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Riot has lost my faith regardless of the game's quality: regarding Twisted Treeline.

SerdinorDarkRose·11/25/2019, 11:36:48 PM·3 votes·576 views

League has been overall a good experience over the years, it has it's ups and downs cosntantly but for the most part it is a game that you can have fun, especially with friends. Unfortunately your experience will always vary on solo play since despite what the automated bots are designed to do, you hardly get a game where at least 2+ people won't flame someone, int or spam surrender after a bad start. Or worse. While I can deffinitely put this on Riot (and it's noone else's fault really), after all these years it is the removal of Twisted Treeline that broke my good will. Let me explain.

I do not claim to be a 3v3 fanatic. Nor was I a Dominion one. I am pretty sure the people that dedicated hours in the past in both those two modes have much stronger feelings than I do. I have enjoyed both modes from time to time and what happened to Twisted Treeline is not the same with Dominion as some people make it out to be. The official announcements for both are still out there, but let me grab 2 things from the Dominion post which is this for reference:

"We haven’t been supporting Dominion, and we’ve trapped ourselves in a vicious cycle where the queue isn’t large enough to warrant major attention, but falls prey to bugs and periods of imbalance from the introduction of new champs and items"

"We’ve learned a lot from Dominion and the costs associated with maintaining a fully separate game mode with balance changes, bugfixes, and item updates."

They strongly emphasize that they cut Dominion to dedicate more resources to League. An additional link there leads to the featured game modes. I advice you to read the Hexakill: Twisted Treeline part.

That was from 2014. What happened from 2014-2019 instead was the radical decline of Twisted Treeline. Riot went silent about the map for the most part, fixed none of the long-existing bugs that plagued the game-mode and did nothing to revitilize it. They weren't supporting Dominion and eventually "had" to shut it down. But apparently they learned a lot from it, which is why they also had to kill Twisted Treeline 5 years later. I suppose all that knowledge that was gained got lost. But remember, from the TT statement found in:

"However, Treeline has always suffered from low queue sizes, even in times when we added new items, map-specific champion balance, and even the Twisted Treeline redesign waaayy back in 2012. "

"We debated on whether an ARAM-esque level of support would bring it up to standard, but the lack of growth from the previous efforts we mentioned led us to the conclusion that it just wouldn’t be enough to make Treeline a healthy long-term mode."

Notice the difference? Back when Dominion got removed, Riot at least had the decency to admit they fucked up and had no other option (which is debatable) but to remove it. Five years later they tried to pass it as their ""efforts"" to support the game mode failed. What efforts? The redesign from 2012? The last patch for it that was V5.11? The fact that game-breaking bugs never got fixed? That new items were not added? Why flat out lying this time around? This also creates a question: if the game mode has been silently left to die for all these years, then what exactly does it cost Riot to maintain it? According to them, the playerbase is extremely small, they obviously do not work or maintain it so it doesn't pull resources. They also didn't even want to reintroduce it as a rotating game mode (although we got some "maybe"s after the backlash).

You're telling me that Riot Games, a company that is extremely successful and profitable, that can announce a plan to dominate multiple genres in the coming years, that host the biggest esports event in the world utilizing AR technology, that same company cannot afford to repurpose or support one of its oldest and core game modes, the only other game mode with a competitive ranked system?

Riot is no newcomer to controcersies over the years. Hell, the game still has lootboxes in it even though we call them "hextech crafting". But that aspect can be tolerated, it's a free game and they need to make money somehow even if some ways are very questionable. But Twisted Teeline as a game mode was there for years. It was there when the game started evolving into a worldwide phenomenon, it was an alternative arena for the competitive online scene. Not long ago we celebrated 10 years of LoL. Twisted Treeline was introduced shortly after the game officially launched. It has accompanied this game for years, but I guess it was too much of a hassle to work on it and improve it. If you couldn't bother to care for the game's lifelong friend, why should I?

As of the removal of Twisted Treeline, every future possible purchase in LoL has been cut from my side and friends that are also stunned by the removal decision. Recently in the My Shop I had the chance to get 3 skins that I always wanted. Bought none. Riot Games as a company understands money, every gaming company speaks that language well. I am but one person, it's pretty late when I write this and if you've read this far you may also not give a shit about TT or this post as a whole. I do not expect you to. The game is still great, but I'm greatly disappointed in the company behind it. That's pretty much it. I am also sorry if parts of this post might appear as "low effort", but as Riot put none into Twisted Treeline I decided to do the same.

1 Comments

rujitra11/26/2019, 12:41:19 AM1 votes

Let me ask you this. You're lost in a forest, and your only method of knowing where you need to head towards to get out is a light that flashes once per minute - so obviously you can't walk towards it all the time because it only flashes.

Do you sit there and keep walking in a random direction, even if you don't see the light? Or do you notice the light is behind you and turn around - having tried to go the direction you originally went, but that direction having failed.

Let's compare it to an airline route, shall we? Sure, airlines could change the timing of the flights, they could maybe do two smaller flights instead of one bigger one, they could change the type of plane, or which airport in the city it uses... That's not how it works. They will try what the market merits. The market for TT has never been such that it would ever merit intensive patching every 2 weeks. It simply never had the playerbase. And this is coming from someone who's played since before Season 1 even started. TT has always been the "red headed stepchild" - it was there for players to have a 3v3 instead of 5v5 experience - but not enough people cared about that for it to be worth putting in money for it.

I invite you to make a "best guess" of how many weekly TT players there were - at its peak. 1,000? 10,000? We probably won't ever know the real number, but just make a guess. Now ask yourself "how much money is it viable to spend per player" for a game mode. $1.00 per player per month? Way too high. I'll be generous and say it's 10 cents for each player who plays TT once per week at least - per month. So 10 cents times 10,000 players... you get 1,000. A thousand dollars per month. That doesn't even cover the server costs - much less a team to work on the game mode.

I know what you're going to say - "but there was more!!!!!!" - obviously not. Regardless, if you assume 10 cents per "once-weekly" player per month is what Riot's willing to spend on a game mode, and considering that we're talking about tens if not hundreds of thousands of dollars per month for dedicated teams and things like you're asking for, you need a playerbase reaching into the millions for it to be financially viable.

Sure, it sucks when something you like is no longer offered by a company. But whining, being selfish, and making it all about you doesn't do anything but make you look bad.