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Riot Games' close calls with disaster
Riot Games CEO Brandon Beck gave the closing keynote at last week's IGDA Leadership Forum in Los Angeles, California, and during the talk (in which he made the point that "Riot's secret weapon all along" has been its employees), he gave a few interesting examples of how Riot's staff had really gone the extra distance to turn League of Legends into the successful online phenomenon it is today. His first example was about the matchmaking system -- originally, Riot struggled to make sure that players were matched up against each other in an interesting and effective way, and the company ended up bringing in not a game developer, but a programmer with a PhD in computational biology whose "thinking was radically different and compelling," according to Beck. A month after this hire, the company had a whole new matchmaking system, and in the end, it turned out to be "too fair" -- the games were too close. Since "what players remember are the outliers," according to Beck, the team developed "snowball items," which were "risky purchases that rewarded flawless execution." That bit of gameplay mixed up the matches, and came to be the system the game uses today.
