Does Riot outsource their animation and music production? The cinematic and music videos they’ve been releasing every year are always amazing.
What It's Like to Work on League of Legends
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Re: What It's Like to Work on League of Legends
#12It's baffling seeing all these credentialed people talk and the game still having an utterly horrid bug riddled client for so long now.
I think that's less on the talent of the people and more what they're being directed to work on. Riot management would rather prioritize new shiny stuff like new gamemodes, champions, reworks, etc, and otherwise stuff they can charge players for, instead of cleaning up their messes even if it would be a massive QoL improvement.
Re: What It's Like to Work on League of Legends
#13Another take on what it's like to work there when the copy isn't curated by HR and PR. https://www.glassdoor.com/Reviews/Riot-Games-Reviews-E247538... Written 1/24/2020 - 11 days ago, Pros - Colleagues who really really care about what they're doing - The best campus and amenities you're going to see in LA - Being surrounded by other gamers/people of similar ages and hobbies - Cool products - a ton of R&D Cons -…
Why the hell would anyone work at a place like that
the sexual harassment stuff can be pretty invisible if you aren't a target yourself
regarding the identity politics stuff, some people live and breath IP and their perception of untenable conditions would be unremarkable to me (e.g. a 22 yr old saying "that's so ghetto")
work-life balance is a deal-breaker for me, but in my early 20s maybe it wouldn't have been if i spent half the work day playing my favorite video game
Re: What It's Like to Work on League of Legends
#14Interesting that 3 of the 5 employees play support and the other 2 play top.
Re: What It's Like to Work on League of Legends
#15Does Riot outsource their animation and music production? The cinematic and music videos they’ve been releasing every year are always amazing.
Cinematics are outsourced. There was an effort to build an in-house cinematics team, but that was abandoned years ago. They often partner with Blur, but use others as well.
Music production is largely in-house.
Re: What It's Like to Work on League of Legends
#16Another take on what it's like to work there when the copy isn't curated by HR and PR. https://www.glassdoor.com/Reviews/Riot-Games-Reviews-E247538... Written 1/24/2020 - 11 days ago, Pros - Colleagues who really really care about what they're doing - The best campus and amenities you're going to see in LA - Being surrounded by other gamers/people of similar ages and hobbies - Cool products - a ton of R&D Cons -…
Reading through this I thought "this sounds like everything I heard about Riot a few years ago but I wonder if things have changed more recently" then I saw the time stamp...
Any company in the games industry is like this. It’s a sweatshop.
Re: What It's Like to Work on League of Legends
#17It's baffling seeing all these credentialed people talk and the game still having an utterly horrid bug riddled client for so long now.
Did they implement replays in the client? The last time I played it was '11. Even a 20+ year game like Starcraft could do this.
Re: What It's Like to Work on League of Legends
#18It's baffling seeing all these credentialed people talk and the game still having an utterly horrid bug riddled client for so long now.
My impression from playing games is that bugs don't kill the games, stopping feature releases to fix bugs kills games. Everyone just laughs at the bugs, even when they change the outcome of an esports matchup with millions of dollars on the line. In the end, the players keep playing and the sponsors keep buying ads, so it's no biggie.
Looking through Blizzard's tech talks about Overwatch (they do exist!) is that they focus their testing on making the game fun. They do not say that this comes at the expense of thorough unit and integration tests, but from playing the game, my impression is that it does. Sometimes a patch will come out and the patch notes will be along the lines of "that ability didn't actually work in the last release, but hey we fixed it". Unit tests always notice abilities not working; playtests don't always pick them up. But unit tests will never make your game fun, and nobody will play a game that's not fun. So I'm guessing they don't work on that.
(This video shows what happens when you uncover a lot of untested corner cases all at once: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hl11iqagWIc)
There are many software engineers that do enjoy bug-free software. Nobody cares because people are given passes time and again for bad software. Some bugs in a game? "OMEGALUL". Some credit card numbers stolen? "Oh, we're deeply sorry." The software crashes the plane from time to time? "Hey, we'll fix that in the 737 MAX v2." If engineers working on safety systems don't really care about bugs, why should a game whose competitors don't care either? It's just throwing money away. When Dota2 starts stealing LoL users because of their amazing bug-free client, then suddenly everyone will be working on testing frameworks. Until then, I expect some bugs in my games.
Re: What It's Like to Work on League of Legends
#19It's baffling seeing all these credentialed people talk and the game still having an utterly horrid bug riddled client for so long now.
Did they implement replays in the client? The last time I played it was '11. Even a 20+ year game like Starcraft could do this.
Sorta, but it's limited in silly ways. Saved replays are basically dead after every patch since they are a hack around the spectator system.
Re: What It's Like to Work on League of Legends
#20Another take on what it's like to work there when the copy isn't curated by HR and PR. https://www.glassdoor.com/Reviews/Riot-Games-Reviews-E247538... Written 1/24/2020 - 11 days ago, Pros - Colleagues who really really care about what they're doing - The best campus and amenities you're going to see in LA - Being surrounded by other gamers/people of similar ages and hobbies - Cool products - a ton of R&D Cons -…
Why cherry pick 1 review? You could've copied the more representative aggregation of reviews:
Pros:
"Riot is a great place for gamers" (in 79 reviews)
"Cares about Rioters: Riot has fantastic perks because they want to keep the talent (that's us) happy" (in 67 reviews)
"Best free food I’ve eaten, benefits are great, and there is a lot of opportunity if you are willing to work for it" (in 40 reviews)
"people that play League of Legends each month" (in 38 reviews)
"The company is obsessively player-focused" (in 32 reviews)
Cons:
"work/life balance can be an issue if you don't know how to handle it" (in 66 reviews)
"Some Rioters lack a sense of appreciation" (in 59 reviews)
"Growing pains: Flat organizational structure doesn't work well when you start to hit 3k people" (in 32 reviews)
"Tends to over-value pedigree from ivy league and mbas" (in 28 reviews)