LOL: The lesson of a Riot worker to the community about the problems of the game

Riot Games is an American video game advancement business based in West Los Angeles. The company developed the Mob League of Legends published in Europe and also North America on October 27, 2009. Considering that the acquisition of the last service shares in December 2015, Riot Games is a subsidiary of the Chinese Web Group Tencent.

The small faults of League of Legends are some of the most time remain in the title. Missing that barely hinder the experience, but that from so much seeing them, they end up being some of the most desperate of the game. One of the current examples was in the champion selection phase that, systematically, forced some players to be the first to choose almost all games. This failure is already part of the title past. However, it has given rise to a question: Why did it take so long to fix something so easy to solve?

The lesson of a developer about League of Legends

Far from being offended by the question raised by the players, One of the developers of League of Legends took the opportunity to explain why the company may take so long to react. Clarifying first of all that it is not about ignorance or a way of ignoring suggestions, this Riot Games worker offered a tremendously extensive explanation in which he faced the perspective of the community with the reality of working on a developer of such a size.

Although it is clear that Riot Games has a number of resources that many companies already wanted, this is due to the existence of a very high players base that also generates additional problems that arise daily. Developers work as a priority resolving failures according to the number of affected players and their severity. In this way, it is normal for daily activity requires small more urgent adjustments or large plans that should not be delayed.

When this developer summarizes the situation in a simple dilemma, it is easy to get on your shoes and realize that we all act exactly in the same way: I must allocate my resources in doing something that 1% of the players will appreciate, but It will not have an impact on your ability to play, or it would be better to use them to solve a problem that prevents 1% of the community to use the game when the load is too high?.

This situation even generates some frustration in developers, who can not always use their time the way they would like to improve the game and sometimes have to do the things that must be solved urgently. In fact, it is when these situations cross with the small areas of improvement when they usually take them out, as happened in the case of the champion selection: everything was a matter of taking a small detour in their work and solving it in A time acceptable to follow quickly with the initial plan.

Riot Games is as structured as a developer can be, so that all its departments work in parallel and in many of them it is impossible to exchange workers. The engineers who focus on the base of the League of Legends code are not the same ones who develop the characters and some of the artists who create Skins may not go from the basic programming notions. It is not a solution simply to sign more members for the equipment, due to the decreasing performance that each new addition would have once reached the productivity.

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