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Riot producer: Addressing bad League of Legends behavior is 'a major focus for us'
A couple of months ago we reported on Riot's decision to assemble a 30-man development team to address adolescent behavioral issues in League of Legends. Now, hot on the heels of a high-profile banning incident involving Team Dignitas pro Christian Rivera, Gamasutra has interviewed LoL lead producer Travis George about the Player Behavior and Justice team (known internally as PB&J), which includes both game designers and academic researchers. George and Riot are hopeful that incentivizing good behavior and throwing a couple of PhDs (in neuroscience and behavioral psychology) into the mix will enable the firm to get a handle on the MOBA title's nefarious community, which was described as a "worldwide problem" in recent player surveys. "You can apply really good research and science techniques to almost anything," George explains. "The trick is just finding what you want to actually spend the time on, and that's where the sentiment for players comes in as a huge guiding factor to that."
Solving the League of Legends community problem one player at a time
As any of its millions of players will tell you, League of Legends is a fun game. Those same players will likely also tell you that the game has a tremendously steep learning curve. With more than 100 playable champions, a dizzying array of items and demanding gameplay, getting to know the ropes is no easy feat. Speaking with senior producer Travis George at Gamescom, I asked how developer Riot Games was going to address the issue of easing players into League of Legends.The game already features bot training and a spectator mode, but what other systems could Riot implement to acclimate new players? His answer surprised me: The problem isn't the learning curve, it's the community.%Gallery-163142%
GDC Online 2011: Riot Games' Travis S. George talks game production
Gamasutra has its hands on a new interview with Riot Games' lead producer Travis S. George, straight from GDC Online 2011. In the interview, George goes into the finer points of game production and outlines five habits into which producers can find themselves falling if they aren't careful. These habits are things like writing down tasks and documentation or resolving all conflicts; in sum, they're all things that sound harmless, or even benevolent. George warns that the true danger comes when the five habits are combined, like some kind of bizarro-game-production-Captain-Planet. It's a truly interesting piece for anyone interested in game production or design, and let's be honest: There are worse people to learn from than the lead producer of Riot Games. For the full technical details, click on over to the full article.
League of Legends Dominion preview: The squared circle
League of Legends recently reached a total of 15 million registered players. Perhaps the most surprising thing is that all of those players have played their matches on just two different maps, one made specifically for Defense of the Ancients-style 5v5 play, and one made for 3v3 combat (there are a few other maps in the game, but they're used for training, not full game modes). That's about to change. Last week, Riot Games invited Joystiq over to its headquarters in Santa Monica, California, to see a brand new game mode for the online competitive title. It's coming along with what Senior Producer Travis George calls "the biggest update we've ever made for League of Legends," a new content release subtitled Dominion. Dominion is a brand new gametype and is especially notable because all of the games in the growing DotA (or MOBA) genre have basically used the same premise: two armies of minions fight with equal strength across a series of parallel lanes, and player champions fight minions and each other to gain ground and win the battle. Dominion, however, is a brand new set of rules, combining elements of the DotA genre with scoring, much more akin to EA's Battlefield games or Call of Duty's Domination mode.%Gallery-129944% p.p1 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; line-height: 14.0px; font: 11.0px 'Lucida Grande'; color: #141414}
