League of Legends Postmortem

Beta, Launch and Beyond

• High Quality• Free to Play• Global Distribution• Developer & Publisher• Proven with gamers

About UsTom Cadwell, Design Director• Game Designer on WoW, War3X• Bachelors in CS from MIT, MBA from

Kellogg• Recovering Producer…Steve Snow, Sr. Producer• Worked on Total Annihilation, Dungeon

Siege and many others.• Deep MMO and MP Experience.• Worked at GPG, Cavedog, NCSoft.• Not a recovering designer.

Recruiting• Challenges:– Unknown Company– Unproven Team– Couldn’t disclose strategy– Couldn’t disclose business model– Economy dropped out making startups less attractive

Recruiting• Solutions– High potential people who were hungry for growth– Recruiters– Looked for very smart disgruntled employees or culture

outcasts– Brought in a lot of diamonds in the rough– Staffed just out of collage for many positions– Aggressive recruiting of experience managers who

could coach promising talent– Weren’t afraid to bring in remote contractors– Drove a lot of process that allowed staff to challenge

each other

• Data of interest– Had to get good at interviewing, coaching and firing– Strong accountability generated high loyalty and

pride in work– Leveraged key talent to vet candidates by giving

them non-committed roles like Advisory Board– Never gave up, Scott Gelb, Tom and I all said no the

first time– We were very opportunistic and brought in people

who may not have a clear role for six months– Because of our openness to remote contracting we

now have some of the best scale minded developers working in another city

High Expectation Audience

• Our only initial advantage – A good business strategy (leverage an existing user base).

• The DOTA user base is VERY hardcore…• Our Goal: Satisfy the hardcore, but broaden

the game for long-term success. • We tried many things. Here are a few…

Denying -- Problem

• DOTA (the game LoL is descended from) allows players to kill their own NPCs to ‘deny’ enemies kill rewards.

• Many DOTA users love this. • And… We removed it to:– Improve early game PvP interactions– Achieve higher usability

Denying -- Results

This did not go well at first…• Hardcore users liked the advantages it gave.• We lost some % of current DOTA users initially.Our response was to explain the changes to our

community, to add other ‘skill differentiating’ features, and to wait.

• Eventually, the removal of deny was accepted by most people, and broadened the game.

UI - Problem

DOTA runs in the Warcraft 3 Engine. Much of the UI it uses is non-optimal, and we attempted to improve it.

Changing UI is perilous – ONLY do it if you have a REALLY GOOD REASON!!!

Where UI Went Well… • Heroes are hard to spot in Warcraft 3. We replaced

dots with Portraits:

• Interestingly, hardcore users still hated it initially because ‘map reading’ is an advanced skill in DOTA…

Huh? Easier…

Where UI Did Not Go Well…

We changed the hotkeys.

“A” (Attack move) is not important to LoL, so we replaced it.

This made the game unfamiliar to DOTA veterans and caused backlash.

Don’t change UI without a great reason!

Mitigating Hate

• DOTA’s gameplay routinely causes teammates to be angry at each other. – You can actively hurt your teammates.– You can steal kills from your teammates at great

benefit to you.– On a team basis, poor individual play is penalized

more than good play is rewarded.

Mitigating Hate

• We felt that making the game less ‘hate causing’ was key to broad success.

• We re-aligned game incentives to achieve this.• Subtle changes and omissions of character-

specific mechanics were readily accepted.• Big changes like ‘no gold loss on death’ were

accepted because no one built core skill-sets around them – so it was just a removal of pain.

Developing While Serving Customers• Challenges– You’re live the moment you start beta– Emergent issues will swamp your team– Identifying the right bug for the right person at the

right time– Early adopters will not last forever– Core features still need to be completed– User growth was unbelievably high– Underestimated Network Operations

Developing While Serving Customers• Solutions– Triage daily – Separate the team to deal with live issues– Built cross discipline teams– Scale testing became key, especially for partners (no

one was prepared for the volume)– Re-allocated leadership to address understaffed

departments

• Data of Interest– Daily bug injections impede velocity immensely and

the team Travis George created for this still exists today and now does high value feature implementations and improvements

– Until we hit beta we were running Scrummerfall– Kanban emerged as the predominant process for live

teams– We greatly undervalued the operational requirements

(across many teams) and struggled with staffing even past launch

– We now have a very elaborate process to simulate scale for us and our partners