Ask Riot: Events and Game Modes

It’s all about events and game modes this week.

You regularly offer events around themes, champions, or skin series (like Project), but these events have become less quality over time. The gaming experience doesn’t bring anything new to players (like game modes), and we have very limited tasks compared to former events, which makes it banal. Will you do more substantial and interesting events for players?

Yes, absolutely! We’ve heard this feedback and wholeheartedly agree—events have become more stale this year. We want each event to feel like a unique experience that all players can be excited for, which is why our goal moving forward is to make participating in events more rewarding, more novel, and more memorable for everyone.

Here are some of the ways we hope to achieve this:

• Bring back game modes (new and old) to events
• Improve how missions interact with events, similarly to Trials (ex: Trials gave you a progress bar you filled up by doing missions, which in turn gave you house-specific rewards for the event, so it all felt more cohesive)
• Deliver more missions and a greater variety of missions beyond just “farm minions,” “get kills,” or “earn gold”

You’ll begin to see some of these changes soon, starting with our first small steps for the upcoming Worlds event, and we’ll continue making improvements into 2020. I hope you enjoy the Worlds event, and we look forward to hearing your feedback during and afterwards!

- XENOGENIC - Game Design Lead

Why can’t we play custom games of URF and the other game modes?

We’ve talked before about the type of work that goes into keeping rotating game modes functional: Things like new and updated champs, abilities, items, runes, and skins don’t always play nice with modes. Changes or refactors to the game’s underlying code—like how damage is recorded or how textures are loaded into game—can be even more problematic, as the rapid development cycle of RGMs often means we’re building them with duct tape and bubble gum. Back when we were releasing modes more frequently, this type of upkeep work took about half of the Modes team’s total time.

But what about customs? Wouldn’t it be okay for rotating game modes to be a bit buggy if there’s nothing on the line, and shouldn’t that make it easy for Riot to offer rotating game modes in customs?

The answer is no. We aren’t willing to offer a knowingly—basically intentionally—buggy experience for customs because we want your League experience to be high quality regardless of how you’re playing. Principled stances aside, some bugs are bad enough that they can crash entire game servers, meaning hundreds of matches would crash, not just the customs they occur in. So even if we were willing to let players opt into a buggy experience in custom games, it’d still lead to risks for the rest of League players as well.

That means it takes the same amount of work to bring a mode back for customs as it does to bring it back for queues, which takes us back to our previous discussions around why we’ve chosen to invest our time into developing new modes, rather than keeping older modes on rotation.

- RIOT POPC0RNER & RIOT AETHER

Any updates on Clash?

In May, we shared a list of what we’d need to do to relaunch Clash globally. Here’s an update on our progress…

1. Redesign: Done!
2. More Internal Testing: Done!
3. Regional Testing: This is where we’re at now, and it’s going well. We’ve run three regional tests using the new Clash model in Turkey, LATAM South, and NA. So far we’ve only run into minor issues, so we’re gonna keep moving forward. We’re tentatively planning to hit the rest of Riot regions over the course of a couple weekends between now and mid-October, but our schedule could definitely change depending on how things go.
4. Global Beta: Once all of the regional tests run smoothly, we’ll run a bigger beta across multiple regions simultaneously. We’re currently hoping to do this at the end of this year or early next year.
5. Launch: Once we complete a successful global beta—and see the new system works to scale and across all regions—Clash will be ready for prime time. Date is TBD.

We’ll keep ya updated as we continue to make progress on the milestones above.

- RIOTIAMWALRUS, Designer, Competitive

We’ll do our best to read every question, but we can’t guarantee they’ll all get answers. Some questions may already be answered elsewhere, and some won’t be right for Ask Riot. This isn’t the best place to announce new features, for example, and we might skip conversations on issues we’ve talked about in depth before (though we can clarify individual points).

We are listening, though, so keep asking. We’ll make sure your questions are heard by the Rioters working on the stuff you’re curious about.