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The F-ing New Guys at Riot are repeating mistakes from 7+ years ago.

Holgranth··270 votes·28,852 views

Grumpy old man time!

Been here since the dawn of the Genre. Played Dota All Stars and Footman Frenzy. Made Mods as a High Schooler and dreamed of being a Dev. Lurked on forums where Dev's posted. Started playing League on Nocturne patch. Kept up with LoL dev posts since S1. Seen lots of mistakes made and growing pains. After 5 years of playing together got engaged to someone I met on League.

Watching the current development team is painful. I am totally unqualified to be a League Developer. I accept that. The best I ever did was a shitty custom mission for Team Apache. I feel like the current crop of Rioters are overconfident and believe their own hype. They keep making mistakes I made when I was making mods. Making changes without understanding why things are designed how they are.

I am in Silver because I cannot be arsed to put in the time to sharpen my skills.

I have been Silver for 6? Years now.

I am not good enough to redesign the jungle.

I am not good enough to design champions.

But I have watched, read and analyzed almost all the league related content the Developers have shared with players for almost a Decade. The mistakes being made right now are embarrassing. It's amateur hour at the incompetence factory.

Back in season 1 through 3 Riot cranked out champions without taking enough time to properly design and test them. (Financial pressure during S1 &2 was intense.) Zoe was a terrifying return to this pattern of terrible decision making. The first failure was at design. Don't blame CertainlyT, blame his fellow designers, blame everyone who didn't say "no that is a bad idea,". Spread that blame like homemade jam on fresh bread, sink it into every bubble and fold.

Releasing a Champion during Pre-Season is always risky and not worth. The Scheduling of Pre-Season has always been great for Rioters and frustrating for players. When you are a Dev dumping the Changes on live then going on vacation is great. Look at the data and make changes in the new year. Sucks to be a player dealing with an unbalanced mess over the holidays.

Zoe got "tested" during the runes overhaul. The testers failed to realize how powerful Q-Q-R was. The testers thought getting random teleport drops could ever work. The testers failed to even come close to doing their job.

Human nature is to ignore mistakes and hope they go away. Its what children do until they are taught to fix and learn from their mistakes. Riot left release Zoe in essentially the same spot for months with tiny meaningless nerfs. Only admitting she hadn't been properly tested and they hadn't reacted fast enough months later. Amateur hour. Basic shit. Thought we were past this five years ago.

The Jungle changes show clear lack of understanding of 8 years of changes to the Jungle. It is a repeat of mistakes from Season 2 onward. A proper overhaul of the Jungle requires a lot more than dicking around with Skuttle Crab and nerfing early XP. It requires a complex set of changes to XP across the entire game. It might require changes to the map, new monster types, changes to spawn times, a rework of the buff camps, new mechanics and item reworks. It takes time and thought and understanding to create a jungle that allows many different champions to thrive and unique play styles to emerge.

Pushing a narrow view of "Jungle vs Jungle interactions," is disheartening. Jungle was more diverse and better back in Seasons 1 and 3 when there were less champions but more variety in play styles.

I would go on about how blindly cranking out more champions is eroding balance and fun, but this is long enough.

I still want to have a Nautilus and Nami on my wedding cake but now it will be a celebration of how we met and the "good old days", we'll have to find something new to symbolize a glorious future together.

_Edit: This is harsher in tone than than I really was going for. I forgave past mistakes because I trusted you to learn and do better I can't trust you guys to do that anymore. I just REALLY want to express to Rioters new and old just how much history this game has that they seem to be unaware of. Seeing the same mistakes for the 2nd or 3rd time is just disheartening. _

143 Comments

HalcyonDweller82 votes

For a grumpy old man you speak a lot of sense. Thank you for acknowledging your own shortcomings before launching into Riot. It's refreshing to see someone who knows their limitations instead of the usual folks who just claim they know best and Riot should do everything they say.

This was really reasonably written, even if it was a bit harsh, and I honestly believe that this is one of the most constructive criticisms I've seen of Riot in weeks or even months. Props dude, have a bump and an upvote +1

P.S. And congrats on your wedding I wish you both the happiest of futures!

FurriesAreHot34 votes

I honestly went into this expecting another “I know everything, my way is the right way” post. But no, this guy respects the limitations of himself and makes a reasonable argument.

PalPlays5 votes

I agree and would love to see this guy get picked up by Riot. EVERY dev team needs a guy who says "whoa hold up, once you release this there's no going back." We've seen with Vladimir, Zoe, and RYZE (about a dozen times) that the team clearly doesn't have someone like this.

The Juggernaut rework, the multiple complete reverts to Leblanc, Rengar, and Kog'Maw, and now the new keystones that are just different flavors of other keystones prove this. Riot? Hire this grumpy old man. He has more qualifications than a lot of your "fresh out of SCAD" newbies. (nothing against SCAD)

Risen2910 votes

They really didn't have an excuse. In the dev forum I, and others, told them that the scuttle changes would just force everyone to pick strong early junglers who could duel. They couldn't see it, or didn't listen. Their weak solution was just to have two scuttles spawn for the first round.

HalcyonDweller5 votes

It's tough to recognize value in - or listen to - comments from players who are intentionally being inflammatory just because they feel justified in taking their anger out on Rioters. I'm not surprised they didn't listen to many of the players who complained about it.

Risen294 votes

{quoted}

It's tough to recognize value in - or listen to - comments from players who are intentionally being inflammatory just because they feel justified in taking their anger out on Rioters. I'm not surprised they didn't listen to many of the players who complained about it.

There was nothing inflammatory in my, or many others, warning to them about the scuttle changes.

Its shocking that they didn't realize this would happen when so many players did.

HalcyonDweller4 votes

Hmm, alright then. I guess this may be a case where Riot should have listened better.

BigSquirrell40 votes

"Don't blame CertainlyT, blame his fellow designers, blame everyone who didn't say 'no that is a bad idea,'."

This is basically something I've been thinking for awhile now about what's going on in Riot. It's been feeling like there are too many people saying "hey, you know what would be cool?" and not enough people reigning them in. It's incredibly valuable to have people around that have innovative ideas, but there have to be people that are willing and able to mold the plausible ideas into something workable and say no to the ideas that are too much.

Holgranth34 votes

Every Rock Star needs a boring manager to keep them on track or they die of an OD in a trashed hotel room with a dead hooker.

Bluup5 votes

I think going "hey, you know what would be cool?" and then implementing those ideas into a game is a good thing, for varying reasons.

Just not in a pvp game where you have to use a lot more neutral thought/reasoning.

If this were a PvE game that would be great, and a lot more of the OP designs Riot has come up with a lot more reasonable. I hope one day they make a Diablo clone in the league universe and throw in a bunch of their OP champ designs or abilities for us to play around with.

Saianna28 votes

I am totally unqualified to be a League Developer. I accept that.

Most of lol devs are pretty much the same. They just don't accept that and instead push with stupid changes ;p

Cowgirl Ed24 votes

Dude congratz on getting married and all that stuff, but seriously DO NOT sponsor this game, DO NOT have that cake. They don't deserve it, and we both know it. Had multiple accounts since beta, it's simply embarrassing. I don't know what the fuck Tryndamere and Ryze are doing right now, but I guess money is money.

Holgranth6 votes

Probably going to have a small beach wedding. Not going to make or break Riot either way.

Thefrostyviking22 votes

Just recently i saw a boards post where a guy was quoting a riot playtester, said play tester wrote that he and another guy were the ones who had tested the jungle changes and were the ones that approved them.

I have no idea if that is actually true or not.

But if it really is true.....then damn, they actually had 2 guys do all the internal testing and put down the biggest part of the approval stamp?

What does the PBE even exist for?

ZephyrDrake12 votes

{quoted}

Just recently i saw a boards post where a guy was quoting a riot playtester, said play tester wrote that and another guy were the ones who had tested the jungle changes and were the ones that approved them.

I have no idea if that is actually true or not.

But if it really is true.....then damn, they actually had 2 guys do all the internal testing and put down the biggest part of the approval stamp?

What does the PBE even exist for?

the PBE has never been to test balance. They have said it time and time again. It's there for bug hunting and how something feels for the most part. Unless something is hilariously OP it's not going to be addressed. Also remember what happened to Skarner? he was fine but people were about how weak he was on the PBE and Riot actually buffed him, they had to get rid of the buff they gave him in a hotfix and Skarner came out just fine. PBE is not good for actual balance testing since MMR quality is horrendous there due to the limited amount of people on the servers and being full of so many boosted people that play with people that have so much higher MMR (on the main servers) than they do and get carried to dumb ranks and MMR lvls that you just see them feed like crazy. Not to mention that people don't really play all that often there as opposed to the live servers to their MMR could be way lower (or higher if really lucky) than what it would be on the main servers

Risen2922 votes

The OP is correct.

I think it's a similar situation to what happened with HoTS. The got a new lead dev, who then proceded to rape the game design because he either did not understand why heroes had been designed the way they were, or was consciously choosing to throw that out in favor of pursuing a goal contrary to the original game design.

Gbay was right about one thing in one of his videos - The death of most big games like this comes because the devs start ignoring what the players like and want from the game, barreling ahead to force the game in a new direction that fails to gain new players but only alienates the existing playerbase. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IIi2oJiqO00

That's what killed HoTS for me. It went something like this:

"Hey, let's give effective AoE waveclear to every new warrior and assassin, and buff it on existing ones. Because players like blowing up lots of minions, it's fun and statisfying".

Don't you realize there is an entire class, the specialist, that was designed to have the best waveclear so they could be the class that manages the waves, sieges, defends against sieges, and generally handles the macro for the team?

"No fucks are given. I don't want any of that macro shit in my game anyway. I want everyone deathballing over the forced map objectives all game long."

Then what is the point of a specialist?

"We'll just change their class definition to be 'whatever doesn't fit in the other three classes'. Boom, done. Problem solved."

But, that still doesn't give us a reason to play the specialist. Because now they are just subpar damage dealers with random utility. Nobody actually needs their utility to win, in the same way they need a tank, DPS, or healer to win.

"While we're at it, let's nerf sieging ability in general and make everything more focused on the map objective than it already is. And let's make it so other classes can easily take merc camps too.

That was the point where I left and never looked back. They basically removed an entire class from the game. The class that was actually the funnest for me because it was the most strategic and macro oriented.

A testament to their failure of vision is the fact that in 3 years they have released dozens of new heroes but only two new specialists. Turns out that defining the specialist as "a dumping ground for whatever doesn't fit in the other three roles" isn't a very effective framework for creative development. Or, maybe all the people who actually had creative talent on that team left a long time ago. It's a shame, because the HoTS specialists were some of the most unique and interesting MOBA heroes.

One of the reasons I like Jungle is also because I am more objective/splitpush/macro oriented. And Jungle has more freedom to do it than top lane does. I wonder if LoL is going down a similar path.

Holgranth6 votes

I LOVED the idea of the specialist and siege classes in HoTS. Had to pick one game in the end, went with League, best decision ever never would have gotten together with my twuu wuv otherwise.

Sad to hear Blizzard crapped on the unique elements of their game though.

BALDG1VEN BOOMER14 votes

Ever since season five Riot goal was to make every new champion as OP as possible, aside from Taliyah and Kled name me which one wasn’t a clusterfuck on release since Ekko.

Holgranth63 votes

"Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity."

Design is hard. Balance is hard. Crunch is hard. Designers are signing up for a hard job. It usually takes 2-3 passes at a champion post release to make them a truly great addition to League. Instead of accepting that and releasing fewer, better champions we are still getting too many half baked releases.

BALDG1VEN BOOMER29 votes

There have been tons of thread expressing why some champions maybe Op on release yet Riot still released them as they are.

I never said design and balance was easy so maybe you should take that quote into consideration yourself.

Holgranth9 votes

Fair enough

BobaFlautist15 votes

Yes but there are also tons of threads expressing why some champions may be OP on release where the champions turn out to be awful.

The pattern for new champions, no matter what, involves them being too strong at some point. Either they're released weak, buffed while people are learning them, and then become too strong, o they're released too strong. That's just the nature of the game.

Tyermaillin5 votes

And yet you say that Riot intentionally releases champions overpowered because they..don't listen to unqualified randoms on the forums? lol

UmbraStar3 votes

[{quoted}](name=j maes,realm=NA,application-id=3ErqAdtq,discussion-id=KBGQLvGE,comment-id=0000000100000003,timestamp=2018-05-22T01:29:12.101+0000)

And yet you say that Riot intentionally releases champions overpowered because they..don't listen to unqualified randoms on the forums? lol

A good majority of Riots playerbase is random, ordinary people who are lower ranking. Personaly I'd love to see the game based around the players and not the pros though. I feel like it would be more interesting to see what the pros would do if the majority of players were the focus. But thats just my 2 cents. So far with the changes going on, and the overly competitive nature being forced almost, Ex. clash, I can only say that I wish they listened to the players instead of randomly doing whatever.

FrostlySpark4 votes

Kayn ?

BALDG1VEN BOOMER6 votes

Pressing two buttons and deleting people isn’t fun to play against at all.

L Rayquaza2 votes

Ivern?

BALDG1VEN BOOMER6 votes

Redemption and Locket were OP, not him. He’s irrelevant now with trash tier itemization.

Nayari3 votes

[deleted]

Risen293 votes

[{quoted}](name=Cute eGirl owo,realm=NA,application-id=3ErqAdtq,discussion-id=KBGQLvGE,comment-id=00000007,timestamp=2018-05-21T20:37:25.688+0000)

Ornn, Kayn, Rakan, Ivern, and Taliyah were all fine on release. Kai'sa too for the most part.

Ivern and Taliyah were cratered into the ground with nerfs. They were both OP at release.

Ornn proved it's unacceptable for something to not be at least slightly OP on release. He was fine on release, but they had to keep buffing him until he was broke. Then they nerfed him to be worse than he was on release.

The same pattern was seen with Kai Sa - Panic buffs after she's released so they don't miss out on sales, followed by nerfs.

Tyermaillin3 votes

Taliyah was not OP at release--she was underpowered. Look at the hotfix buffs on patch 6.10.

ModCaptainMårvelous14 votes

This is interesting because it highlights dev replacement and a shifting version of the game as opposed to other games.

League's original design team isn't really there anymore. The guys who made Season 0-3 are mostly gone or working on other projects. In their place was new blood. I'm going to haphazard that a large amount played 1-3 league. Still, all this said, the original team is gone. In their place are people who are trying to design/work on a game that didn't start with them. Making changes to an existing framework. Can you imagine being given an entire theme park and told to make it work better? Add new rides? Change/make judgement calls on the food that's being served?

What will also be interesting is 3+ years from now. I'd haphazard that the kids who grew up with league (We're talking 2011/2012 middle schoolers) are now entering college or partway into it. In 3+ years time they'll be entering the work force with degrees. These are people whose experiences were molded and shaped by old league and perhaps current. We'll see those people who played league try to work at Riot and bring their ideas of what the game used to be, currently is and what it could be into Riot.

Plus I'd say it's harder these days to work on League than the old days. Champions (in RIot's own words) MUST fulfill something new and never before seen in the game. It's way tougher to create something completely new and unique than it is to add a dash/shield/heal/nuke onto a kit and call it a new champ ala Season 2.

Holgranth9 votes

All available evidence is that the new blood have no real idea what has been tried before or how the framework functions. Hence they are recycling old mistakes and recreating old problems. I remember the Season 2 changes to jungle in particular were similar is goals and absolutely horrible in execution.

The Meta all year was to grab 3-4 gold per 10 items and play as the second support.

Level 2 ganks with boots 3 potions Shyvana were or Twitch were the cheese of the day.

Now we have shifted to a different type of Jungler being dominant instead of actually diversifying the role.

ModCaptainMårvelous8 votes

I think the gold meta was less about shifting the meta and more so people discovering aspects of the game. For a long time GP5 items were seen as a crutch for bad players until it caught on that hey, maybe if you're good at last hitting and have GP5 items, you can make like double gold. Plus there was usually something once/twice a season where someone finds a new, cheese way to play.

Sadly, we're never going to go back to that initial time of discovery where every tool was unknown and all it'd take for a meta change is for someone to realize armor yellows might be more useful than dodge runes. Game has become too figured out and people know too much to let great ideas slip under the radar.

Maybe it's finally time for Riot to do League of Legends 2...

Holgranth4 votes

S2 Jungle was undervalued, Riot went overboard in nerfing how much gold you could get from the Jungle. PS and HoG on every champion was definitely a result of players figuring out economics but S2 Jungle was a total mess.

KazaJhodo12 votes

One of the best posts I've read in a while, not that I spend much time here. Well done.

Riot, when your veterans that are super invested in the game are bailing, you better figure out why. You have a game with an extremely high learning curve that will have great difficulty picking up a new playerbase. Especially our new generation of everything now and easy. Especially when you're still placing them in silver out of their first promos, so they get shit on until they hit bronze 5, 80 games later. They won't even make it that far, especially when all the players are flaming them because they don't belong in the elo.

Its out of hand. Far past out of hand actually. These boards are nothing but players complaining lately.

Seems like the fun has left league.

Shrek Luigi10 votes

can i have a piece of your nautilus and nami cake please Q__Q

Slice n Dice em7 votes

Be ready for Pyke bois. They release things as OP because OP sells. Who would buy zoe if she was released as, in current state. But when you see 1-shoting clips people run to get their hands on that champion, not because of lore or the looks or whatever, but because of being broken and OP.

Sure there will be some people who get really hyped for a new champion because of other stuff than its utility or damage but if you compare them against those who want to play OP stuff, the number would be very low. The issue is money here, and sure there are way more greedier companies than Riot. I am not blaming Riot for trying to milk maximum, because in the end Riot is a company just like every other company.

LibroMastro7 votes

Riot, the community is doing everything for you, you just have to read

Av3lon6 votes

While I'm not a game developer by any means, but I have done my share of analytics and complex system decomposition, design, integration and test. I've also been around this community for the better part of a decade, and find that a lot of what OP has voiced resonates strongly with me.

I'm very curious how well established Riot's systems engineering methodologies are, especially in terms of architecture and on the implementation and validation end. Often times it seems that some of the changes we see do not look like they are thought through well enough in the sense that not all the major touch points have been revalidated or iterated on when making a change, or that the context for why certain things were set up the way that they have been in the past. If you do not have that entire architectural picture of the current state, any changes you introduce propagate a degree of risk. Sometimes that risk is acceptable and mitigatable as you might need to push out the change to get more data before fine tuning. What I do not find acceptable is pushing changes with risks that are either not well understood or not understood at all, as it results in playing a lot of catch up before it can be resolved.

I would assume that having so much data coming in from the player base (both feedback on the forums and actual gameplay data) is a huge boon to quickly identifying and dismantling these risks and implementing fixes, but we don't always see that either.

Holgranth3 votes

The stupidest decisions I have ever seen were made by very smart people with only some of the skills and information needed. Or no common sense.

Leto GT5 votes

I kinda felt betrayed by the jungle changes to be honest. I felt like the role I've been playing since season 2 received some random changes like the whole jungle role meant nothing, like it didn't deserved a thorough work. I believe those changes are disrespectful toward the jungle job and what it represents in the game but also toward the whole jungler community.

Holgranth4 votes

I agree that it feels like a betrayal of trust. Either do it properly or don't do it at all.

PapaGreg214 votes

I remember back in season 5 I thought I would just be a Nautilus jungle main. The joke was on me looking back on things.

Holgranth3 votes

I finally gave up on maining Nautilus last year. I mained him since his release day. At the time the furor on the old forum was that Sejauni had just been released and Nautilus did the same job better.

PapaGreg213 votes

I remember in season 5 they said they wanted Naut to be able to keep up with the AOE jungle camps so they nerfed his w and put all the power into his E. Then he showed up in top lane and they decided to destroy his e. Now he has nothing, lol.

JRobin314 votes

{quoted} Pushing a narrow view of "Jungle vs Jungle interactions," is disheartening. Jungle was more diverse and better back in Seasons 1 and 3 when there were less champions but more variety in play styles.

I agree that pushing Jungle vs Jungle interaction is disheartening. It's almost like laners are designing the jungle and they subconsciously think that the enemy jungler is their 'lane opponent'. Because scuttle now feels like a way to 'punish' junglers that 'roam' to 'other lanes', lol.

I think you may be right about RIOT's continued release of champions. Don't get me wrong, I think it's great to release new champions with new ideas, but it seems evident that RIOT itself is not able to keep up with themselves ever since they broke the hundred champion limit. It's like their ability to manage all the champions, in addition to all the other changes they make, has been spiraling out of control. Just to be clear: I don't think it's a problem for players at all. I definitely think the designers are unable to keep up with their own creations at this point. And on top of that RIOT starting releasing very controversial designs for champions - things that they vetoed early on as bad ideas made it into the game because of the obsession with new champion release.

Look, RIOT, if you can't keep up with your own designs, then you know you've made too many champions. The litmus test on that was never on players; it always rested 100% on design team capabilities.

Holgranth2 votes

Very well said. I'd write that up and post it as it's own thread.

Eninya3 votes

Hmm, maybe this was a bad time to end my four year hiatus. My main was destroyed by the most bizarre rework I've seen since Tassadar in Heroes of the Storm, and the jungle meta looks stupid as all hell.

focuself1 votes

fire the current balance team, before league becomes a dead game. please.

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