Wild Rift /dev: Balancing Wild Rift

“Master Yi is SO OP.”
“Jinx is BUSTED!”
“WTF is this champ?!”

Jonathan here. I lead the balance team on Wild Rift, and the above is just a sample of the quotes… from our last internal playtest.

We wanted to give a quick intro to Wild Rift’s balance team, what we’re responsible for, and how we plan our patches. We’ll keep up the communication as the game evolves.

Who’s on the balance team?

We’re a group of folks with a range of experience from different backgrounds:

• I’m Jonathan “JCM1117” Chao. I’ve led the balance team on Wild Rift for over a year now. I peaked at Masters on LoL PC and reached top ranks in other mobile MOBAs. Before Riot, I worked on mobile and AAA titles at Ubisoft.
• Alex “Wav3Break” Huang is a longtime Rioter who worked on LoL PC champions and balance for five seasons. Alex has been a core member in Wild Rift’s development from the early stages and is also responsible for our gameplay controls design.
• Bao “ShinKaigan” Nguyen works both on balance and future maps and modes. Bao was the Vainglory Season 2 world champion while he played for Ardent Alliance; he then transitioned to working on the game’s dev team.
• Mike “RogueFool” Breese is the newest member of the team, joining us from Warner Bros. Avalanche. He’s currently working on standardizing mana usage across all champions and tweaking the Rift Herald.
• We also work with partners around the world who give us insights on regional data and gameplay.

What does the balance team do?

We’re part of the overall gameplay team that develops and maintains the in-game portion of Wild Rift—so basically, anything from the moment you load into a game until somebody’s Nexus goes kaboom. We look after things like:

• Champion stats and abilities after release
• Runes, summoner spells, and items
• Recommended loadouts
• Overall game pacing
• Structures and minions
• Jungle monsters and neutral objectives

What’s our goal?

Simply: We want to make Wild Rift the most balanced mobile MOBA ever.

We’re serious about ensuring that every champ is viable, and no champ or strategy becomes overwhelmingly dominant at all levels of play.

That said, Wild Rift is still a new game. Without a lot of data, our current game balance is built on the foundation that League of Legends PC has built, plus countless internal Wild Rift playtests. Inevitably, we will miss the mark sometimes, but we’re constantly monitoring various player feedback channels and game data to make sure we catch imbalances as soon as possible and roll out fixes in a timely manner.

At Riot, we use the term “data informed,” not “data driven,” so we’ll always be looking at win percentages, pick rates, and a hell of a lot of graphs, but we also acknowledge that something can be technically balanced, yet frustrating. If there’s something you’re not happy with, let us know!

How often will we balance?

Major balance patches will hit roughly every two weeks on a fixed day of the week so you’ll always know when to expect them. However, as we’re still figuring out our development timelines, the initial patching frequency after Wild Rift heads into Regional Open Beta may be less rhythmic. Our primary focus right now is making sure the game is shipped at a high quality to as many players as possible.

We want to avoid situations where we have to adjust something multiple times in back-to-back patches, so normally, balance changes go through a full development pipeline that includes data validation, designer discussions, implementation, playtest validation, and quality control. This means that some outliers may not be addressed immediately in the next patch.

Bigger changes or bug fixes may require a full client update, and unlike League PC, Wild Rift needs to go through third-party stores for these changes—a process that takes time as well. When we notice something that is wildly OP or broken (*cough cough* 66% win rate Camille *cough cough*), we will push out emergency hotfixes. With the amount of champion releases coming up, we do expect this to happen every now and then.

That’s all for now. In a few days, we’ll be posting a follow-up from Lead Balance Designer, Alex “Riot Wav3Break” Huang (his business cards are very long). He’ll be breaking down how we decide what to change at different skill levels, and take you all through a specific balance change so you can get an idea of all that goes into it. He also plays Zed, ‘nuff said.

Thanks everyone!