was a mess in season 1. The most impactful legacy was the rushed bi-weekly champion releases. Quality control was very low. Volibear, Mordekaiser and NuNu are only slightly changed from those days.
I read up on league for a few weeks then joined on the Nocturne Patch. Late March 2011.
The Good: Riot was full of passionate and creative people. The Bad: Riot's engineering and framework was new, jury rigged and fragile. The Ugly: Riot was under tremendous financial pressure; cranking out updates and new champions as fast as possible to keep the lights on.
Darius release in season 2 brought CertainlyT into the picture. He was a rock star developer then and now. Rock stars need managers. Otherwise they end up dead of an overdose in a trashed hotel room with a diseased, deceased hooker. CT has similar problems with champion design. He's fine as long as someone sets rules and boundaries for him.
Nostalgia for season 1-3 tends to skip over the bug splats. The sever outages. The Log in Queues every weekend. Release Vladimir. Release Vayne. Mistakes were made under pressure. But mistakes were forgiven. Because of honesty. Because of trust. Because of a desire to improve. It was like my current relationship.
I brought real life friends into the game. Infected them. Created a web of friends of friends that eventually lead to me meeting my bride to be through league. Made mistakes. Grew as a person. Never was arsed to push past silver.
Ranked was incredibly toxic the first 4 years. Lost my taste for it early.
Riot was growing too. Improving. Game breaking mistakes were fewer. The framework was stabilizing. People were getting better at predicting the results of changes. League hit its stride and was in a constant state of improvement.
So what happened? When did Riot shift away from learning from past mistakes? What happened to that institutional knowledge?
I don't know. Best Guess? A lot of the old people moved on, moved up or burned out. For me the trust is gone after the latest Jungle changes. The trust is dead. Like when my ex stole my car after failing to tell me she owned the government thousands. I'm not against a Jungle rework. A proper set of changes that learn from the season 2,3,4,5,6,7 jungle changes. Right now I see no evidence that Riot is growing as a company. I see no evidence that League is growing as a game or a community. I see a whole lot of 2 steps forward 3 steps back.
The Good: Riot is still full of passionate and creative people. The Bad: The development pipeline is an embarrassing mess. Riot constantly underestimates how much time and resources they need on projects. The Ugly: League hasn't significantly improved in years because of poor management, leadership and loss of institutional knowledge. Every change that fixes one thing breaks at least one other. Even Runes Reforged was a small upgrade at best.