Riot Ghostcrawler on Reddit’s Influence: “We don’t always agree; we try to weigh it out and don’t want to be in a position where Reddit votes on changes to the game” Izento Follow May 28, 2018 · 5 min read

The Inven Global Esports Conference was an event held in Irvine, CA on May 1st to bring together industry leaders to discuss all things esports. This allowed Izento the chance to speak with Izento with Riot Ghostcrawler to talk about the current changes that are happening to the game and his philosophy on Reddit input and changing the ranked experience. (This interview was conducted on May 1st, 2018)

Do you think Reddit has too much influence in balance changes? There was a recent talk of the jungle changes about the scuttle crab. Pros were saying that this isn’t the best idea because we’re going to be having more waveclear mids to get mid priority and then fighting over scuttle. So, what is your opinion on Reddit and community criticism in relation to gameplay changes? Do you think this is healthy?

I think it’s healthy. Reddit has a lot of influence, but so does Inven and streamers as well. They would probably all tell you they don’t have enough influence because they would rather have us make more changes but we don’t hold ourselves to be of superior intellect when we get feedback from pro players or community members that understand the game. They might say, “hey, this might not have the outcome you guys are looking for”. That is great information for us. We don’t always agree; we look at it, we try to weigh it out and we don’t want to be in a situation where Reddit votes on the changes to the game, but we definitely want to know of a situation that the community is worried about because, there’s probably a reason. Maybe we don’t understand our goals or maybe we missed some nuance. It’s often hard to predict how the changes are going to manifest.

Many among the Reddit community are concerned about your announcement to the changes of ranked queue. You guys just announced separate elo to different positions and, with that in mind, do you think LoL players are gravitating more towards only playing one or two roles?

This is a great question because I think competitive players do gravitate towards one position and they do that because the game asks them to. Anytime you aren’t playing your position, you’re probably not going to do as well, and that’s certainly going to hurt your MMR. So, players are like, “why would I want to go mid? I’m a bot lane player, and sure I understand the basics of mid but I know I’m better at bot, so anytime you’re asking me to go mid, you’re hurting me as a player”.

The design is trying to address a couple of things.

One is that, if I have to play a position, I understand that it’s not that I’ve never played that position and I know it’s not my strongest, but it doesn’t hurt my overall performance. It’s like, well, I’m not going to advance my top lane MMR but at least I’m not hurting my top lane MMR either.

Secondly, for people that want to pursue multiple roles, they can do that! “You know, I’ve played jungle for 1000 games, I’m starting to burn out a little bit, or maybe there’s a new champion that I’m excited about”. Right now, if there’s a new champion that comes out that doesn’t pertain to your main role, maybe you’re like, “well, that’s irrelevant to me. Maybe I’ll play against that character, but overall, that doesn’t affect my league play”. So, my hope is that, overall, if they’re interested in pursuing this, they might be able to get Gold in X, and hey, they can try to get Gold in something else as well.

One of the reasons why we’re talking about ranked changed so early is because ranked is a dangerous thing to touch. We know it alarms players and we want to give them a chance to respond, to be able to voice their opinions and ask for more explanations.

And maybe Reddit is one of the better places to ask about ranked, because they’re more invested in the game.

Yeah. Reddit has a strong ranked focus and the downside is that you get a mostly English language view and we have players all around the world, so we want to get a balanced view of what everyone has to say.

We’ve just had our first split completed under the franchise model. Has franchising had an effect on your overall plan to changing the game?

I don’t think our strategy for how we design league is going to change that much. I think franchising goes with our overall strategy which goes along with the idea that we want this game to test the stand of time, we don’t want a game that fades out after a couple of years. Franchising, as the esports side of things, goes along with that investment. This goes along well with how we think about the game, how do we build on it, how do we not break this thing that we have going?

Are you worried that as LoL gets older and there becomes this barrier of knowledge that starts to compound upon itself, do you think that this will continue to escalate for new prospective players? Do you feel like we’re at a cap or milestone?

That’s something we think a lot about.

Overall, we care most about our current engaged players. We do not want to sacrifice their enjoyment in the hopes of bringing on new players, who may not enjoy LoL anyways. We don’t want to do anything that would hurt the engaged players. That said, we do want a game that stands the test of time, as I said before.

We need a healthy influx of players. As players get older, they may have less time to play, their life, their schooling, their situation changes. People do eventually turn out of games and we want to make sure that more players are coming in at the same time. Now, we don’t want to do that by simplifying the game so much to attract those new players, because as I said, that’s just going to hurt enjoyment from our core fan base. Instead, we try to try to take the strategy, that even if you’ve been out of touch with LoL for a while, it’s not going to be that different. Yes, there’s going to be new champions, maybe the rune system got overhauled, maybe there’s new things in the jungle, but it’s always going to start with champion select, zoning into the nexus, buying items, running down lane. So, you’ll have a little bit of catching up to do, but it’s not going to be like, “OMG, I was playing God of War for 2 months, then I came back to League and I didn’t recognize it”. Hopefully that’s not the case.