Do you view mid-season and off-season class updates as an ongoing cycle of something you’re going to be doing indefinitely going forward? Or are you hoping to address these outlying issues and champions, and then at some point, you won’t have to do class updates anymore? RH: Let’s talk about some of your bigger updates. Holistically, I would say it’s also things like: Are gold income levels where we want them to be? Are items doing the right things in the game? Those are kind of more systemic changes we’d like to look at long-term, less about patch-to-patch balance. That’s what we’re hearing about the most from players right now.
#Galio and yet it moves plus#
Plus the first tower bonus really encourages four-player attacks on bottom lane, because you can get two kills while you kill a tower. If you’re getting an auto-filled support, then as an ADC, you probably don’t have someone who really is experienced trying to keep you alive in the early game. I worry that it even goes back to auto-filled supports. That’s something we’ve been looking at for a while. I think we are in a situation, for a number of reasons - like the strength of junglers, strength of tanks, changes to masteries, changes to items - we’re hearing from a lot of players that ADCs, particularly in the laning phase, don’t have enough agency.
I don’t know if that’s actually, holistically the real biggest challenge or not. GS: What the players would say is that it’s ADCs 2017. RH: In the current season of League, just based off what’s going on right now, what people are talking about on Reddit, what you guys are seeing yourselves internally, what do you think is the biggest balance challenge that you are facing at the moment? You can certainly create the type of game where you interfere as little as possible. So they decided with League, they wanted something that was - the word we use a lot is “curated.” The developers are always going to be paying attention, and we’re going to try to react to things very quickly when they happen.
#Galio and yet it moves Patch#
And Brandon and Mark felt like there was so much more there if the developers would just patch it. But they were playing games where the meta was solved. GS: Maybe, although StarCraft was updated fairly regularly. It was a real-time strategy game, I think. Mark and Brandon played a ton of games together, and they got frustrated at - I don’t even know what game it would have been at the time. GS: It goes way back to the founding of the studio. RH: What is it that led to Riot’s strategy of patching constantly and at least changing little things very frequently? community has pretty much accepted that it is static, and it’s up to the players to evolve things. RH: Exactly, or even other types of games like Counter-Strike or Hearthstone. GS: Yeah, like Dota 2 has one patch, and then nothing for a while. Some developers release maybe one patch every three to six months that’s like a really big patch where they change a lot. It seems like there are differing schools of thought. RH: Of course! One thing I find interesting about Riot’s approach to balance is that you’re doing it constantly. GS: And players are never happy with the state of balance. RH: It’s one of those topics that - looking at League and looking at the number of characters you have and the combinations of items and everything, balance has got to be one of the most daunting elements of working on a game like League.
He was like, “Hey, we’d love to hear a talk on how you guys balance League.” I was actually invited by my old boss Rob Pardo, who sits on the board at GDC. The title of the talk is “Bronze to Bengi,” because that is the entire gamut of competitive League play. Greg Street: I’m talking about game balance, and specifically strategies for balancing a game with such a diverse player skill level. Rift Herald: What will you be speaking about at your GDC panel? You can find further details on what’s new with Galio from Rift Herald’s coverage. Note: This interview was conducted shortly before information on the upcoming Galio character rework was revealed.
#Galio and yet it moves full#
Two weeks ago at 2017’s Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, Riot Games design director Greg Street took the stage for a panel titled “Balancing League of Legends for Every Player, from Bronze to Bengi.” You can watch that full panel here.īefore Street’s presentation, though, we had a chance to sit down and speak with him about the current state of League, what’s coming next and what Riot has learned from recent struggles to balance the game.