League Independent Dev Kit
Can we ever look forward to or expect an independent development kit for league? This a question largely aimed at the Devs to see if there's any feedback they have regarding this, but some context on community demand would be nice too.
I think league could really benefit competitively and casually if Riot were to provide us, the community, with a release or toolkit, which would enable us to tinker around inside the game a little bit.
Access to the ability to tweak some of the Game's numbers, experience and work with them, even perhaps be able to play with friends in private matches. It would certainly go a long way in increasingly the quality of design posts and criticisms of the community at large if there was some more direct access to the curtain.
Additionally, it would remove much of the live design teams burden, by outsourcing some of their idea generation, as well as initial quality control to the community. The live design team could spend far more time applying their expertise to hammer out minute details, and their vision to work on the farther reaching and sprawling changes, rather than being so incredibly bogged down in the middle ground, where the changes are often imprecise, and who's effects really only ripple out into the immediate meta and what's broken, rather than developing a core design philosophy.
Additionally, it would go a long way in community champion concepts. Being able to cobble together a prototype to record, send to friends, even play test can do a lot more than some speculation on the boards.
It also would have massive implications for community content, such as skins, animations, textures, and integration with the league creator initiatives. A large and thriving part of CS:GO's community is custom skins designed by community members, which often have months of love and labor poured into them. They're often high quality, and for some, the artists are reached out to by Valve to implement in game.
Some form of SDK or platform tool kit for league, which would give at least some level of access to toy around in league's guts would seriously go a long way in improving and diversifying league's community.
Artists and designers could become their own thriving community hook for the game.
It could even get to the point of custom community game modes, where Riot can host events in which independent groups can create their own unique game modes and rulesets, competing to see who could hold the honor of entering the RGM pool.
It would not only be cool, but it would also have the added benefit of giving a little more substance to the theory crafting, and by effect cleaning up a lot of the circle jerking on the boards.
