Interview Gamespy au sujet du lancement de la première saison de compétition LoL

[makemashita]

Riot Games' Marc Merrill and Tom Cadwell discuss the perks and perils of ranked play.

http://uk.pc.gamespy.com/pc/league-of-legends-clash-of-fates/1094538p1.html

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.



GameSpy: In broad terms, what's Season One going to mean for players?

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.

GameSpy: What took so long to roll this out? After all, LoL's been out for a few months now.

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.


GameSpy: How many players do you have at this point, anyway?

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.

GameSpy: 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?

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.

GameSpy: 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?

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.


GameSpy: 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.

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.

GameSpy: 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?

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.

GameSpy: Speaking of bans, have you ever considered including a summoner spell ban?

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.

GameSpy: Wow. That's gonna cause some angst.

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.

GameSpy: Are you going to be rolling out any big changes to the client or the website to prepare for ranked mode?

Marc Merrill: Yes, there will be some dramatic enhancements to the website -- a graphical overhaul, some new features, etc. We're redoing player profiles, in the game and in the client; these will show more detailed statistics. For ranked play, philosophically we're very interested in displaying lots of stats and letting the players try to identify strategies and do a lot of analysis. Whereas for unranked games, our philosophy is to have a more casual atmosphere, with less focus on trying really hard and being super-competitive.

GameSpy: Will players earn more or less experience and in-game currency in ranked play?

Tom Cadwell: We're unclear on that. We're still thinking about it, but it will either be the same or more.

GameSpy: Going back to your point about displaying more stars within the game client, are we going to be able to see detailed breakdowns for every single champion? Right now, the way it's set up, you can only see your top three most-played characters...

Marc Merrill: Yeah. We actually track a huge amount of stats for pretty much everything you could possibly think of. We have too many stats, in fact, so we just don't show them to players right now. But it's our intention to show lots and lots of statistics to players.

GameSpy: I'd say more is better than less.

Marc Merrill: Right, yeah. Currently, we've been erring on the side of less, because we don't want players to focus too heavily on stats -- that leads to a lot of negative gameplay and community implications. But for ranked play, when it's opt-in, and there are competitive players who are intentionally looking at that stuff, then we're in full support of it and want to display it.

Tom Cadwell: Yeah, our philosophy for ranked games is that it's for really hardcore players seeking out an intense experience. So the set of features for that group is a bit different.


GameSpy: When you queue up for a ranked game, are you going to be able to see any detailed stats on whoever you wind up teaming with?

Tom Cadwell: I don't think we're going to put that out there, just because leaving from draft mode or leaving from a ranked game's champion select is something that we're going to be pretty draconian against, and we don't want to display that stuff and give people motivation to do it. But you certainly can research all that information after the game, if you want to see what the strength of the team was in terms of rating.

GameSpy: I would guess that you'll have a certain segment of people who will just look up everybody on the website, as soon as they get into character select -- and then start bitching when they see somebody with what's perceived as a mediocre rating...

Tom Cadwell: Yeah, most likely. I think for a lot of those players, their strategy is going to be to just roll with a full premade team if they want to be ultra-picky and ultra-intense about their teammates.

Marc Merrill: By design, if people want to hop into a competitive match in the solo queue, there's inherently going to be some type of randomness there. Obviously, you're going to be matched with people very close to your skill level (or relative skill level), but some people will still complain about that. The easiest way to solve that problem is to go find a team.

GameSpy: What about players who get into a ranked game and then just sit idle at the base? Are you going to punish people very hard for that sort of bad behavior?

Marc Merrill: We will. In fact, we're adding a report feature to the game. As I mentioned, we'll be pretty merciless when it comes to ranked play. Also, I don't know if you just saw this, but we recently released something called the Summoner's Code; we're trying to instill a sort of code of conduct among our players as well, and really promote behavior that we think build a successful community. For certain blatant issues where people disregard those rules, or are extremely disrespectful to other players, there will be community consequences.

GameSpy: Well, good luck with that on the Internet!

Marc Merrill: Thanks. And you know, our community is far more... collaborative, I guess I should say, and less harsh than many similar gaming communities. I think that's because of our focus and some of the design choices that we've made. And as we continue to make progress, we'll be adding a reputation system and other things like that as well. But our community is fairly positive overall, even though it's a competitive community. We're going to continue our best efforts to help support that community.


GameSpy: How will ranked play affect the way you approach balance changes? Do you figure the ban system will sort of solve rampant champion balance issues? Are we going to see patches cooking for longer before they go live?

Tom Cadwell: We've learned a lot about how to balance the game effectively and quickly, and we're continuing to develop tools that allow us to fix balance issues more quickly. The other thing, though, is that we simply can just shut champions out of ranked play for a period of time. When we release a new champion, we probably -- in most cases -- will not be putting them into ranked play until we're sure that they're OK. By the same token, if we release some fixes for a champion, and that champion then turns out to be a real problem for ranked play, we can just disable it. We'd rather that the bans in draft mode were used for sort of metagame reasons, or to supplement your team strategy, rather than as a play balance mechanism for players. Even then, draft mode will dramatically improve some potential balance concerns. As an example, I, as a player, tend to not have a problem with Jax. In draft mode, if somebody picks Jax, I can pick Janna or somebody that I think counters him really well, because I can snare him and then pop him away from my allies. Various characters can counter other characters pretty effectively, and we think that will help address and mitigate problems.

GameSpy: How long is the season going to last? Is it going to be organized into a tournament structure, or will you have some sort of event to determine who the overall season winners are?

Marc Merrill: Yes, there will be a tournament structure to cap off the ending of the season. We're going to be announcing some additional details about that in the short term. But we're not going to be announcing a specific date for it or ending at this time. There will be a cool sort of... inflection point, some exciting events, some tournaments. The ladder will lead up into a qualifier. The way that you would think this sort of thing would work is probably pretty close to how we're going to be structuring it.

GameSpy: Are you incentivizing top performance with any sort of cash prizes or special skins or anything like that?

Marc Merrill: Absolutely -- both in-game and out-of-game rewards. And some of the stuff that we announce in this regard will probably blow people's socks off. There's going to be some exciting stuff. Of substantial scale.


GameSpy: Once the season wraps, what's on your mind for the future? I know you've said that you would be limiting champion selection a bit in future seasons, in order to mix things up a bit; is that still the plan?

Tom Cadwell: We're not entirely sure how we want to approach that at this point. What we will be looking to do is add additional and dramatically different game modes. We've talked about these in the past, and we've started some initial development on them. Those are going to be maps with completely different objective sets, and I think putting a competitive structure on those will be really exciting for us. I'm not sure what strategy we'll pursue with champion limits and that sort of thing yet -- we'll have to play it by ear when we get there.

GameSpy: And finally, for the future -- are you guys thinking about things like voice chat, or spectator mode, or replays?

Marc Merrill: Those will not launch at the start of Season One, but they will be introduced during Season One. [Our philosophy here] is similar to our perspective on how we've approached LoL from the get-go: A lot of people would say that they thought certain features were required in order to launch. We disagreed, not because we don't think those things are important, but just because our focus has been on making the game extremely fun, and adding content, and doing a lot of other things that we thought were really important. These other features are important, but for all those things -- from voice chat to spectator mode to replays -- there are some other solutions in place right now. We've had close to 10,000 people joining our real-time livestream, as an example. There's lots of videos on YouTube. Most competitive players have their own voice servers or access to one. So there's a lot of other solutions that help mitigate those problems. Because we update the game so frequently, to create a replay system that would support our content updates requires some special patching technology, which we're now at the finishing stages on. So that's something that will allow us to roll out a replay feature. It'll be exciting when we do it.

[Le Mat]

L'avis de babe m'intéresse sur ce coup.

Etant donné qu'il a une plus grand expérience de ce genre de jeu et de communoté.