Riot, is there a reason you don't have your old champs archived somewhere?

Linna Excel·Jul 11, 2018·16 votes·8,092 views

I just saw this Ghostcralwer Q&A session and it made me think. Why does riot discard their stuff to older champs when they get reworked? Shouldn't you guys keep these things around privately for preserving the history of the game? Haven't you guys learned that those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it?

I mean look at WOW, they just added a legacy vanilla server not that long ago and it was a huge hit for fans and it helped keep the history of their game alive.

16 Comments

Lets have shrexJul 11, 201814 votes

I'd give my life to play old Galio, tbh I'd really pay to play an old version of league

CaveslothJul 12, 20181 votes

Even better, old Galio in URF. So fun dumpstering the so called "META" champs with ease. Yeah his kit was clunky and weird but once you got used to it, it was surprisingly easy to win with.

Akali is SO HOTJul 11, 201810 votes

I was honestly surprised when a red posted that they don't keep their old stuff. They coulda just copy and pasted old Leblanc when they reverted her with probably only a little tweaking to do, but instead they had to rebuild basically everything. Even now she is still missing a lot of sound effects and has a ton of bugs. Could've been avoided if they had just saved her old files somewhere.

Linna ExcelJul 11, 20183 votes

Yes, there's that too. It's entirely possible another mid-sized or larger rework may have to be reverted in the future. Having the old files on hand would make sense just for that.

Besides, memory is relatively cheap these days. It's not like they couldn't afford a hd to store archived stuff on.

CaptainAntiHerozJul 12, 20187 votes

Nuuuuuu Eeeeeeeveeeeeeee now your not a leather badass tank ad ap whatever the hell you were intended to be T_T

CURSE THAT THING AND ALL IT'S DISGUSTING GRUNTING

KICK OUT AT 2Jul 12, 20186 votes

Because like Blizzard they can only look forward and disregard the past. This has the possibility of biting them in the ass if it turns out that many players preferred older versions of the game. Maybe Riot will have a Nostalrius-esque fiasco they'll have to deal with in the future.

Warlord RhinarkJul 12, 20186 votes

Am I the only one that actually finds it hard to hate Ghostcrawler when he's sitting here, answering these questions?

I mean, I get it, he makes bad decisions, but I don't think he's actually doing it to intentionally piss people off.

He genuinely seems like a nice guy.

The EcdysiastJul 12, 20184 votes

It becomes easy to hate him again when you notice they cherry-pick the questions mainly to attempt jokes, and the few serious questions he answers, he doesn't give solid answers.

Linna ExcelJul 12, 20181 votes

I think he's a nice guy. My concern isn't with him, it's with riot not keeping the history of the game somewhere.

KFCeytronJul 12, 20184 votes

Even amateur programmers writing toy programs keep old versions of their stuff, even if their idea of version control is "Save As... > chess9.py" rather than Git or Subversion. He couldn't possibly have meant that someone selected all those files and hit Delete without storing a backup somewhere. It's inconceivable. "Those champions are gone" must mean that they're just no longer included in the files when a new user downloads the latest version of LoL.

DW DianaJul 12, 20181 votes

{quoted}

Even amateur programmers writing toy programs keep old versions of their stuff, even if their idea of version control is "Save As... > chess9.py" rather than Git or Subversion. He couldn't possibly have meant that someone selected all those files and hit Delete without storing a backup somewhere. It's inconceivable. "Those champions are gone" must mean that they're just no longer included in the files when a new user downloads the latest version of LoL.

This was my thought. Added to which, the idea that they could just "copy/paste" the champion back into the game is hilarious! I don't even work in the game development industry (consigned to full stack web development atm :P) and even I know it's not that easy xD

koshkyraJul 11, 20183 votes

I want to to back to s5

CaveslothJul 12, 20182 votes

Is it really that surprising from a company that changed the CORE of its gameplay from the slow strategic moba that made it the number 1 game in the world to a fast paced high lethality shooter style?

Colgate GatorJul 12, 20182 votes

I honestly refuse to believe they don't have an archive of older versions of the game/champ/items and stuff along with all the data they hold, even I have multiple old versions of stupid Phosothop files. It reminds me that the only reason we have Toy Story 2 around was because someone had a local backup of the work, as there was an accident in the offices that caused the "working file" to basically implode.

I'm leaning towards the possibility of them saying that they do not have an older version as to avoid people going "WELL THEN JUST REVERT X, YOU HAVE THE FILES".

ChaddyFantomeJul 12, 20181 votes

Rioters have actually answered this before.

It's because of the way the game is coded.

League of legends isn't coded modularly. it's a big spaghetti code mess.

The reason they don't just pull out the USB with Old Urgots data and keep it in a folder is because they actually can't. Instead, everything in league is like a series of tangled wires that come together to somehow form things as they function in the game. The line of code that controls all snares in the game for example is the same for every champion. The one for hitboxes is the same for every champion etc.

When riot changes or removes/reworks a champion, they are in fact, largely changing the overall code of the game to make it also do things for the champion they are changing/adding, as opposed to plugging in a folder with the character data into the game. This is why they can't just keep the code for old champions. It doesn't really exist.

PaladinNOJul 12, 20181 votes

What 3 champions would you guys open a cold one with?

Easy:

Fiora (she gave me my first ever pentakill - plus I actually got the hang of playing her)
Soraka (RIP mana bananas - though her Q basically made her a melee champ)
Sivir (there was a time her dance and VO were actually cool)

Honorary mention: