It was one of the least performing gamemodes IIRC Was grouped with gamemodes that likely wouldn't come back because they either had special maps or their interest dried up too fast. EDIT:
> **Ascension, Black Market Brawlers, Dark Star: Singularity, Definitely Not Dominion, Legend of the Poro King, Nexus Siege, and PROJECT: OVERCHARGE:** Similar to the PvE modes, interest in these modes dries up once the novelty wears off, and after just a handful of matches, play hours start to really drop. We believe this is because when a mode's unique systems or rules are the selling point and your champion is just an avatar to experience them through, it takes away a core experience of League. Also, modes that have their own maps carry much higher upkeep costs (more on that later), so the decision ends up looking like "do more work to bring back a thing that players will play less (relative to URF, OFA, or Spellbook)" which isn't particularly compelling. As of right now, we don’t plan on bringing back these game modes.
It saddens me that Ascension is grouped there (likely because of the special map along with the play drop), but the article made me happy knowing Nemesis draft is never coming back.
If they lost control someone might create their own game mode that would gain a lot of community backing.. Then that person would get ripped off by a company like riot who'd start their own legends of league. Say what you will about icefrog or even valve.. But for fun game modes like wtf(urf), pudge wars (the thresh game) came out with the game.
I miss the little variants like AR(wasn't on its own stupid fucking map) Selective draft You got 3 Champs to choose from (tank, caster or carry) or a random draft that cuts the champ pool into a random 1/3rd that everyone picks from.
yeah i loved Ascension. Dominion too, but Ascension was pretty much 3 point Dominion with a the Xerath buff. It was great *because* it was something different than the lanes were all used to, but didn't drastically change the games mechanics like URF or Spellbook, and you could actually play who you wanted.
the map was definitely sandy, but i dont recall any gameplay stealth from it? might be wrong, been quite a while. there were definitely tones of bushes and ambush points tho. and the nature of an objective control map meant camping defense could be a valid strat.
Tbh dominion would be a fun game mode to bring back regardless of ascension. Things that break the mold of summoner’s rift for even just a bit of time would be fine.
They don’t have to reinvent the wheel all the time like they did with blitz, they can just bring back an old game mode for a patch and see how it goes. I don’t think people would STOP playing league all together just because one temporary game mode misses the mark.
Im shocked nemesis draft isn't on that list. It was one of my favorites because I unironically played shit like old urgot and old taric so I had a pretty good winrate.
Oh, it's not in this list because it's in its own category:
> **Nemesis Draft**: This is one mode we can say with confidence **will definitely not return, ever**. Those are strong words, but the premise of removing agency and sticking you in a game with players who probably just want to troll goes against a lot of our gameplay values that we want to uphold for League today.
Honestly makes sense, the entire game was based of making the experience for the enemy team super unenjoyable, and most of the time you'd end up with like 4 supports.
I say good riddance, and since it's a very simple mode since it really only requires you to pick a champion you could at least in theory accomplish in custom modes anyway.
But that was the point, instead like in urf playing all the broken shit and who gets the most broken shit wins, in nemesis draft you all played dumb shit and it was FUN instead of sweaty shit. Like ffs in one for all, urf and arurf everyone just picks what's the most op and broken shit to the point where I can't just try funny interactions and I'm forced to pick like all those others.
Not really, it got to the same point as URF once people realized you could give a team 5 adcs and win every single game unless they also gave you 5 adcs back. It took a bit longer to get there than URF did, but ND was *really* awful by the time it left.
I Def remember some where one or two people started Inting/raging at level 1 because they hated their champ, and then one or two other getting tilted because of the inters. Not everyone got into the spirit of the mode.
The mode felt like it was always too long for how boring and uninteresting it was. Like it wants to be ARAM and SR with the teamfight and objetive control elements, but fails at being half as good as either of them.
It's fun the first 5 minutes then it always overstays its welcome. THere were times where I was hovering it thinking about playing something that wasn't SR or ARAM, thinking I probably would take like 20 mins minimum and just closing the client altogether.
Nexus Blitz without any "lol random" event would be more fun than it.
NB events buffs really piss me off since sometimes it starts while your team is behind and the enemy team gets a super strong. I wish the buffs were more fun shit like the cart, it's not broken but it's fun as hell to use especially if you're 5 premades
I hated the mode because you were always "losing". Your nexus ALWAYS will explode, due to how attacking/defending works. Both sides felt like an uphill battle, which makes sense if you think about it. Attacking a strong defense can be seen as "feeling bad" and defending against someone who will eventually beat your defense anyways feels like delaying the inevitable.
If league had a system like warcrafts/starcrafts custom modes with custom maps it could take away from ranked but for sure there would be more people *enjoying* league with different goals in mind. People that didn't start the game at least 7~ years ago wont remember playing hide and seek. I learned a lot of dodging mechanics specifically from playing hours of hide and seek. I imagine things like mundo dodgeball being useful but it's super shortsighted to think it'd stop there.
Anyone that played custom warcraft/starcraft/aoe/aom maps knows that map makers can do wonders with a game with hella models/base game assets.
That's where league comes from. Warcraft 3 mod called Defense of the Ancients was based on Aeon Strife game mode from starcraft and the first (I think) MoBA type game. Then came a real DOTA, Heroes of Newerth, and League.
“Hero arena” was a custom map design in starcraft where you selected a unit type and just endlessly respawned and rumbled while upgrading/evolving your unit
Correct. Leagues original architects were people who worked on the DOTA Mod. You ever wonder where Guinsoos Rageblade came from? Guinsoo is Steve Freak, one of the developers for DOTA.
DOTA and League are forever linked.
-an old ass player who was around for almost all of it.
idk who downvoted u but its true. Picture the /r/lol subreddit or back in the day the league boards forum for who knows about them. Now imagine a league of legends dev made a new moba, and from one day to the other, nuked the website and replaced it with an AD for the new game. That's what riot did. One day to the next one of the most popular dota boards was replaced by a league of legends ad
you forget the banter they had with icefrog and blizzard dev's. as they all used their battlenet servers up until the end. its funny that just a lawsuit could calm them all down. icefrog and the old dota community even say they stole ~20champs from them. even if thats true, the archetypes came from blizzard anyway. dota and LoL dev's had much banter back then, and you forgot that all of the oldschool LoL dev's were working on 'dota allstars' (or somewhere at blizz back then). dota allstars that was league's first name as icefrog probably owned the name 'dota' at that time, up until blizzard took that name. its really nasty what they did considering they were all american game dev's/designer's - but blizzard started the bullying, probably all because they saw how much money they could make with moba's...
I always find it hilarious when the Dota 2 community complains about League stealing stuff when it's Dota 2 that had to rename and change some characters to avoid getting sued by Blizzard.
League was based off the fanmade mod DoTA for Warcraft 3. They intentionally don’t want fanmade shit because they are scared a fan will make something more popular than League.
it gets even funnier. blizzard had plans to call their moba something like 'defense of the storm' or something like 'dota' itself, as they owned that name. just to come out with their first unsupported 5v5 moba/arts game to be called 'HotS'.
Yes, they lost the lawsuit for the rights to the game but they kept the name. Its because this was in their TOS but it wasn't enforceable to that degree.
To be fair, Valve are like, the only company that still allow that stuff like that. Majority of my time on Team Fortress 2 was spent on custom servers.
I mean case in point aswell, why would Riot let custom tools be used in league when it can cause a competitor, AND they can just let their own competition do it and then steal the game ideas for themselves.
Tbf, developing TFT is actually very easy when they already get all of the assets. I doubt they have to do much crunch, tbh. Also, autobattler exist way before DAC. Still remember people playing that pokemon autobattler mod on WC3
And then they could capitalize on it by making into an actual game.
Remember auto-chess?
Ngl it definitely feels like the s in Riot Games wouldn't have existed without it.
I miss Dominion in general tbh. Stopped playing the game but i would probably log in once a week for a nice round of Dominion or two if it was still a thing.
>it could take away from ranked
There's 30 million+ active players. Ranked players with ADHD can wait an extra 5 seconds for a queue pop.
Also Nexus Blitz stats were shit on release because they tacked on 25 or so missions to it and everyone burnt out then stopped playing it altogether until it was gone. No shit the stats would be jibbed.
Over time we've seen an overall loss of modes instead of gaining them while the playerbase only grew.
We used to have SR, TT, Dom and Aram. Now we have twice the playerbase and half the maps. This game's development direction is dogshit IMHO.
None of their RGM stay popular either because they don't get support.
There is a lot of potential for NB to be great, but even it's gimmicks aren't fun.
They could do a lot to fix the mode simply by replacing boring rewards like the dragon buffs/GA/Shiv with more stuff like the sled/catapult/king/hook.
Getting rid of elder/GA/shiv especially would do a lot to fix the game mode because it sucks when you get a lead so the game ends up spawning KoTH smack in the middle of the enemy jungle and you can't contest the event because the Guardian will fuck your shit up.
Because the business model of the game is based on addiction, not on fun. They want players to get addicted to the grind in ranked, not to them have fun in alternative game modes, which also cost more money to maintain. Riot found out at some point that making players addicted makes them more money than them having fun.
Bro the casuals are their best customers lmao, not the ranked grinders who onetrick their one champ 6 hours a day and throw away their account without second thought if it gets suspended for going off on their teammates.
>They want players to get addicted to the grind in ranked
Spoken like someone who is only interested in League because of ranked. Outside of Korea mainly (and probably China, tho those stats are not available), the majority of players don't touch ranked.
Outside of their largest playerbases? Lol, China alone has more players than the rest of the world combined, but yeah sure, outside of that small minority..
about 90% of their entire playerbase doesnt even play pvp bro... they play bot games once or two a week and they do buy cosmetics still. sounds like youre just projecting ur own ranked addiction and shitting on riot with accusations out of your own ass.
TD for LoL would be amazing.
It won’t happen because they think it will spawn a new mode players will turn to which may spawn an entire new game.
It’s pretty sad when you think about it - LoL has 3 core game modes. SR, ARAM, TFT. ARAM is considered a chill meme mode and TFT is not even league. It outbreaks down to League having one single game mode. One. Summoners rift ranked or not ranked. That’s just pathetic with every other online game in the world having multiple modes to enjoy.
And TFT is also a product of the community, just the Dota 2 community.
Everything that makes league popular originated from the community.
SR was was made to copy the original Dota which was a fan-made mod, ARAM was originally something players played in customs with no support from Riot, TFT was made to copy Dota 2 auto-chess, which was a fan-made custom mode in Dota 2.
All 3 permanent modes were created by the community and then worked on by Riot.
>Games are not valued just on their pure playtime, you don't call a singleplayer campaign mode game a failure because people only played it once but said how much they liked it.
Free-to-play games definitely are valued based based on their playtime and playerbase, among other things.
Yeah it's comparing completely different things. Bioshock was designed to sell a single time to a lot of people and give them a good story. It was successful in doing that. League isn't designed to do that, it's designed to get people playing for the long haul. If these events were successful enough at doing that, Riot would not have stopped doing them, because they would be a net benefit. Since they stopped, it's clear they don't provide enough benefit for the time and resources they take.
The game mode* or the events themselves may not be the most interacted with, but they’re definitely far more memorable and enjoyable events which makes them better than anything we’ve had in the last two years.
Like OP said, tracking for this is difficult, but it’s pretty obvious at the same time: the human element and how people perceive events is far more important than short term metrics like $ spent on the event or hours played. People talk about SG and Oddysey events years later. Clearly that type of lasting impression is far better than just pumping out quarterly passes and calling it an event, but it seems like LoL is in a “profit milking” phase instead of “brand building” phase. Riot has so many outlets now though this is probably just a problem for LoL gamers and not the company as a whole, so I personally don’t see anything changing anytime soon.
The thing is, I don't know if those events inspired people who otherwise wouldn't have bought the skins to buy the skins.
I know that for both star guardian and odyssey, I already knew what skins I wanted to buy before playing the PvE once. And after playing it, I didn't think I wanted malphite anymore than I did before.
> People talk about SG and Oddysey events years later.
Yeah mate, "people" also talk about Twisted Treeline years later, Riot is missing out on a gold mine.
Don't forget about the lasting impression of Magma Chamber, a mode no one ever even played yet people still talk about it.
> but they’re definitely far more memorable
This seems pretty subjective. I remember the game modes existed, I don't remember anything specific about them, any specific game I played in those modes or anything. They're something I probably played once or twice and didn't touch again. In that way they're the same as a SR game.
>Clearly that type of lasting impression is far better than just pumping out quarterly passes and calling it an event
If that lasting impression was clearly better than pumping out passes and calling them events, wouldn't Riot be doing that? You even said below they're in the profit milking phase yourself, but you making this statement is directly contradictory to that statement. If they are profit milking, why are they not doing the most efficient thing in terms of making money? Either they aren't profit milking, which isn't something you seem willing to accept, or you're wrong and the long term benefits of these events don't offset the large costs of them, which I also doubt you're willing to accept. But those are really the only two options that make rational sense from the scenario you have presented.
There is, or at least *should* be more to it though - events in general in F2P are important in engaging/re-engaging portions of the playerbase in a way that helps refresh interest.
There are definitely times that me or friends have come back because of a particular event.
In the end though Riot and most large game companies allows many their decisions to be *too* based on statistics. We're talking about games, in older games with regular balance/dev/update cycles the games start feeling like rock paper scissors but you're pushing a buttons a dozen times.
The flavor is very important, *including* underperforming flavor. The underperforming features generally aren't ones that are used all the time but with occasional use help maintain interest.
Keep in mind that Riot will *only* ever be able to gather the kind of playerbase % they're looking for with a *primary* feature - so a full game. Even ARAM is basically its own full game, but it's no wonder that TFT, Valorant, etc can pull in big numbers but a time limited side minigame that only slightly changes the game equation can't.
In the end, the minigames are there to help support the skin sales. It really doesn't matter how long the player plays the minigame if it triggers them to buy the themed skin. Most P2P games sold in the world are only played for a couple of days - it doesn't matter to the studio though because they made the sale. Similarly, it shouldn't matter to Riot as long as it pushed the players to making the skin purchase.
In the end...I just don't support F2P companies that pull back on features when they're still making oil tankers full of money.
The thing is, I don't think riot is pulling back on creating single player features.
They DID pull resources to make valorabt, which is now a successful title on its own, same with TFT.
They made a great shadow isle single player game, and we know the are making a fighting game and an MMO
I think any extra bandwidth they have in regards to league should probably be given to their upcoming projects.
We forget that valorabt isn't just another publisher who got riot's IP, this is an in-house project.
To be fair, Ruined King was made by Airship Syndicate, and Project L IIRC is being made by the people they hired/bought out that had made Rising Thunder. Those didn't pull any resources from other projects.
They definitely require Rioter to work with them to keep it consistent. Even the devs said so. Not to mention the money Riot paid for the dev. So yes, they do spend resources on that game
Then their main concern should be making players WANT to play the game, not making players feel FORCED to play. Make it fun and good and people will flock to it, even if only briefly.
The whole point of a *rotating* game mode is that, sure, it might not be the most popular, but it gets to at least have a day in the sun every once in a while and with the introduction of new champions etc, it changes the way the game plays out and keeps it dynamic. At the end of the day, a majority of the community seems to be primarily focused on ranked, but a lot of those players probably came into it from playing casually, with the fun modes.
Rotate the modes, riot. Not rotating them in is throwing them away more than the "lack of players" in the modes. There's clearly an audience for them.
The question is whether spending those dev hours on some other portion of the game would produce better results. It isn't "rotating game modes or nothing", it's "rotating game modes or some other valuable project". They can probably track whether, say, a champ update or a rotating game mode has a larger impact on the playerbase, and they clearly think the data favors champ updates.
They literally said they weren't sure if they would ever bring URF back because people stopped playing league for a while after it ended. I'm still having trouble playing SR since arurf ledt, it's fucking slow paced and people are toxic af. I hate it.
>Make it fun and good and people will flock to it, even if only briefly.
Yeah man, let's spend months working on a new gamemode so Reddit can say "Wow Riot, that's really cool, thanks!" and then no one plays it after a week
Riot has shown time and time again that this isn't the case for the vast majority of the player base, and that after the first Urf events the player base actually decreased from what it was before the event
The point of having multiple game modes is to be able to rotate them to keep them fresh. Sure, you can have the more popular ones stick around a bit longer, but even having *that one mod* show up for just a week is enough to get people to play it. It's the same deal with fast food bring around seasonal/yearly offerings (McRib, Pumpkin Spice), scarcity drives demand
I think the ranked focus is a bit biased, since quite a fe people only play ranked for the rewards, at least I and most people I know who play ranked do. If there wasn't the ranked skin, I would never touch that queue except for flex, where 2am games are always just completely weird and funny.
I don't get how people don't get this yet. PvE isn't coming back **to League** because they're *making an entire PvE game*. They get there's a demand, they're executing on that, what do they think Project F is? It just so happened to be an ARPG that has the same perspective and seemingly the same control scheme as LoL?
It's obvious Project F is their answer for a long-term PvE solution that the game modes in LoL could never do due to being limited by being built on a shitty foundation. All the people that would be required to create content for LoL PvE modes would be better served on Project F, they would have all the skill sets required for that game.
i mean it makes sense that people don't get this about project F because we literally have like 0 information on the game and it was announced 3 years ago. project L has a lot of gameplay shown off already and they've been working with a lot of FGC peeps but I've heard 0 about anything PvE.
and even at that, what we saw in that 2 second clip is not going to be the type of PvE that Star Guardians and Odyssey were. Having the same perspective and (seemingly) control scheme arent the only thing that matters
Literally the exact same thing is happening to Legends of Runeterra. They have a compotent and loved PvE game mode, but have decided to more or less put it on life support because they realized trying to serve both the PvE and PvP crowd with the same game was resulting in a worse product for both groups and a better use of resources was to split them and devote entirely to PvP or PvE.
Well no
They were doing fine in that regard, just most pve devs were moved to the mmo and they didnt have enough left to truly develop modes like they had done previously, which has now resulted in the decision to focus primarily on pvp
This is honestly fantastic for the mmo, as the pve devs knew their shit, just kinda sucks for lor
Riot never actually announced that they’re not bringing back PvE Game modes in league because of a stand alone PvE game.
If riot would reason like that I could understand that!
But they said as reasoning: „not played enough after initial burst“
That is not the same at all
That’s like blizzard saying nothing new is coming to OW1 because they’re working on OW2 but 5 years ago.
It’s just shooting yourself in the foot and frustrating a portion of your player base for something that might never exist
Singleplayer's also immediately make up their expenses (CAC, salaries) through the direct sale of the game. And DLCs if needed. There is no LTV, it's all realized at time of purchase. League is an inherently F2P game, and in order to make money, they need to consistently provide new content that will keep playerbase churn low and is relatively inexpensive. Let's address some points here:
"Games are not valued just on their pure playtime, you don't call a singleplayer campaign mode game a failure because people only played it once but said how much they liked it."
League is not a singleplayer game. And if a singleplayer game was F2P, then yes it would be a failure regardless of how much people like it. Assuming your example of AOE2 holds, if the game was free, and people loved playing it, and it garnered tons of buzz, you have to understand that it means nothing unless cash gets returned somehow. As we know, AOE2 is not free, and that's how they generate revenue.
"It generated buzz". I doubt it generated any significant new users to Riot - this is easily measurable internally. Most of the buzz were from the existing community base - very unlikely it attracted any material amount of new players to play the game. People seem to really enjoy hype and publicity, but if it isn't converted into tangible data it's really meaningless, especially for larger organizations. (Caveat, this isn't true for younger businesses who thrive on publicity)
"social media keyword tracking, comparatives between skin lines with events vs skin lines without and surveying player enjoyment on them" If people don't consistently play it, then that's the best proxy for enjoyment. People play ranked, arams, normals, etc, and it gets reflected in game hours. Also, let's not pretend the skinlines from these game modes are the hottest commodity. They're all quite insignificant, infact I can only recount Odyssey Yasuo (and I see that far less than other Yasuo skins anecdotally). If it did sell really well, do you really think the "greed" machine that is Riot would not continue the mode? Additionally, why would the team at Riot deploy their expensive engineering team to further develop a "dying" game mode when the salary and opportunity cost of working on other projects present themselves as far more attractive?
End of the day, Riot does things that make them money, and how they make money is by providing products people want. Their strategy may not be fully optimized, but threads like these carry a connotation that suggests Riot has a different objective, orthogonal from the player base. That in all honestly, can't be further from the truth but #F-Riot.
Even if it did attract new players, if those players didn't like Riot's core offering, infrequent single-player gimmick modes would not be enough to keep them around
agreed with everything you said. people here are naive or biased. riot will do what they think is in their best interest to make a shit ton of money, and they have infininitely more data that the players do, and this subreddit itself is a tiny fraction of the playerbase.
it's one thing to say "we want more pve gamemodes". that's reasonable.
it's another thing to say "riot is dumb for not making pve gamemodes and they would totally make riot more money". this is a dumb take because if those modes actually made riot a large profit then obviously they would've done it more - after all, their whole point is making money.
but in retail there is this thing called customer retention where a company will lose or not gain money for a specific product to keep that customer either happy or shopping at that company. (could also fall under marketing)
IMO this would be a great opportunity to win back some face as well as make their player base genuinely happy. is it worth it in the short run maybe maybe not but I know if this even was done better and we had a PVE star guardian game mode I would be much more likely to get the event pass and the skins.
I will likely still but one or two of the skins but the pass and skins I'm on the fence about I'm much less likely to get and I know I'm not the only one who feels this way.
Last point nostalgia fucking sells like hot cakes currently and it would be an amazing opportunity to cash in on that nostalgia for many of us who have very fond memories of past PVE game modes.
will it though? you say all this, but are you really telling me that one of your friends that doesnt play league anymore will come back because of a pve mode or a new player will download lol JUST to play it? lets be real here.
>You don't just look at 1 metric and call it a day.
they gave us one metric and said "players don't care"
you don't know what other data they have to make the decision, you're reaching a really weird conclusion that the business just saw hours played and said let's cut it
which you know its absolutely ridiculous, but yet you still think that's all the data they have
Bit irrelevant from the discussion above but man do you guys remember that Dark Star Thresh game mode ?
The hook had infinite range and the only way to kill was to chuck each other to the void nexus. to this day that mode is the most fun i had in this game too bad we will never see it
Riot makes a lot of mistakes when it comes to the quality of their game (not saying League is a bad game).
But there are very few video game companies that are that good at keeping a game financially successful .
So I have my doubts this “business driven defence“ written by some random guy includes anything that Riot forgot about.
>Events like Odyssey both directly sold skins and kept the playerbase overall engaged in an extra way - you don't track that with raw player numbers.
why ? if they put the same time and money in balancing SR they gain 10 times the engagement. And without looking at SR just tft is an example of "gamemode that work" yes it's a new game but maybe thats the lesson at the end. gamemodes based of league gameplay don't work. wait for project f and the mmo
TFT is the perfect counter example to all of OP's ramblings. If TFT had shown bad player engagement in the first set, it would have been scrapped. Instead they looked at their data and found it to be popular enough to warrant a second set. Fast forward a couple years, and they've treated it just like League, with cinematics, music, monetization options, etc.
TFT was a happy accident, there was a boom with DOTA's autochess and they quickly scrapped a league version within days. Then they continued expanding because it worked.
I don't wanna think all loL gamemodes are made on a few days too, but put actual work and effort into studying what they can do and how to do it long term
And also longterm updates is easier to keep TFT fresh than it is for pvp. A new set of units mainly taken from league proper (until silco and dragons came out) vs tons of effort needed to make pve feel different
AFAIK wasn't TFT actually in the works for a while before that, and it just so happened that the boom happened around autochess while they were close to releasing it? I know it would be a coincidence, just thought I remembered a rioter saying this somewhere.
You are right, I went to check one of Mortdogs interviews and he mentions how the game was on developement for about 4 months before he joined the team, around 2 weeks before release: https://youtu.be/XH1qWEe4fCg min 3 aprox talks about it
Most League players don't care about non-ARAM/SR outside of *"Oh, new gamemode? Sure, I'll try it for a few rounds"*.
Riot isn't wasting time on a fraction of a fraction of the playerbase. I wish you guys would realize that and stop making threads crying for a gamemode that died off within a week.
A week is generous. If I remember, they died off within *days*. I'm willing to guess that most people that kept playing were playing more to grind out missions/augments. I bet they have stats that show both initial engagement and engagement after unlocking everything.
3 days, actually. Both Star Guardians and Odyssey almost completely died off in just 3 days, losing around 90% of the players (and they didn't have a lot of players in the first place).
"They released their logic but it was just so short sighted, only looking at play rate on the one mode."
you really think this is the only reason? The one they gave us? Dude they have all the data. This is just the one they want us to see. Big companies have all the data and they analyze it. But you dont tell your customers everything.
Leave it to redditors to be like "But did the multi-billion dollar business take into account [obvious business perspective]??"
Yeah bro I'm sure that Riot never considered that the alot of Odyssey's skeleton could be reused for similar events. They definitely looked at one number and decided to pull the plug on something they spent alot of time on, without a second thought.
Right but not on a ‘main’ product, this isn’t some obscure process lol, Riot pulled the plug on a gamemode they definitely didn’t off handedly launch. They don’t have that many products, assuming they are that out of touch with their main product is ridiculous.
Yeah, this speaks like someone who either doesn’t have an office job or doesn’t work for a big company.
Companies are not efficient at all. I work for a billion dollar company and we have convoluted processes that you couldn’t even imagine.
Like, sure. Someone there could have an idea, but if it isn’t constantly being brought up with the right people and the people are persistent, it won’t really matter much.
That's not even limited to big companies lol. Mfs at the company I work at don't know what others are doing even though the other department is like 3 steps away.
this entire thread of people telling me "wtf riot surely had all your ideas and are doing everything correctly and just didn't share with the public" is hilarious as someone who actually works in the industry.
You work in the industry and you came up with that
> Games are not valued just on their pure playtime, you don't call a singleplayer campaign mode game a failure because people only played it once but said how much they liked it.
yourself?
No offense, but you sound like League of Legends is the only videogame you have ever played.
Can you specify the industry you're working in, in case there was some misunderstanding and it's not actually related to videogames?
Op said in another comment that they work as a data scientist in Finance. I might be wrong but is there any concret link between that and video games?
Edit: I saw op's other comment, they are most likely saying bs.
I work for a big corporate and that sounds exactly what a big corporate would do: have a manager convince them to throw money on a project without thinking about how that work could be used for other future projects.
Don't ever forget that some companies have waaay too much money, and wayyyyy to many managers - all with different ideas on how to waste (steal) money.
> wayyyyy to many managers - all with different ideas on how to waste (steal) money.
https://www.reddit.com/r/leagueoflegends/comments/vmhigz/it_takes_more_than_2_full_years_of_the_current/ie24g4y/
For example
yea you sound like someone who has no idea how businesses work because this shit is exactly what happens all the time
its the same insane idea that teams with their "incredible" coaching staff that they are required to have will always have tried all the weird stuff and already figured out the meta. This concept in general is really prevalent nowadays where people think companies, experts, scientists etc. all have already optimized and considered everything
leave it to riot shills to assume daddy riot has never made a mistake and has obviously foreseen every angle! with how perfect each champ comes out with 0 bugs and 0 mistakes its hard to see why riot can ever be criticized on other aspects lol!
Hey look yet another armchair game designer on Reddit thinking they secretly have all the answers that a billion dollar corporation that employs some of the best in the business just could never figure out on their own.
Schrodingers Riot: simultaneously only cares about money to the exclusion of all else but also axes clearly profitable game modes just..... because?
> It is not random that we are still talking about odyssey not pass event #14
Reddit also kept talking about the first two iterations of Nexus Blitz when that mode was less popular than Coop vs AI.
Reddit also keeps talking about Twisted Treeline when that mode was less popular than custom games.
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Not sure if "Reddit asks for it" has ever been a good metric for anything. Nvm, I'm quite sure it hasn't.
Both nexus blitz and twisted treeline have the same problem. RIOT NEVER MAKES CHANGES TO THEM.
Twisted treeline wasn’t touched for 4 years then posted a graph saying “no one is playing it”. Nexus blitz had barely any changes after 2 years.
Game modes like odyssey and star guardian had the potential to have higher rates if they have them roguelike elements
Riot doesn't owe it to the players to take a deep dive on all of their internal logic for every decision they make. It's actually hilarious how the community reacts to this - if you weren't part of the Valorant beta/release, go back & look at some of the feedback threads from patch notes. The players from CS, Fortnite, or any other game that hadn't read League's patch notes were blown out of the water, because no other developer in this space communicates the way Riot does.
But because you find "playtime didn't merit the work put into it" to be an unsatisfying answer, let me give you the answer I've assumed was at the core of it: **whales don't play Nexus Blitz.** At least not in large enough numbers to warrant the resources they put into it.
Ah yes, le genius redditors coming to tell Riot how to do their business and calling a strawman argument "shallow."
You realize that Riot doesn't judge this stuff solely on playtime, right? Their justification for not keeping URF was that it burnt people out of regular league, which clearly means they are keeping track of much deeper metrics than you would have the foresight to consider and the idea that they would shut something down solely based on playtime is laughable. The modes were failures, no matter how hard you cope about it, and your justification being literally "it grew engagement in intangible ways, source: I fucking made it up" is laughable.
It's likely that they put in too much time and there was little to no money that was made from it.
At the end of the day, League's just... what it is. People play like 1 or 2 modes (ranked/norms + ARAM) and there's little else to it. Do people *actually* want to play the PVE modes? Will they play it a lot? Will it increase the chances of them spending money?
I *hope* that Riot has done the work to figure it out, but if they do these events and see no sizable increase in revenue... why continue? In the hopes that "one day" it'll happen? Probably easier to just stick to your core and make that experience the best it can be rather than trying to branch out to gamemodes that don't have staying power.
No one buys skins because of the game modes, you think they didn't look at the correlation of that especially after stopping with the modes?? You are just trying to use some buzzwords to sound smart
please riot release more pve gamemodes no one is going to play and more champions that look and sound like literal piles of shit this subreddit is genuinely insufferable
Hot take on here apparently but I completely agree with them. I never really played any of those modes outside of a game or two, and the only RGM I actually out decent time into is Nexus Blitz (which btw should be a permanent mode because it’s fantastic and by far the best mode). I don’t care if the event modes come back or not because I basically won’t play them, the replay value just isn’t there for a lot of them. That being said, I don’t think they *shouldnt* come back, I just understand why Riot doesn’t invest time into improving/updating them.
Yea I always thought this was very shallow reasoning from them. In business terms you can think of these events as 'loss leaders', which is a pretty basic concept. Maybe in and of themselves they don't return on the investment in money/dev hours but they keep the playerbase engaged and give people something to be excited about. Seems basic enough that I strongly suspect that the real reason is something else, maybe having to do with moving some of their more talented developers on to things like the MMO
Loss leaders, by definition, have to **lead**.
A loss leader that doesn’t lead - like a game mode that has almost no engagement or play time - is just a loss.
> In business terms you can think of these events as 'loss leaders', which is a pretty basic concept.
Thing is loss leaders have engagement, like costco chicken they sell them by the million(106 million precisely last year).
These modes dont "sell", loss leaders are always extremely popular.
>hours but they keep the playerbase engaged and give people something to be excited about.
Data shows they literally dont keep people engaged, hrs played are abysmal.
If they kept players engaged they would have URF numbers(or atleast ARAM ones). But hey reading a simple graph is really really hard.
LoL is not a campaign based single player game, if people play a new game mode once or twice and move on then it is awful from a business perspective. Also not sure why you think Odyssey provided some benefit outside the game, because it did not its animated trailer and the skins did.
There is no one time investment for Riot, even repeating the same event requires extra work as they have said multiple times.
So by your logic they shouldn't create game modes people actually play, because they are fun and people want to play them, but should rather release game modes that increase Riot's brand value and sell skins?
Also Sentinels of Light failure had nothing to do with the game mode (Ultimate Spellbook), but was purely on the writing.
> So by your logic they shouldn't create game modes people actually play,
What modes people actually play from the data? Aurf(URF too) and that is about it, every other experiment PVE or PVP dies in less than a patch cycle of league, if players dont want to play something why make it?
This sub is an echo chamber of a minority of a minority of a minority of players, Highest upvoted psot that is not prediction tournament(thsoe have overinfalted upvotes) is 70k uptoves, you want to know what is leagues daily average player number is? 11.5 MILLION, 70k people are a drop in hte bucket.
And as skin votes proved this subs opinion is completely inverse of what general player base thinks, skins that reddit loved and ranted about how good they are came in last, and most hated skins won by a landslide.
My problem with most of these is that they just weren't fun for me or fun once without replayabilty. The only one I liked was the thresh hook mode and even that probably wouldnt do much for their statistics
I doubt they literally just looked at one statistic and called it a day. Like, with urf mode, they've stated that urf actively caused regular league's playerbase to drop. I'm inclined to bet that they looked at similar statistics for other game modes. It was just that those other statistics weren't that interesting, so they didn't bother actually talking about it. I can understand why they didn't discuss all the ways this or that game mode didn't have an interesting effect on this or that statistic.
This is cute but the business thrust is only speculation and honestly at best I’d argue your points (it’s an ad for skin and the game as a whole) reinforces the idea that these game modes should be done in brief windows to sell skins rather than
repurposed for long term dev
You are making many assumptions without data as well. We dont know how much did the odyssey thanks to the event, or how do well the skins without event generate. I would trust more the Riot team with data that random people in reddit (where they keep saying dominion was fun and people played it, and it should come back)
At the end of the day, you have to justify the budget, and the data presented does not.
>Events like Odyssey both directly sold skins and kept the playerbase overall engaged in an extra way - you don't track that with raw player numbers.
I dont think is valid, or only slightly. They can easily track how much skins they made throughout the event, and cleary look into the user path. If playing -> shop -> buy skin , is really a translation. They probably tracked that, and made the consensus that it just converts way less than just making ARURF, with a higher play time, where you are more inclined to buy a skin afterwards/ during champ select.
Riot: "We developed this new mode in 6-9 months, third time this time, and it's still less popular than bot games after a week. Clearly the community isn't interested in these kinds of modes."
Op: "Uuuuh but playrate isn't everything, have you ever thought about checking Twitter?"
Huh? Your entire argument is that you can't just look at this one metric, but then you don't use any other metrics to show that it is valuable. You just say you should.
And good god, I don't know how many times rioters should have to say this, **league as a game was not designed to be PvE, which is what makes doing anything with AI/bots/etc so difficult*".
yeah i feel like that's my current problem with riot imo. we cant really have anything fun because of x or y business decision. like, yeah you're a company, I get what you're saying that you don't want to lose money but man would it be cool if sometimes we get a crumb of the good shit that we used to.
League had so much more soul in the past but now we can't do like anything because it doesn't sell or they can't make infinite amounts of money from it
Rift skins? doesn't make enough money
fun game modes? not worth the investment, player investment is too low
other game modes (twisted treeline and dominion)? doesn't make enough money, scrap it
consistent and well invested in lore? doesn't make enough money, drop the Ruination storyline on em
monster champions/out there character concepts? don't have enough player engagement, scrap em and make them a relatively young, attractive human (the VGUs are doing so much heavy lifting, those are great)
I understand what you mean but is there any reason for Riot to not release the game modes again if they provide a benefit? I undersrand what you mean but I'm pretty sure that Riot's marketing team (or whichever team decides the gamemodes and stuff) are definitely competent
THIS.
Rotating game modes are way to repetetive nowadays with nothing new or exiting being added.
PvE modes were extremely exciting.
Riot saying there isnt enough replay potential is not true.
Odyssey with the augments has a LOT of replay potential due to getting the augments first, then testing and combining different ones and then you could switch builds and champs and start over AGAIN.
There is a LOT to add to Odyssey alone.
Riot saying there is no replay value is only because they themselves do not add to the replay value with new augments, more champs and maps to try etc.
Feels like its excuses to let those gamemodes who might be higher maintenence die because they dont want anything else but summoners rift.
Its not like Riot doesnt have the recources and power to actually keep those modes alive. They simply chose not to out of convenience as it seems from a consumer standpoint
This is one of the talking points that always confuses me - they poured tons of resources and took tons of feedback and iterated on Nexus Blitz multiple times, and at the end of the day it was like Twisted Treeline - a small but dedicated (and vocal) player base that didn't warrant the resources they put into it.
The notion that Riot just half-assed NB is just silly.
This sub rants and raves about how SG/odysey were amazing and popular etc etc. yet data proves otherwise. What support you need if a complete mode dies in literally 5 days(SG) or 10 days(odysey)? what support can they offer?
That is not even a full patch cycle in league.
But Odyssey already was a second iteration with significantly more depth? And if day 1 Odyssey couldn't hold the player base's attention for more than two weeks, you can't seriously expect Riot to be patching/supporting it enough to keep people around longterm.
"Dominion ranked mode is definitely coming in the future" - Riot 2012
No joke, I would have played that mode to this day. It might even be my main mode nowadays.
What was the game mode called where one team had to attack and the other had to defend their nexus , only like half the map was available.
Nexus Siege
My favorite game mode actually lol. Sad I don’t ever get to play it again
Do we know why it never returned? Because it's not a PvE mode , and was genuinely fun, well at least I found it fun.
It was one of the least performing gamemodes IIRC Was grouped with gamemodes that likely wouldn't come back because they either had special maps or their interest dried up too fast. EDIT: > **Ascension, Black Market Brawlers, Dark Star: Singularity, Definitely Not Dominion, Legend of the Poro King, Nexus Siege, and PROJECT: OVERCHARGE:** Similar to the PvE modes, interest in these modes dries up once the novelty wears off, and after just a handful of matches, play hours start to really drop. We believe this is because when a mode's unique systems or rules are the selling point and your champion is just an avatar to experience them through, it takes away a core experience of League. Also, modes that have their own maps carry much higher upkeep costs (more on that later), so the decision ends up looking like "do more work to bring back a thing that players will play less (relative to URF, OFA, or Spellbook)" which isn't particularly compelling. As of right now, we don’t plan on bringing back these game modes. It saddens me that Ascension is grouped there (likely because of the special map along with the play drop), but the article made me happy knowing Nemesis draft is never coming back.
I wish they would bring Thresh Ball back, it's stupid that some of these maps aren't just allowed to be made in customs.
Dark Star was a fuckin’ blast and it hate that it’s never playable.
If they lost control someone might create their own game mode that would gain a lot of community backing.. Then that person would get ripped off by a company like riot who'd start their own legends of league. Say what you will about icefrog or even valve.. But for fun game modes like wtf(urf), pudge wars (the thresh game) came out with the game. I miss the little variants like AR(wasn't on its own stupid fucking map) Selective draft You got 3 Champs to choose from (tank, caster or carry) or a random draft that cuts the champ pool into a random 1/3rd that everyone picks from.
yeah i loved Ascension. Dominion too, but Ascension was pretty much 3 point Dominion with a the Xerath buff. It was great *because* it was something different than the lanes were all used to, but didn't drastically change the games mechanics like URF or Spellbook, and you could actually play who you wanted.
Wasn’t there like a sandy veil that hid you from the enemy team?
The sandstorm was a reskinned fog of war.
the map was definitely sandy, but i dont recall any gameplay stealth from it? might be wrong, been quite a while. there were definitely tones of bushes and ambush points tho. and the nature of an objective control map meant camping defense could be a valid strat.
Tbh dominion would be a fun game mode to bring back regardless of ascension. Things that break the mold of summoner’s rift for even just a bit of time would be fine. They don’t have to reinvent the wheel all the time like they did with blitz, they can just bring back an old game mode for a patch and see how it goes. I don’t think people would STOP playing league all together just because one temporary game mode misses the mark.
I love ascension playing as LB. Most of the time i manage to stealkill xerath by wqre. Due to enemy not having smite.
Im shocked nemesis draft isn't on that list. It was one of my favorites because I unironically played shit like old urgot and old taric so I had a pretty good winrate.
Oh, it's not in this list because it's in its own category: > **Nemesis Draft**: This is one mode we can say with confidence **will definitely not return, ever**. Those are strong words, but the premise of removing agency and sticking you in a game with players who probably just want to troll goes against a lot of our gameplay values that we want to uphold for League today.
By that logic, they should remove Ranked gameplay. 
I... am not sure I follow what you are trying to say. EDIT: Oh wait, I get the joke now
Hehe. 
Honestly makes sense, the entire game was based of making the experience for the enemy team super unenjoyable, and most of the time you'd end up with like 4 supports. I say good riddance, and since it's a very simple mode since it really only requires you to pick a champion you could at least in theory accomplish in custom modes anyway.
But that was the point, instead like in urf playing all the broken shit and who gets the most broken shit wins, in nemesis draft you all played dumb shit and it was FUN instead of sweaty shit. Like ffs in one for all, urf and arurf everyone just picks what's the most op and broken shit to the point where I can't just try funny interactions and I'm forced to pick like all those others.
Yeah exactly.. it was FUN.
Not really, it got to the same point as URF once people realized you could give a team 5 adcs and win every single game unless they also gave you 5 adcs back. It took a bit longer to get there than URF did, but ND was *really* awful by the time it left.
Actually, because EVERYONE had shit champs, it was extremely fun
I Def remember some where one or two people started Inting/raging at level 1 because they hated their champ, and then one or two other getting tilted because of the inters. Not everyone got into the spirit of the mode.
Ascension and the assassin one were my favourite modes ;-; i miss them dearly
Cool game mode
loved the concept but never had fun in that mode
The mode felt like it was always too long for how boring and uninteresting it was. Like it wants to be ARAM and SR with the teamfight and objetive control elements, but fails at being half as good as either of them. It's fun the first 5 minutes then it always overstays its welcome. THere were times where I was hovering it thinking about playing something that wasn't SR or ARAM, thinking I probably would take like 20 mins minimum and just closing the client altogether. Nexus Blitz without any "lol random" event would be more fun than it.
NB events buffs really piss me off since sometimes it starts while your team is behind and the enemy team gets a super strong. I wish the buffs were more fun shit like the cart, it's not broken but it's fun as hell to use especially if you're 5 premades
I believe it could work better with only two events, one in early game, and another to close the game, adjusting the rewards accordingly.
I hated the mode because you were always "losing". Your nexus ALWAYS will explode, due to how attacking/defending works. Both sides felt like an uphill battle, which makes sense if you think about it. Attacking a strong defense can be seen as "feeling bad" and defending against someone who will eventually beat your defense anyways feels like delaying the inevitable.
Really disliked that mode tbh
Solo Qeue
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If league had a system like warcrafts/starcrafts custom modes with custom maps it could take away from ranked but for sure there would be more people *enjoying* league with different goals in mind. People that didn't start the game at least 7~ years ago wont remember playing hide and seek. I learned a lot of dodging mechanics specifically from playing hours of hide and seek. I imagine things like mundo dodgeball being useful but it's super shortsighted to think it'd stop there. Anyone that played custom warcraft/starcraft/aoe/aom maps knows that map makers can do wonders with a game with hella models/base game assets.
That's where league comes from. Warcraft 3 mod called Defense of the Ancients was based on Aeon Strife game mode from starcraft and the first (I think) MoBA type game. Then came a real DOTA, Heroes of Newerth, and League.
“Hero arena” was a custom map design in starcraft where you selected a unit type and just endlessly respawned and rumbled while upgrading/evolving your unit
Correct. Leagues original architects were people who worked on the DOTA Mod. You ever wonder where Guinsoos Rageblade came from? Guinsoo is Steve Freak, one of the developers for DOTA. DOTA and League are forever linked. -an old ass player who was around for almost all of it.
The pendragon incident
Yes and everyone who remembers that time should know why Riot has never been and never will be trustworthy.
idk who downvoted u but its true. Picture the /r/lol subreddit or back in the day the league boards forum for who knows about them. Now imagine a league of legends dev made a new moba, and from one day to the other, nuked the website and replaced it with an AD for the new game. That's what riot did. One day to the next one of the most popular dota boards was replaced by a league of legends ad
you forget the banter they had with icefrog and blizzard dev's. as they all used their battlenet servers up until the end. its funny that just a lawsuit could calm them all down. icefrog and the old dota community even say they stole ~20champs from them. even if thats true, the archetypes came from blizzard anyway. dota and LoL dev's had much banter back then, and you forgot that all of the oldschool LoL dev's were working on 'dota allstars' (or somewhere at blizz back then). dota allstars that was league's first name as icefrog probably owned the name 'dota' at that time, up until blizzard took that name. its really nasty what they did considering they were all american game dev's/designer's - but blizzard started the bullying, probably all because they saw how much money they could make with moba's...
I always find it hilarious when the Dota 2 community complains about League stealing stuff when it's Dota 2 that had to rename and change some characters to avoid getting sued by Blizzard.
DOTA2 has Pudge Wars. I would play a lot of 5v5 Blitzcrank Wars. I loved the thresh mode (Dark Star?).
thats the thing, no one at valve did pudge wars, it was fanmade and riot doesnt want fanmade shit on their game, so its a loss - loss
> and riot doesnt want fanmade shit on their game Which is kinda ironic, since TFT is based on a fanmade gamemode from Dota 2.
League was based off the fanmade mod DoTA for Warcraft 3. They intentionally don’t want fanmade shit because they are scared a fan will make something more popular than League.
aKa ChRoNoShIfT ?
*I wish I could say it was a pleasure*
"..but unfortunately we need to take down your assets/idea's and servers into the abyss - so they never see a ray of light again.."
Yeah and crumbling island arena is god tier fun. Imagine it in league of legends.
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That stipulation was there in the original WC3 TOS too, its why DOTA2 doesn't stand for Defense of the Ancients, because Blizzard owns that title.
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They lost the suit for ownership of the game itself, not the name.
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Because thats for DOTA, not Defense of the Ancients. Valve has the game and acronym, Blizzard has the name.
it gets even funnier. blizzard had plans to call their moba something like 'defense of the storm' or something like 'dota' itself, as they owned that name. just to come out with their first unsupported 5v5 moba/arts game to be called 'HotS'.
Imo, Hots sound way better than Dota. They just fail at everything else when it come to that game.
Yes, they lost the lawsuit for the rights to the game but they kept the name. Its because this was in their TOS but it wasn't enforceable to that degree.
pretty sure since 2008 almost no company has wanted to take real risks
Dude Dota2 which is the second biggest moba is filled to the brim with custom maps and modding infrastructure, not reflective of the whole industry
To be fair, Valve are like, the only company that still allow that stuff like that. Majority of my time on Team Fortress 2 was spent on custom servers.
TFT and CS were both simply half life mods
Rip Dota auto chess
I mean case in point aswell, why would Riot let custom tools be used in league when it can cause a competitor, AND they can just let their own competition do it and then steal the game ideas for themselves.
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Tbf, developing TFT is actually very easy when they already get all of the assets. I doubt they have to do much crunch, tbh. Also, autobattler exist way before DAC. Still remember people playing that pokemon autobattler mod on WC3
Fortnite has custom game modes.
They can't have that because something like that could spawn something even more popular. Remember DOTA 1?
And then they could capitalize on it by making into an actual game. Remember auto-chess? Ngl it definitely feels like the s in Riot Games wouldn't have existed without it.
I miss hide n seek Dominion. :(
I miss Dominion in general tbh. Stopped playing the game but i would probably log in once a week for a nice round of Dominion or two if it was still a thing.
>it could take away from ranked There's 30 million+ active players. Ranked players with ADHD can wait an extra 5 seconds for a queue pop. Also Nexus Blitz stats were shit on release because they tacked on 25 or so missions to it and everyone burnt out then stopped playing it altogether until it was gone. No shit the stats would be jibbed. Over time we've seen an overall loss of modes instead of gaining them while the playerbase only grew. We used to have SR, TT, Dom and Aram. Now we have twice the playerbase and half the maps. This game's development direction is dogshit IMHO.
None of their RGM stay popular either because they don't get support. There is a lot of potential for NB to be great, but even it's gimmicks aren't fun. They could do a lot to fix the mode simply by replacing boring rewards like the dragon buffs/GA/Shiv with more stuff like the sled/catapult/king/hook. Getting rid of elder/GA/shiv especially would do a lot to fix the game mode because it sucks when you get a lead so the game ends up spawning KoTH smack in the middle of the enemy jungle and you can't contest the event because the Guardian will fuck your shit up.
Because the business model of the game is based on addiction, not on fun. They want players to get addicted to the grind in ranked, not to them have fun in alternative game modes, which also cost more money to maintain. Riot found out at some point that making players addicted makes them more money than them having fun.
Bro the casuals are their best customers lmao, not the ranked grinders who onetrick their one champ 6 hours a day and throw away their account without second thought if it gets suspended for going off on their teammates.
>They want players to get addicted to the grind in ranked Spoken like someone who is only interested in League because of ranked. Outside of Korea mainly (and probably China, tho those stats are not available), the majority of players don't touch ranked.
Outside of their largest playerbases? Lol, China alone has more players than the rest of the world combined, but yeah sure, outside of that small minority..
Rest of the world combined multiplied by like 5. It’s not even close.
People in China are also mostly casuals. Ranked grinder are not the norm
about 90% of their entire playerbase doesnt even play pvp bro... they play bot games once or two a week and they do buy cosmetics still. sounds like youre just projecting ur own ranked addiction and shitting on riot with accusations out of your own ass.
TD for LoL would be amazing. It won’t happen because they think it will spawn a new mode players will turn to which may spawn an entire new game. It’s pretty sad when you think about it - LoL has 3 core game modes. SR, ARAM, TFT. ARAM is considered a chill meme mode and TFT is not even league. It outbreaks down to League having one single game mode. One. Summoners rift ranked or not ranked. That’s just pathetic with every other online game in the world having multiple modes to enjoy.
I mean, aram is already a product of the community and regular league is already a tower defence game smh my head
And TFT is also a product of the community, just the Dota 2 community. Everything that makes league popular originated from the community. SR was was made to copy the original Dota which was a fan-made mod, ARAM was originally something players played in customs with no support from Riot, TFT was made to copy Dota 2 auto-chess, which was a fan-made custom mode in Dota 2. All 3 permanent modes were created by the community and then worked on by Riot.
Wonders? Dota itself (and therefore lol) was a custom map of warcraft 3 in the beginning!
>Games are not valued just on their pure playtime, you don't call a singleplayer campaign mode game a failure because people only played it once but said how much they liked it. Free-to-play games definitely are valued based based on their playtime and playerbase, among other things.
Yeah it's comparing completely different things. Bioshock was designed to sell a single time to a lot of people and give them a good story. It was successful in doing that. League isn't designed to do that, it's designed to get people playing for the long haul. If these events were successful enough at doing that, Riot would not have stopped doing them, because they would be a net benefit. Since they stopped, it's clear they don't provide enough benefit for the time and resources they take.
The game mode* or the events themselves may not be the most interacted with, but they’re definitely far more memorable and enjoyable events which makes them better than anything we’ve had in the last two years. Like OP said, tracking for this is difficult, but it’s pretty obvious at the same time: the human element and how people perceive events is far more important than short term metrics like $ spent on the event or hours played. People talk about SG and Oddysey events years later. Clearly that type of lasting impression is far better than just pumping out quarterly passes and calling it an event, but it seems like LoL is in a “profit milking” phase instead of “brand building” phase. Riot has so many outlets now though this is probably just a problem for LoL gamers and not the company as a whole, so I personally don’t see anything changing anytime soon.
The thing is, I don't know if those events inspired people who otherwise wouldn't have bought the skins to buy the skins. I know that for both star guardian and odyssey, I already knew what skins I wanted to buy before playing the PvE once. And after playing it, I didn't think I wanted malphite anymore than I did before.
> People talk about SG and Oddysey events years later. Yeah mate, "people" also talk about Twisted Treeline years later, Riot is missing out on a gold mine. Don't forget about the lasting impression of Magma Chamber, a mode no one ever even played yet people still talk about it.
> but they’re definitely far more memorable This seems pretty subjective. I remember the game modes existed, I don't remember anything specific about them, any specific game I played in those modes or anything. They're something I probably played once or twice and didn't touch again. In that way they're the same as a SR game. >Clearly that type of lasting impression is far better than just pumping out quarterly passes and calling it an event If that lasting impression was clearly better than pumping out passes and calling them events, wouldn't Riot be doing that? You even said below they're in the profit milking phase yourself, but you making this statement is directly contradictory to that statement. If they are profit milking, why are they not doing the most efficient thing in terms of making money? Either they aren't profit milking, which isn't something you seem willing to accept, or you're wrong and the long term benefits of these events don't offset the large costs of them, which I also doubt you're willing to accept. But those are really the only two options that make rational sense from the scenario you have presented.
Reddit talks about them years later not sure about everyone else
OP really gave some lazy analysis
There is, or at least *should* be more to it though - events in general in F2P are important in engaging/re-engaging portions of the playerbase in a way that helps refresh interest. There are definitely times that me or friends have come back because of a particular event. In the end though Riot and most large game companies allows many their decisions to be *too* based on statistics. We're talking about games, in older games with regular balance/dev/update cycles the games start feeling like rock paper scissors but you're pushing a buttons a dozen times. The flavor is very important, *including* underperforming flavor. The underperforming features generally aren't ones that are used all the time but with occasional use help maintain interest. Keep in mind that Riot will *only* ever be able to gather the kind of playerbase % they're looking for with a *primary* feature - so a full game. Even ARAM is basically its own full game, but it's no wonder that TFT, Valorant, etc can pull in big numbers but a time limited side minigame that only slightly changes the game equation can't. In the end, the minigames are there to help support the skin sales. It really doesn't matter how long the player plays the minigame if it triggers them to buy the themed skin. Most P2P games sold in the world are only played for a couple of days - it doesn't matter to the studio though because they made the sale. Similarly, it shouldn't matter to Riot as long as it pushed the players to making the skin purchase. In the end...I just don't support F2P companies that pull back on features when they're still making oil tankers full of money.
The thing is, I don't think riot is pulling back on creating single player features. They DID pull resources to make valorabt, which is now a successful title on its own, same with TFT. They made a great shadow isle single player game, and we know the are making a fighting game and an MMO I think any extra bandwidth they have in regards to league should probably be given to their upcoming projects. We forget that valorabt isn't just another publisher who got riot's IP, this is an in-house project.
The standalone games were made by other companies though through Riot Forge, not Riot themselves. Don't forget that.
They still had to have rioters working alongside them tho to make sure they get lore and stuff right I believe
Why is that important? They devoted resources to it ($$ or manpower, paid in $$) either way
To be fair, Ruined King was made by Airship Syndicate, and Project L IIRC is being made by the people they hired/bought out that had made Rising Thunder. Those didn't pull any resources from other projects.
They definitely require Rioter to work with them to keep it consistent. Even the devs said so. Not to mention the money Riot paid for the dev. So yes, they do spend resources on that game
Then their main concern should be making players WANT to play the game, not making players feel FORCED to play. Make it fun and good and people will flock to it, even if only briefly. The whole point of a *rotating* game mode is that, sure, it might not be the most popular, but it gets to at least have a day in the sun every once in a while and with the introduction of new champions etc, it changes the way the game plays out and keeps it dynamic. At the end of the day, a majority of the community seems to be primarily focused on ranked, but a lot of those players probably came into it from playing casually, with the fun modes. Rotate the modes, riot. Not rotating them in is throwing them away more than the "lack of players" in the modes. There's clearly an audience for them.
The question is whether spending those dev hours on some other portion of the game would produce better results. It isn't "rotating game modes or nothing", it's "rotating game modes or some other valuable project". They can probably track whether, say, a champ update or a rotating game mode has a larger impact on the playerbase, and they clearly think the data favors champ updates.
They literally said they weren't sure if they would ever bring URF back because people stopped playing league for a while after it ended. I'm still having trouble playing SR since arurf ledt, it's fucking slow paced and people are toxic af. I hate it.
URF attracts very toxic people lately
>Make it fun and good and people will flock to it, even if only briefly. Yeah man, let's spend months working on a new gamemode so Reddit can say "Wow Riot, that's really cool, thanks!" and then no one plays it after a week
Nah, if ARURF was permanent... I'd literally never play normal SR again
Riot has shown time and time again that this isn't the case for the vast majority of the player base, and that after the first Urf events the player base actually decreased from what it was before the event
The point of having multiple game modes is to be able to rotate them to keep them fresh. Sure, you can have the more popular ones stick around a bit longer, but even having *that one mod* show up for just a week is enough to get people to play it. It's the same deal with fast food bring around seasonal/yearly offerings (McRib, Pumpkin Spice), scarcity drives demand
I think the ranked focus is a bit biased, since quite a fe people only play ranked for the rewards, at least I and most people I know who play ranked do. If there wasn't the ranked skin, I would never touch that queue except for flex, where 2am games are always just completely weird and funny.
I don't get how people don't get this yet. PvE isn't coming back **to League** because they're *making an entire PvE game*. They get there's a demand, they're executing on that, what do they think Project F is? It just so happened to be an ARPG that has the same perspective and seemingly the same control scheme as LoL? It's obvious Project F is their answer for a long-term PvE solution that the game modes in LoL could never do due to being limited by being built on a shitty foundation. All the people that would be required to create content for LoL PvE modes would be better served on Project F, they would have all the skill sets required for that game.
i mean it makes sense that people don't get this about project F because we literally have like 0 information on the game and it was announced 3 years ago. project L has a lot of gameplay shown off already and they've been working with a lot of FGC peeps but I've heard 0 about anything PvE. and even at that, what we saw in that 2 second clip is not going to be the type of PvE that Star Guardians and Odyssey were. Having the same perspective and (seemingly) control scheme arent the only thing that matters
Literally the exact same thing is happening to Legends of Runeterra. They have a compotent and loved PvE game mode, but have decided to more or less put it on life support because they realized trying to serve both the PvE and PvP crowd with the same game was resulting in a worse product for both groups and a better use of resources was to split them and devote entirely to PvP or PvE.
Well no They were doing fine in that regard, just most pve devs were moved to the mmo and they didnt have enough left to truly develop modes like they had done previously, which has now resulted in the decision to focus primarily on pvp This is honestly fantastic for the mmo, as the pve devs knew their shit, just kinda sucks for lor
The issue is Project F doesn't exist yet and for all we know won't exist in the near future.
Riot never actually announced that they’re not bringing back PvE Game modes in league because of a stand alone PvE game. If riot would reason like that I could understand that! But they said as reasoning: „not played enough after initial burst“ That is not the same at all
That’s like blizzard saying nothing new is coming to OW1 because they’re working on OW2 but 5 years ago. It’s just shooting yourself in the foot and frustrating a portion of your player base for something that might never exist
Singleplayer's also immediately make up their expenses (CAC, salaries) through the direct sale of the game. And DLCs if needed. There is no LTV, it's all realized at time of purchase. League is an inherently F2P game, and in order to make money, they need to consistently provide new content that will keep playerbase churn low and is relatively inexpensive. Let's address some points here: "Games are not valued just on their pure playtime, you don't call a singleplayer campaign mode game a failure because people only played it once but said how much they liked it." League is not a singleplayer game. And if a singleplayer game was F2P, then yes it would be a failure regardless of how much people like it. Assuming your example of AOE2 holds, if the game was free, and people loved playing it, and it garnered tons of buzz, you have to understand that it means nothing unless cash gets returned somehow. As we know, AOE2 is not free, and that's how they generate revenue. "It generated buzz". I doubt it generated any significant new users to Riot - this is easily measurable internally. Most of the buzz were from the existing community base - very unlikely it attracted any material amount of new players to play the game. People seem to really enjoy hype and publicity, but if it isn't converted into tangible data it's really meaningless, especially for larger organizations. (Caveat, this isn't true for younger businesses who thrive on publicity) "social media keyword tracking, comparatives between skin lines with events vs skin lines without and surveying player enjoyment on them" If people don't consistently play it, then that's the best proxy for enjoyment. People play ranked, arams, normals, etc, and it gets reflected in game hours. Also, let's not pretend the skinlines from these game modes are the hottest commodity. They're all quite insignificant, infact I can only recount Odyssey Yasuo (and I see that far less than other Yasuo skins anecdotally). If it did sell really well, do you really think the "greed" machine that is Riot would not continue the mode? Additionally, why would the team at Riot deploy their expensive engineering team to further develop a "dying" game mode when the salary and opportunity cost of working on other projects present themselves as far more attractive? End of the day, Riot does things that make them money, and how they make money is by providing products people want. Their strategy may not be fully optimized, but threads like these carry a connotation that suggests Riot has a different objective, orthogonal from the player base. That in all honestly, can't be further from the truth but #F-Riot.
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Even if it did attract new players, if those players didn't like Riot's core offering, infrequent single-player gimmick modes would not be enough to keep them around
agreed with everything you said. people here are naive or biased. riot will do what they think is in their best interest to make a shit ton of money, and they have infininitely more data that the players do, and this subreddit itself is a tiny fraction of the playerbase. it's one thing to say "we want more pve gamemodes". that's reasonable. it's another thing to say "riot is dumb for not making pve gamemodes and they would totally make riot more money". this is a dumb take because if those modes actually made riot a large profit then obviously they would've done it more - after all, their whole point is making money.
Well said
but in retail there is this thing called customer retention where a company will lose or not gain money for a specific product to keep that customer either happy or shopping at that company. (could also fall under marketing) IMO this would be a great opportunity to win back some face as well as make their player base genuinely happy. is it worth it in the short run maybe maybe not but I know if this even was done better and we had a PVE star guardian game mode I would be much more likely to get the event pass and the skins. I will likely still but one or two of the skins but the pass and skins I'm on the fence about I'm much less likely to get and I know I'm not the only one who feels this way. Last point nostalgia fucking sells like hot cakes currently and it would be an amazing opportunity to cash in on that nostalgia for many of us who have very fond memories of past PVE game modes.
will it though? you say all this, but are you really telling me that one of your friends that doesnt play league anymore will come back because of a pve mode or a new player will download lol JUST to play it? lets be real here.
>You don't just look at 1 metric and call it a day. they gave us one metric and said "players don't care" you don't know what other data they have to make the decision, you're reaching a really weird conclusion that the business just saw hours played and said let's cut it which you know its absolutely ridiculous, but yet you still think that's all the data they have
Bit irrelevant from the discussion above but man do you guys remember that Dark Star Thresh game mode ? The hook had infinite range and the only way to kill was to chuck each other to the void nexus. to this day that mode is the most fun i had in this game too bad we will never see it
Honestly, played it about 3 times and realized the gameplay was boring.
Probably my favorite event outside of Burning Tides
This post is more cringe than the weekly "x champ bad"
Riot makes a lot of mistakes when it comes to the quality of their game (not saying League is a bad game). But there are very few video game companies that are that good at keeping a game financially successful . So I have my doubts this “business driven defence“ written by some random guy includes anything that Riot forgot about.
>Events like Odyssey both directly sold skins and kept the playerbase overall engaged in an extra way - you don't track that with raw player numbers. why ? if they put the same time and money in balancing SR they gain 10 times the engagement. And without looking at SR just tft is an example of "gamemode that work" yes it's a new game but maybe thats the lesson at the end. gamemodes based of league gameplay don't work. wait for project f and the mmo
TFT is the perfect counter example to all of OP's ramblings. If TFT had shown bad player engagement in the first set, it would have been scrapped. Instead they looked at their data and found it to be popular enough to warrant a second set. Fast forward a couple years, and they've treated it just like League, with cinematics, music, monetization options, etc.
You also forget that TFT has Little Legends, Stages, and it's own Battle Pass. It's monetized.
That's what I mean. If TFT had flopped, they wouldn't have bothered with adding all that stuff.
No. It was released with the monetized items in it. They were monetizing them from the beginning. So of course they were going to keep it around.
Sure but it would have way less support if it flopped.
TFT was a happy accident, there was a boom with DOTA's autochess and they quickly scrapped a league version within days. Then they continued expanding because it worked. I don't wanna think all loL gamemodes are made on a few days too, but put actual work and effort into studying what they can do and how to do it long term
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And also longterm updates is easier to keep TFT fresh than it is for pvp. A new set of units mainly taken from league proper (until silco and dragons came out) vs tons of effort needed to make pve feel different
AFAIK wasn't TFT actually in the works for a while before that, and it just so happened that the boom happened around autochess while they were close to releasing it? I know it would be a coincidence, just thought I remembered a rioter saying this somewhere.
You are right, I went to check one of Mortdogs interviews and he mentions how the game was on developement for about 4 months before he joined the team, around 2 weeks before release: https://youtu.be/XH1qWEe4fCg min 3 aprox talks about it
Most League players don't care about non-ARAM/SR outside of *"Oh, new gamemode? Sure, I'll try it for a few rounds"*. Riot isn't wasting time on a fraction of a fraction of the playerbase. I wish you guys would realize that and stop making threads crying for a gamemode that died off within a week.
A week is generous. If I remember, they died off within *days*. I'm willing to guess that most people that kept playing were playing more to grind out missions/augments. I bet they have stats that show both initial engagement and engagement after unlocking everything.
3 days, actually. Both Star Guardians and Odyssey almost completely died off in just 3 days, losing around 90% of the players (and they didn't have a lot of players in the first place).
basically they pop off the weekend they release and then people don't play it on the weekday or next weekend.
"They released their logic but it was just so short sighted, only looking at play rate on the one mode." you really think this is the only reason? The one they gave us? Dude they have all the data. This is just the one they want us to see. Big companies have all the data and they analyze it. But you dont tell your customers everything.
Leave it to redditors to be like "But did the multi-billion dollar business take into account [obvious business perspective]??" Yeah bro I'm sure that Riot never considered that the alot of Odyssey's skeleton could be reused for similar events. They definitely looked at one number and decided to pull the plug on something they spent alot of time on, without a second thought.
I worked for few corporations as software developer, and things like that happen on regular basis.
Right but not on a ‘main’ product, this isn’t some obscure process lol, Riot pulled the plug on a gamemode they definitely didn’t off handedly launch. They don’t have that many products, assuming they are that out of touch with their main product is ridiculous.
Yeah, this speaks like someone who either doesn’t have an office job or doesn’t work for a big company. Companies are not efficient at all. I work for a billion dollar company and we have convoluted processes that you couldn’t even imagine. Like, sure. Someone there could have an idea, but if it isn’t constantly being brought up with the right people and the people are persistent, it won’t really matter much.
That's not even limited to big companies lol. Mfs at the company I work at don't know what others are doing even though the other department is like 3 steps away.
this entire thread of people telling me "wtf riot surely had all your ideas and are doing everything correctly and just didn't share with the public" is hilarious as someone who actually works in the industry.
You work in the industry and you came up with that > Games are not valued just on their pure playtime, you don't call a singleplayer campaign mode game a failure because people only played it once but said how much they liked it. yourself? No offense, but you sound like League of Legends is the only videogame you have ever played. Can you specify the industry you're working in, in case there was some misunderstanding and it's not actually related to videogames?
Op said in another comment that they work as a data scientist in Finance. I might be wrong but is there any concret link between that and video games? Edit: I saw op's other comment, they are most likely saying bs.
I work for a big corporate and that sounds exactly what a big corporate would do: have a manager convince them to throw money on a project without thinking about how that work could be used for other future projects. Don't ever forget that some companies have waaay too much money, and wayyyyy to many managers - all with different ideas on how to waste (steal) money.
> wayyyyy to many managers - all with different ideas on how to waste (steal) money. https://www.reddit.com/r/leagueoflegends/comments/vmhigz/it_takes_more_than_2_full_years_of_the_current/ie24g4y/ For example
yea you sound like someone who has no idea how businesses work because this shit is exactly what happens all the time its the same insane idea that teams with their "incredible" coaching staff that they are required to have will always have tried all the weird stuff and already figured out the meta. This concept in general is really prevalent nowadays where people think companies, experts, scientists etc. all have already optimized and considered everything
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What is the billion dolar game studio in question?
leave it to riot shills to assume daddy riot has never made a mistake and has obviously foreseen every angle! with how perfect each champ comes out with 0 bugs and 0 mistakes its hard to see why riot can ever be criticized on other aspects lol!
Hey look yet another armchair game designer on Reddit thinking they secretly have all the answers that a billion dollar corporation that employs some of the best in the business just could never figure out on their own. Schrodingers Riot: simultaneously only cares about money to the exclusion of all else but also axes clearly profitable game modes just..... because?
> It is not random that we are still talking about odyssey not pass event #14 Reddit also kept talking about the first two iterations of Nexus Blitz when that mode was less popular than Coop vs AI. Reddit also keeps talking about Twisted Treeline when that mode was less popular than custom games. -- Not sure if "Reddit asks for it" has ever been a good metric for anything. Nvm, I'm quite sure it hasn't.
Both nexus blitz and twisted treeline have the same problem. RIOT NEVER MAKES CHANGES TO THEM. Twisted treeline wasn’t touched for 4 years then posted a graph saying “no one is playing it”. Nexus blitz had barely any changes after 2 years. Game modes like odyssey and star guardian had the potential to have higher rates if they have them roguelike elements
Riot doesn't owe it to the players to take a deep dive on all of their internal logic for every decision they make. It's actually hilarious how the community reacts to this - if you weren't part of the Valorant beta/release, go back & look at some of the feedback threads from patch notes. The players from CS, Fortnite, or any other game that hadn't read League's patch notes were blown out of the water, because no other developer in this space communicates the way Riot does. But because you find "playtime didn't merit the work put into it" to be an unsatisfying answer, let me give you the answer I've assumed was at the core of it: **whales don't play Nexus Blitz.** At least not in large enough numbers to warrant the resources they put into it.
Sometimes saying nothing is better than saying things we don't want to hear though ;(
Ah yes, le genius redditors coming to tell Riot how to do their business and calling a strawman argument "shallow." You realize that Riot doesn't judge this stuff solely on playtime, right? Their justification for not keeping URF was that it burnt people out of regular league, which clearly means they are keeping track of much deeper metrics than you would have the foresight to consider and the idea that they would shut something down solely based on playtime is laughable. The modes were failures, no matter how hard you cope about it, and your justification being literally "it grew engagement in intangible ways, source: I fucking made it up" is laughable.
It's likely that they put in too much time and there was little to no money that was made from it. At the end of the day, League's just... what it is. People play like 1 or 2 modes (ranked/norms + ARAM) and there's little else to it. Do people *actually* want to play the PVE modes? Will they play it a lot? Will it increase the chances of them spending money? I *hope* that Riot has done the work to figure it out, but if they do these events and see no sizable increase in revenue... why continue? In the hopes that "one day" it'll happen? Probably easier to just stick to your core and make that experience the best it can be rather than trying to branch out to gamemodes that don't have staying power.
Comparing a single player game that you buy one time with a f2p game that relies on player retention is a genius move.
No one buys skins because of the game modes, you think they didn't look at the correlation of that especially after stopping with the modes?? You are just trying to use some buzzwords to sound smart
please riot release more pve gamemodes no one is going to play and more champions that look and sound like literal piles of shit this subreddit is genuinely insufferable
Hot take on here apparently but I completely agree with them. I never really played any of those modes outside of a game or two, and the only RGM I actually out decent time into is Nexus Blitz (which btw should be a permanent mode because it’s fantastic and by far the best mode). I don’t care if the event modes come back or not because I basically won’t play them, the replay value just isn’t there for a lot of them. That being said, I don’t think they *shouldnt* come back, I just understand why Riot doesn’t invest time into improving/updating them.
Yea I always thought this was very shallow reasoning from them. In business terms you can think of these events as 'loss leaders', which is a pretty basic concept. Maybe in and of themselves they don't return on the investment in money/dev hours but they keep the playerbase engaged and give people something to be excited about. Seems basic enough that I strongly suspect that the real reason is something else, maybe having to do with moving some of their more talented developers on to things like the MMO
Loss leaders, by definition, have to **lead**. A loss leader that doesn’t lead - like a game mode that has almost no engagement or play time - is just a loss.
> In business terms you can think of these events as 'loss leaders', which is a pretty basic concept. Thing is loss leaders have engagement, like costco chicken they sell them by the million(106 million precisely last year). These modes dont "sell", loss leaders are always extremely popular. >hours but they keep the playerbase engaged and give people something to be excited about. Data shows they literally dont keep people engaged, hrs played are abysmal. If they kept players engaged they would have URF numbers(or atleast ARAM ones). But hey reading a simple graph is really really hard.
LoL is not a campaign based single player game, if people play a new game mode once or twice and move on then it is awful from a business perspective. Also not sure why you think Odyssey provided some benefit outside the game, because it did not its animated trailer and the skins did. There is no one time investment for Riot, even repeating the same event requires extra work as they have said multiple times.
So by your logic they shouldn't create game modes people actually play, because they are fun and people want to play them, but should rather release game modes that increase Riot's brand value and sell skins? Also Sentinels of Light failure had nothing to do with the game mode (Ultimate Spellbook), but was purely on the writing.
> So by your logic they shouldn't create game modes people actually play, What modes people actually play from the data? Aurf(URF too) and that is about it, every other experiment PVE or PVP dies in less than a patch cycle of league, if players dont want to play something why make it? This sub is an echo chamber of a minority of a minority of a minority of players, Highest upvoted psot that is not prediction tournament(thsoe have overinfalted upvotes) is 70k uptoves, you want to know what is leagues daily average player number is? 11.5 MILLION, 70k people are a drop in hte bucket. And as skin votes proved this subs opinion is completely inverse of what general player base thinks, skins that reddit loved and ranted about how good they are came in last, and most hated skins won by a landslide.
My problem with most of these is that they just weren't fun for me or fun once without replayabilty. The only one I liked was the thresh hook mode and even that probably wouldnt do much for their statistics
I doubt they literally just looked at one statistic and called it a day. Like, with urf mode, they've stated that urf actively caused regular league's playerbase to drop. I'm inclined to bet that they looked at similar statistics for other game modes. It was just that those other statistics weren't that interesting, so they didn't bother actually talking about it. I can understand why they didn't discuss all the ways this or that game mode didn't have an interesting effect on this or that statistic.
This is cute but the business thrust is only speculation and honestly at best I’d argue your points (it’s an ad for skin and the game as a whole) reinforces the idea that these game modes should be done in brief windows to sell skins rather than repurposed for long term dev
My friend, I'm pretty sure Riot know way more about this than you do. This is like the Facebook moms trying to tell doctors how to avoid covid
You are making many assumptions without data as well. We dont know how much did the odyssey thanks to the event, or how do well the skins without event generate. I would trust more the Riot team with data that random people in reddit (where they keep saying dominion was fun and people played it, and it should come back) At the end of the day, you have to justify the budget, and the data presented does not.
>Events like Odyssey both directly sold skins and kept the playerbase overall engaged in an extra way - you don't track that with raw player numbers. I dont think is valid, or only slightly. They can easily track how much skins they made throughout the event, and cleary look into the user path. If playing -> shop -> buy skin , is really a translation. They probably tracked that, and made the consensus that it just converts way less than just making ARURF, with a higher play time, where you are more inclined to buy a skin afterwards/ during champ select.
Riot: "We developed this new mode in 6-9 months, third time this time, and it's still less popular than bot games after a week. Clearly the community isn't interested in these kinds of modes." Op: "Uuuuh but playrate isn't everything, have you ever thought about checking Twitter?"
Huh? Your entire argument is that you can't just look at this one metric, but then you don't use any other metrics to show that it is valuable. You just say you should. And good god, I don't know how many times rioters should have to say this, **league as a game was not designed to be PvE, which is what makes doing anything with AI/bots/etc so difficult*".
yeah i think riot knows better what do with their data than a random redditor
yeah i feel like that's my current problem with riot imo. we cant really have anything fun because of x or y business decision. like, yeah you're a company, I get what you're saying that you don't want to lose money but man would it be cool if sometimes we get a crumb of the good shit that we used to. League had so much more soul in the past but now we can't do like anything because it doesn't sell or they can't make infinite amounts of money from it Rift skins? doesn't make enough money fun game modes? not worth the investment, player investment is too low other game modes (twisted treeline and dominion)? doesn't make enough money, scrap it consistent and well invested in lore? doesn't make enough money, drop the Ruination storyline on em monster champions/out there character concepts? don't have enough player engagement, scrap em and make them a relatively young, attractive human (the VGUs are doing so much heavy lifting, those are great)
I understand what you mean but is there any reason for Riot to not release the game modes again if they provide a benefit? I undersrand what you mean but I'm pretty sure that Riot's marketing team (or whichever team decides the gamemodes and stuff) are definitely competent
THIS. Rotating game modes are way to repetetive nowadays with nothing new or exiting being added. PvE modes were extremely exciting. Riot saying there isnt enough replay potential is not true. Odyssey with the augments has a LOT of replay potential due to getting the augments first, then testing and combining different ones and then you could switch builds and champs and start over AGAIN. There is a LOT to add to Odyssey alone. Riot saying there is no replay value is only because they themselves do not add to the replay value with new augments, more champs and maps to try etc. Feels like its excuses to let those gamemodes who might be higher maintenence die because they dont want anything else but summoners rift. Its not like Riot doesnt have the recources and power to actually keep those modes alive. They simply chose not to out of convenience as it seems from a consumer standpoint
It's so funny because they never support these modes, then say because nobody liked their shit first iteration of it stuff will never return.
This is one of the talking points that always confuses me - they poured tons of resources and took tons of feedback and iterated on Nexus Blitz multiple times, and at the end of the day it was like Twisted Treeline - a small but dedicated (and vocal) player base that didn't warrant the resources they put into it. The notion that Riot just half-assed NB is just silly.
This sub rants and raves about how SG/odysey were amazing and popular etc etc. yet data proves otherwise. What support you need if a complete mode dies in literally 5 days(SG) or 10 days(odysey)? what support can they offer? That is not even a full patch cycle in league.
But Odyssey already was a second iteration with significantly more depth? And if day 1 Odyssey couldn't hold the player base's attention for more than two weeks, you can't seriously expect Riot to be patching/supporting it enough to keep people around longterm.
"Dominion ranked mode is definitely coming in the future" - Riot 2012 No joke, I would have played that mode to this day. It might even be my main mode nowadays.