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When exactly was Steve Feak hired, and where is he now?

Jarring·4/1/2019, 12:45:47 PM·1 votes·6,201 views

I'm seeing different things depending on where I look. Wiki says 2006, but apparently Marc Merrill himself said 2005 at one point or another, when he explained that he hired Steve 'Guinsoo' Feak shortly after DotA Allstars supposedly "blew up" in popularity.

I bought WC3 when it was released, and I remember DotA was ALWAYS the most popular custom map, even before TFT came out and DotA Allstars was born. Someone could be waiting for 1 other person to fill their "not a dota game" and in the same time 10 dota games would have rotated 10 times. I'd guess idk 100 games of DotA being created every minute on a single server.? Something like that, but yeah its popularity didn't start and end with Steve Feak, it was always popular from what I remember.

OFC everyone knew other people were involved, there were a shitload of people involved. It said as much on the load screen. There were new versions out daily.

Anyways, where is Steve Feak these days? I hear he's not working for Riot anymore. I'm interested in hearing if the more "user friendly" aspects of this game were his idea. I'm not convinced it was. Not convinced of Icefrog supposedly being "the help" back when Guinsoo worked on DotA either..

It just doesn't add up. I mean, I remember Icefrog always being credited as its sole creator. The games I got into anyways.. There were a lot of versions, and I wasn't like.. picky or anything, I'm just saying.

I played a shitload of the HoN beta while LoL was also still in beta at the same time, and it's because they were vastly different games. HoN was basically still DotA, and I just needed to get used to the new visuals. LoL had like...maybe 20 champions? It was struggling in its infancy. If you think it's unbalanced now my god. Anyways, eventually it did get popular, and it really owes its success to the major changes made to make it more forgiving to new players who've never played dota before. I mean, changes made from its source material, they were always part of LoL. Like, don't lose gold from dying, can't deny, can't creep block, can't pull camps, can't STACK camps, the list goes on. practically every single difference makes the game easier for noobs to play.

**both HoN and DotA 2 came with the entire hero pool when you downloaded them. IIRC I think I had to pay 10$ when HoN "officially released" even though it wasn't any different than it was before when it was still in beta lol. One thing I never liked about Riot, I mean, how greedy can you fucking get. smfh, it's supposed to be FTP. but no, you just get 9 rotating champions. Try to have fun grinding for the rest... at LEAST until you find one you like right. **

I know I'm probably not gonna get any answers or even read any comments on this thread, but yeah...

I was wondering what the deal was with Guinsoo.

I don't like these forums, nor am I a fan of Riot or its employees, but I do have an amount of respect for Guinsoo and Pendragon.

9 Comments

Hypochondria94/1/2019, 1:57:41 PM1 votes

I thought he was working at Riot still but on some new unknown project unrelated to LoL, I could be wrong.

The EightH ChaoS6/30/2019, 5:41:46 PM1 votes

good. fuck him. fuck him for creating a bullshit champ like tryndamere. good riddance.

AllenPCarlson6/30/2019, 6:06:22 PM1 votes

Good question. I can only fill in a few of the blanks here. When Guinsoo left twitter it was because he needed to take a leave of absence from Riot. It had something to do with women at Riot, a love triangle, or something, I don't remember. Something happened, it wasn't good, and they forced him to leave for a while. The last we heard from him, he had come back to Riot to work on the Fiora remake. He posted on the forums a few times:

https://boards.na.leagueoflegends.com/en/player/NA/Guinsoo

http://forums.na.leagueoflegends.com/board/showthread.php?t=4415932&page=13#post46277582

You can find him on facebook now.

https://www.facebook.com/steve.feak.5/timeline?lst=100003879580401%3A100001504250706%3A1561917601

Apparently he's just a dad doing dad things and watching sports. He probably made a butt load of money off of Riot and retired.

Zac x Me6/30/2019, 6:07:33 PM1 votes

he help to copy games like auto chess and pretend it's all new and innovative

Jarring7/6/2019, 5:34:30 PM1 votes

what's all this hate towards steve feak for? He did a LOT for mobas. If it wasn't for him, I don't think they would exist at all, and none of you would be here right now. So...

IIRC he created Roshan(what yall might call Baron Nashor) and items that could combine into larger bigger items with recipes. It was big.

I mean. DotA could have eventually fell into obscurity forever for all we know, and the genre wouldn't exist.

When I played DotA Allstars, mobas wasn't a term I associated with it. I called it a fucking "Real Time Strategy Player vs Player Role Playing Game". lol and it could have stayed that way forever, because that's all there was. Stand alone mobas didn't exist.

All I'm saying is that I don't think ANYTHING good can come out of Steve Feak not working with Riot full-time.

What I personally don't trust is Riot as a company. All a company cares about is how much money it's making.

Without Steve Feak, future looks bleak for Riot in my honest opinion.

Or they can try hiring some other designers... to do something other than design and rework champions.

If someone were to ask me, the map needs a full overhaul.

Jarring7/6/2019, 5:44:47 PM1 votes

i was thinking item scaling on champions needs to be reworked too.

Like, a number of things needs to be done across the board. It doesn't seem logical to me for skills to have the same scaling power at every level...but that could just be me.

Why should the very last skill you max get 60-90% wtfever AD/AP scaling from every item you have and deal absurd amounts of damage at level 1? WHO KNOWS, don't ask me.

Like, maybe they have to choose between getting a support skill or wtf idk...but skill point allocation takes like...no thought whatsoever. It doesn't seem like good game design imho.