Wild Rift Annual Player Letter

Our inaugural letter discussing the past year on Wild Rift, and looking forward to 2025.
Dev
David Xu

Wild = Innovation

As we begin 2025, it feels like a great time for us to take a look at the big picture of where we are with Wild Rift and place our farsight wards into the future to see where we want to go. Make yourself comfortable because this is going to be a long-long-long post, as we hope to take you behind the scenes and dig deep into our philosophies and design principles. This is also the first time we are trying a deep-dive of this kind, so please send us your thoughts and feedback as we look to do more communications like this in the future.  

Where we are

The Wild Rift story started with an explosive launch, on the backs of the League of Legends IP. From there, however, we’ve learned many a hard lesson about what it takes to be great on mobile:

  • Quality of life basics such as network and login
  • Volume of content to satisfy a faster-paced platform
  • The type of gameplay that resonates with mobile fans

After our launch, we experienced a period of decline where we struggled to address the challenges above. The decline was frightening but also illuminating, as it helped us prioritize what mattered most to all of you. Between fine-tuning underplayed roles, reducing edge cases that torpedoed an entire game, or investing in new “Wild Rift first content”, we were able to stabilize and started to grow again.

We do not take the recent steadiness and growth for granted. This is the right time for Wild Rift to begin making bigger bets and not just rest on the tried-and-tested League of Legends laurels.

The Future

Gearing ourselves up for that future, the team will rally around the following objectives:

  1. Fix the issues on mobile that gate-keep potential audiences from getting into the game 
  2. Discover solutions to foundational MOBA challenges
  3. Improve Matchmaking: The bane of competitive titles

Getting ready to be lucky

Across the mobile gaming landscape, games that have experienced a post-launch resurgence and defied the typical product life cycle have one thing in common: they were prepared to capitalize when they got.....well, lucky.

Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity. - Seneca

While few and far in between, there are games that have been on the path of decline and then out of the blue, through a series of well-executed innovations, explode past their previous peaks and reach new horizons. 

With the power of hindsight, we can often attribute these successes to actions or features. While that is inevitably true, there is one prerequisite: these games were all ready to 5x or 10x their playerbase. With a huge influx of new players, these games saw smooth download experiences, thoughtful onboarding, and tolerant social dynamics that welcomed all new players into the fold. Having solid mobile app fundamentals meant that when these games evolved, they were able to capitalize on their luck. From where we stand today, there is still a lot of work to be done before Wild Rift is ready to be lucky. 

Going into 2025, our number one objective is to make playing Wild Rift as seamless as playing any other modern mobile game is. Your experience may vary depending on your region, but expect us to make investments in: 

  • Login & accounts 
  • Download & updates 
  • Network & latency 

Currently there are challenges across all of these aspects that drastically lengthen the time it takes between a player wanting to engage with Wild Rift and eventually playing and having fun. We call this our ‘time to fun’ metric. As we shorten the ‘time to fun,’ you should expect:

  • More stable logins
  • Shorter download times
  • Fewer crashes and update issues
  • Lower latency

Fixing these basic issues and drastically shortening the “time to fun” will have transformative effects for Wild Rift, and set us up to take more shots at innovation and placing ourselves in a better position to become lucky.

The MOBA of it all

One of the major learnings we have had since the inception of Wild Rift is that if we were to only walk along the tried and true path that League of Legends PC has laid down, we would be subjecting ourselves only to a small subsection of the potential target audience. Every MOBA game on the market is looking toward the next evolution of the current formula and it's a race to see who will get there first. 

Here on Wild Rift, we see MOBA as a long standing genre that is ripe for innovation. While there are natural advantages that helped this kind of game remain relevant for over two decades, there are also fundamental challenges that can push players away. 

What makes MOBAs amazing?

  • Infinite replayability where each new feature has near infinite interactions with existing content
  • Multiple paths and skill-tests that can lead to advantages or victory
  • Deep strategic team gameplay
  • Streamlined in-game RPG progression, a consistent zero to hero loop every game

These natural strengths of MOBAs are what we believe propelled the genre to its over 20 year lifespan. However, as new genres emerge and the tastes and needs of players evolve we are finding more and more challenges that seek to topple the value that MOBAs bring to players. 

What are foundational challenges with MOBAs?

  • Zero Sum Win-conditions
    • You winning, means me losing is incredibly frustrating and stressful, especially when the outcome of the game is not something that a single player can guarantee.
  • Intolerance of skill gaps and weakest link problem
    • While team coordination is often aspirational and amazing when it happens, its importance also means that a single player is capable of derailing the plans of the rest of the team. Stealing a quote from the Fallout series “everyone wants to save the world, they just disagree on how”. 
  • Lack of progression outside of skill progression
    • A natural flaw of most competitive games is that if you are not winning, not only are you not progressing, you are actively regressing on your ranked journey. While this pressure adds tremendous value to your end of season achievements, it also generates anxiety and a natural devaluing of the time you have dedicated to the game.
  • 100% uptime, intolerant of distractions
    • A more pronounced challenge on the phone, where in addition to being your gaming device, it's also your food delivery platform, social media platform,  calendar, and life platform. Asking you to tune out the world when on your phone is more difficult, when there are infinite opportunities for real life to come calling.

How do we fix this? 

Seeing the genre through this pro/con list gives a clear marching order for the team — How do we go about maintaining what makes MOBAs amazing, while creatively solving the innate challenges of the genre? To this end, here are our focus areas:

  1. Maintain and evolve the existing Summoner’s Rift experience
    • There will always be a place and a desire for you to test your mettle on the classic Summoner’s Rift experience. This is the legacy of what makes Wild Rift amazing, and we don’t have plans to upend and throw all of this away. Expect us to always keep tuning and improving the Summoner’s Rift experience. 
  2. Rapidly innovate new gameplay loops through game modes
    • As great as SR is, we don’t believe it is the only embodiment of MOBAs. With that in mind, expect us to explore a variety of new ways for your favorite champions to interact in new settings. Hex ARAM and Arena are examples of these explorations, but expect Wild Rift to get crazier with maps and game modes in the future. We will also be evaluating opportunities to graduate certain mechanics from these new experiences to the core experience when we believe the time is right; so your feedback along the way is critical!
  3. Redefine the recognized progression paths
    • Similar to the classic SR gameplay, we will always uphold a level of reverence and prestige for the Ranked Tiers. We just believe that it shouldn’t be the only pursuit worthy of celebration. This is probably the hardest challenge to overcome, but an absolute necessity as it will be the underpinning which connects the new gameplay experiences together into a meaningful game session. Expect us to define new ways of matchmaking, new progression paths, and new rewards that recognize the time invested by you. 

Trying to re-shape the MOBA genre is going to be a long-term effort, given how foundational some of these issues are. Regardless of the challenges, we are excited for the chance to tackle these problems, and we hope you will be with us riding shotgun throughout the journey. 

Matchmaking

First, we do not punish you for winning.

I had to get that off my chest; and with that myth busting out of the way, the issue of matchmaking is still inevitably at or near the top of conversations. From day one, matchmaking has been an area of heavy investment and over the years we have continued to optimize the matchmaker. However, it continues to be on the hotseat. Why is that? 

A couple of years ago, we released an inside look into Wild Rift’s matchmaking, where we discussed the difference between matching for Elo vs Skill. Aside from a quality matchmaker, there are other factors that ultimately contribute to your perception of a fair game and whether it is worth your investment of time and energy. 

  • Matchmaker factors
    • How “Skill” is measured
    • How MMR works
  • Perception of fairness factors
    • Speed of finding a match
    • How was the pace of snowballing, did small mistakes get over magnified
    • How the Ranked Climb experience works AKA what happens after wins/losses
  • Context from one match to the next
    • Was the match tense or lopsided from laning to teamfights
    • Did you understand why you won or lost the match 

Matchmaking and perception of fairness are meant to be related but not necessarily the same. Wild Rift being a team based MOBA means that even if we were to put 10 equally mechanically gifted players together, the team that ends up with the better team combination and coordination would end up winning most of the time. As it happens, all of our tools for detection are based on past game results and individual performances, which does not specifically measure team collaboration & coordination performances. So essentially, how well your team is able to coordinate will often feel random. 

The cerebral aspect of playing for the team or being willing to sacrifice for the team is often a hidden skill that doesn’t get celebrated enough. And, while we will continue to toil away at trying to make the start of every game a perfectly fair 50/50 win chance; we believe there are other avenues we can also explore to improve the overall perception of fairness. After all…as Viktor said “there is no prize to perfection… only an end to pursuit” and we are far from the end.

Tuning the Matchmaker

One of our next attempts will look to find a balance between matchmaking for the entire team vs matchmaking for your specific lane. Everybody has had games where they were dominant in lane, solo killing opponents multiple times but allied lanes were struggling. In this case, while technically, your likelihood to win still stands at 50%, it feels like an imbalanced experience to different team members. To that end, we are looking to increase the weight we place on lane to lane matchmaking rather than overall matchmaking. And given our previous discussions on how much team coordination plays into the entire team’s likelihood to win, we are optimistic about this direction. We are going to start testing the new matchmaker in different regions and will report back to you once we have more data.

Speed of Matchmaking and other Wild Ideas 

Imagine sitting in a queue for over three, five, or even ten minutes, only to have the game you’ve waited patiently for to quickly end due to a poor early-level gank or a misplayed first dragon fight. While there is a trade-off between speed and accuracy of matchmaking, given how volatile the game-to-game team composition and coordination ends up being, we are leaning into faster matchmaking as a better choice for most players. However there will still be cases where we will deliberately prioritize statistical fairness, such as in Legendary Queue. For most other cases, we are going to prioritize speed with as minimal an impact to accuracy as possible. 

Outside of these foundational improvements, we are going back into the experimentation mindset, to find ways against this cursed matchmaking problem. Examples could look like: 

  • Our recent experiments with Galio's Aegis is a way to put more agency back into your hands. We understand how frustrating it can be when it feels like you are already doing all you possibly can to help the team win, but still cannot progress on your Ranked climb. We are still tabulating the effectiveness of this beta-test and will report back later with the results. 
  • Leaning into the fact that matchmaking will never be 100% fair. When a team that is less likely to win does pull off the upset, we do more than only adjust their MMRs and find some more visible ways to show it off. 
  • Game modes such as Arena, where the battle royale mechanic skirts the zero sum nature of MOBAs and provides new definitions for victory. 

At the end of the day, we see matchmaking as one of the core blockers for us to innovate on the foundational MOBA problems; therefore, we will be investing resources to find impactful solutions for it. Unfortunately, there is no easy way and it will take us time to find new solutions. 

If you have made it this far, thank you! We are grateful for the support that all you have shown us. Having you all by our side makes the work we do significantly more meaningful and we cannot wait to see what the future holds.

See y’all on the Rift!