Wild Rift Real Talk: March 2021

Hey everyone,

I haven’t had a chance to talk to you all yet, so I thought now would be a good time to say hi!

I’m Alan “Mirross” Moore—Wild Rift’s game director; I lead the development of the game. Along with folks you’ve already met like Michael “Paladin” Chow, Brian “FeralPony” Feeney, and Christina “ObiWunKenobi” Wun, I work with all the Wild Rift teams and direct the overall player experience.

As the Regional Open Beta continues, we wanted to provide some transparency into our development priorities, so here are the key areas we’re investing most of our time into. This isn’t everything we’re working on, but we wanted to pick out some highlights.

ADDRESSING CRITICAL PAIN POINTS

We know that there are some disappointing experiences for some of you right now, and these are our top priority to address:

MATCHMAKING

This is an area that we’ve been adjusting constantly over time, but one thing we want to do better is tightening the rank spread between players in the same game. We think some variance is acceptable, considering that players at different ranks can have the same Matchmaking Rating (or MMR, the system that works behind the scenes to put matches together), and we want to continue making games fairer as time goes on. Our goal is that you rarely, if ever, are in a game where there is a gap of more than one tier (e.g. silver to gold) within the game.

Here’s what we’re working on to keep matchmaking healthy in Wild Rift:

1. Ensure that both the skill level between and within teams is even, so matches are fair
2. Keep matchmaking times short, so you can get into game quickly
3. Create matches with people close to you, so you can communicate more easily and expect lower latency
4. (In progress) Give you more choice over your position in-game, so you can play the positions you’re comfortable with, or try something new

That’s the simple version, anyway. In reality, there are many mini-systems and considerations (e.g. time of day, queue population) working away in the background that we have to take into account when forming matches, so it’s important for us to work deliberately and carefully when changing anything here. A small optimization in one area can lead to huge changes for another.

In order to maintain a fun, fast and fair process to get you into the game, we have to continuously balance the four aspects above. So far, we’ve managed to reduce the rank spread so that differences of two tiers in the same match shouldn’t be happening as often, but we know they’re still happening occasionally. We’ll look to continue tightening the ranked parameters as long as it doesn’t impact one of the other factors above, as well as improving long queue times for high-skill players.

LATENCY

Lag sucks, and can really take a game of Wild Rift from thrilling to infuriating. We know that too many of you are having games with consistent high ping, or ping spikes, and it’s something that we are improving further. Latency varies a lot across regions, changes by the location you’re playing from, and is impacted by your internet service provider or local network. This makes it difficult for us to evaluate individual situations, and apply one-size fixes. So we have a bunch of targeted improvements here.

There are a lot of optimizations that we’re looking to make. Some of those will be local to specific regions, and some will be broader improvements. Those include spinning up new servers where it makes sense to do so, improving backend logic that determines which game server you’re connecting to, as well as working with service providers to optimize the routes that your traffic takes.

There are some issues that we’re still actively investigating to understand better before we can prioritize for fixes—including large temporary ping spikes that some players are seeing.

CHEATING

Let us be clear: Cheaters have no place in Wild Rift (unless you’re Twisted Fate). While we know that combating cheating will be a constant tug-of-war, we are working diligently behind the scenes to address cheaters, cheats, and the people who make ‘em. We won’t be communicating frequently on this subject, as we don’t want to give too much information away on our detection and actions taken. If you are found to be cheating in Wild Rift, you will be permanently banned from the game.

NEW CONTENT

While we have large parts of the team focused on addressing these key issues, we still want to make sure there’s always something new and fresh to play in the game! Here are some other things the team is working on.

LAUNCHING NEW REGIONS

A big priority for us right now is ensuring the game is available to as many players as possible. Launching new regions is a huge, worldwide effort between hundreds of Rioters across development, engineering, publishing, localization, and countless more departments. With a lot of Open Beta launches under our belt so far, we’ve definitely made many of our processes smoother and more reliable over the past few months, but each set of launches presents new challenges and constraints on our teams and pipelines. We’re still working on our next regional launch in the Americas.

CHAMPIONS

We think champions are the foundation of content in Wild Rift. Each champ should feel fun, unique, high quality, and authentic to how they play in League PC. We spend thousands of hours developing and testing champs before they come out, and still are on track to release two champs per month on average in 2021. We also think the game’s balance has been in a great spot given our limited opportunities to make large balance changes.

BIG MOMENTS

Finally, we spend a lot of time gearing up for specific “big moments” throughout the year. These could take the form of a sizable patch with a ton of features (looking forward to Patch 2.2!), a large in-game event like Yordle Expedition or Lunar Beast, or something even grander involving League PC or other games across the League ecosystem.

WHAT’S NEXT?

Overall, we’re going to keep up the transparency, so please keep sending your feedback through social media. If you’re experiencing any bugs or server issues, please send your reports to support-wildrift.riotgames.com so we can collect as much information as possible. 

Thanks for reading,

Mirross