Marc Merrill, President/Executive Producer: Season One really marks the kick-off of the competitive side of League of Legends. Right now, we're in what we call "pre-season." Pre-season is really about having our players learn the intricacies of the game, build up their accounts, and establish relationships so they can form teams. Season One will mean a couple of things. One , we're going to be introducing a bunch of important new features that players have been asking for, and that we're really excited about -- such as ranked games, draft mode, and ladders. And it also means that we're going to be running and supporting a lot of leagues and tournaments, and doing a whole bunch of events focused on the competitive side of the game.

Marc Merrill: It was actually fairly deliberate. We looked at LoL's launch -- and our pre-season -- as the start, not the end. We think that LoL is still very much in its infancy. So, our focus through beta and then through launch and through the pre-season has been on making the game extremely fun, balancing the game, growing the audience, and adding content. We believe that for any competitive game to be successful, it requires a very large audience. LoL has seen tremendous growth since we launched, and it's actually grown more rapidly than we anticipated -- which has been fantastic. One hurdle that introduced is, it required us to focus some additional resources on scaling our backend systems. But we're obviously really excited about it, and this will just ensure that the competitive side will be more healthy and vibrant.

Marc Merrill: We haven't announced those [latest] numbers, but we're probably going to in the relatively near future, because they're substantial. We've been really excited and pleased with the game's growth and success. One of the coolest things, too, is that the growth has been really consistent. When players come in and start playing LoL, a lot of them stick around, they're thrilled at the depth of the game, and then they want to go bring in their friends to play with them. So it's been great. As we've gone broader, we've actually grown even faster. That's a trend that's generally not the case in games. Most games start off, you get a whole bunch of people upfront, and then it slowly dies down. Ours has been the opposite.

Tom Cadwell, Design Director: Basically, we didn't want to create a big barrier to entry. We felt that level 20 players have most of the advantages that level 30 players do -- you can buy tier-three runes, you have all the summoner spells, and you're accessing most of the critical masteries (or you're very close to them). When we look at the ranking spreads for normal games, we see a lot of extremely high-rated players in the 20s. So we decided that, hey, if you've played to 20, you most likely know what you're doing, and you're not at too much of a disadvantage.

Tom Cadwell: No, they will be separate, because we want casual play to remain casual; we don't want people worrying about that. But what we might do is relate some of your ranked ratings to other ranked ratings. For example, three-on-three premade teams will be a different rating than five-on-five premade teams. So we might do something where we evaluate what your best premade rating is, and use that to partially seed your new ratings, or something like that. But we're definitely going to keep normal games and ranked games separate.

Marc Merrill: So, what the exclusive draft mechanic does is, it allows you to better constrain what your friends are picking. And just for those people who don't understand what exclusive draft is, that means if I draft Annie for my team, the other team now can't pick Annie. By doing that, you get a greater degree of champion diversity. As for bans, that's for two reasons: One is because the competitive community has been pretty strong in telling us that that's their expectation. But the other reason is that we think it adds to the richness and strategy of taking a good counter-team to your opponents, and kind of getting inside of their heads and figuring out what their strategy is going to be.

Marc Merrill: Yeah, that's a great point -- and we're actually going to be adding additional rune pages prior to the launch of Season One, precisely to avoid situations like that.

Tom Cadwell: Yeah, we thought about it. We ultimately chose not to do it because, first of all, there are a lot fewer summoner spells than there are champions. We were worried that you might just see people blanket-banning certain survival summoner skills and shutting out a key component to a lot of what people are playing, like Smite for a Warwick player on Twisted Treeline or something. Or going after Cleanse or Flash, for example -- although we're probably going to remove Flash pretty soon here, and see how that goes.

Tom Cadwell: Yeah... That will be an interesting experiment. It'll either go very well or very poorly. Our initial tests show that it will probably be a lot better.

In terms of competitive strategy games, League of Legends is one of the biggest things to hit PCs (and, soon, Macs) in a long time. The spiritual successor to the wildly popular five-on-five Warcraft III: Defense of the Ancients scenario has experienced rapid growth since its October 2009 launch -- and later this summer, developer Riot Games is rolling out a bevy of new features and enhancements to usher in LoL's long-awaited competitive ladder. I recently chatted with Riot president/executive producer Marc "Tryndamere" Merrill and design director Tom "Zileas" Cadwell and got some exclusive insights about the game's first ranked-play season, and its future as a serious competitive strategy game. And if this is any indication, it's a good time to be a LoL fan.In broad terms, what's Season One going to mean for players?What took so long to roll this out? After all, LoL's been out for a few months now.How many players do you have at this point, anyway?Well, that said, let's dive into the big questions. One of the interesting things I noticed in reviewing some of the Season One notes I've seen, is that you guys are letting everybody who's level 20 and higher participate in ranked matches. I just wondered, why did you decide on doing that, instead of requiring people to hit the 30-level cap?When this kicks off, is everybody going to pretty much be starting over, in terms of their competitive ranking? Or will everyone's initial ladder position be relative to their current casual ranking?Can you talk a bit about the draft features that are endemic to ranked play? I suspect a lot of LoL players are new to this sort of competitive structure, and I see a lot of angst on the official forums about the idea that ranked matches are going to involve character bans and whatnot.That seems like it has the possibility of adding some unwanted complications to team selection. If I have both of my rune pages set up for specific champions, and then one gets picked and the other gets banned, what do I do then?Speaking of bans, have you ever considered including a summoner spell ban?Wow. That's gonna cause some angst.