League of Legends is in trouble. For years LoL was the only game for Riot Games, now the studio has several irons in the fire with Valorant, the new LoL MMORPG and mobile versions of LoL. Players accuse the developers of neglecting LoL and putting the PC version into maintenance mode. One of LoL’s main developers, Ryan “Reav3” Mireles, isn’t going to let it sit.
What’s making LoL players so angry right now? Well, for one, it’s LoL players, the guys don’t need a concrete approach to be angry with Riot. “Anger and frustration” is actually the normal state of a MOBA player, as seen with streamer Tyler1. But there are specific points of criticism:
LoL Season 2023: The Cinematic “The Brink of Infinity”
Official apology fizzled out
What does Riot say? There was an official apology from Riot as to why the 2023 video wasn’t great. You tried something new and not the action-packed cinematics like before. They wanted to show the “world” now.
It should have been communicated better. That was stupid.
Pretty typical “corporate” talk. That only made the criticism worse.
Riot would have stopped making content for the game. They would no longer care, it said on Twitter.
Developer says: Many good employees lost during Covid
What does an employee say? One of the most important developers of LoL, Ryan “Reavge3” Mireles, however, speaks plain text on reddit. He responds to the criticism that “PC-LoL is in maintenance mode”:
I can understand why people would come to this conclusion, but I can assure you that it is not. […] Like many companies we lost a lot of talented people during Covid, employees took the opportunity to work from home to find a different path in life. It’s been tough for the whole industry, a hard turning point, and Riot was no different. It’s not because Riot has significantly restricted the budget or limited perspective for LoL.
To put it more elegantly: Shit happens.
In LoL you have recently invested a lot of time in things that are not yet coming into play. But Mireles says: He knows that his words don’t change the impression that actions have to do it.
He assures that the team keeps working hard on LoL.
This is behind it: What Mireles addresses is the so-called “Great Resignation” also known as “the Big Quit”: For many people, Covid was a deceleration from their normal lives.
Everyday life changed as a result of the lockdown: Suddenly you were no longer trapped in the stress of the office, but sat at home and had time to think about whether you were really satisfied with life “before Covid” or whether it wasn’t time for what’s new. The opportunity to do something completely different, to work more independently, to spend more time with friends and family.
Some employees, especially high-performing ones, did not want to go back to their old lives after the end of the measure, but wanted to take a new path. Apparently, in the course of this reflection, many LoL developers have also quit and now have to be replaced.
For the video game industry, the switch to working from home was a major challenge everywhere:
Destiny 2 is now being made from home – Bungie is closing studios because of Corona