Key Learnings from Beyond Ruination

Hey friends, with Beyond Ruination wrapping up, I wanted to take a second to share what we learned. It's the first time we are reflecting on a past patch, and we would love your feedback both on the patch and on this type of format for discussing Wild Rift’s designs. With the preamble out of the way, here are our top five learnings from Beyond Ruination.

Thematic Easter eggs vs meaningful gameplay changes

Beyond Ruination was Wild Rift’s first foray into thematic patches. While we saw tremendous interest at the start of the patch and encouragement from the community to tell more Runeterra stories, it was clear that most players hoped for bigger changes to gameplay. 

• Ruined and Light items felt awesome on paper but were hard to balance.

• Ruined Fruit and Ruined Mist were innovative, but they didn’t see a lot of interaction.

Going forward, expect us to take larger swings on gameplay, ones that truly shake up the meta in Summoner’s Rift, ARAM, or other game modes. While there will inevitably be a trade-off between potential balance issues with larger meta shifts, we believe it's healthier to take larger steps and then iterate across the patch compared to making small-scale changes that are less innovative along the way. This is closely connected to the next point that…

Lore deepens the experience, but it should not come at the cost of gameplay innovation

It was opportunistic that we had three Shadow Isles champions in Kalista, Viego, and Maokai grouped closely enough in our development pipeline that we were able to ship them together in a single Ruination patch. This doesn’t mean that we will always have champions from the same regions appear together in a thematic patch. Innovation is at the forefront of our minds, and we’ll look for ways it can work hand-in-hand with lore (without taking a backseat!) in patches to come.

Reacting to Champion launch win-rates

Four years ago, our League PC colleagues released an article on their philosophy around champion launches. Most of this article still holds true for Wild Rift, though there are several noteworthy differences.

• A majority of Wild Rift players have played League of Legends on PC. This often means players will rapidly accelerate through the Mastery Curve and hit a long-term balance state sooner.

• Wild Rift players have a higher tolerance for larger meta swings than we see in League PC. Wild Rift can leverage this freedom to respond nimbly when issues come up.

Viego and Kalista, for instance, released at a lower power level than we anticipated. Both are high-mastery-curve champions, which warrants a lower launch win-rate. Still, we undershot their power levels when considering how they would integrate into the metagame.

The current meta is burst-oriented, and scaling champions such as Viego and Kalista face steeper challenges in this environment. In the future, our balance team will be more cognizant of how champions will fit into the current meta and will rely on our speed of iteration to fix any launch issues. As a player, you should always feel safe investing time to learn a new champ, and we will spend balance cycles up-front to help bring them into a stable long-term balance state.

Game-modes are palate cleansers and warrant more investigation

Final Stand was our venture into PvE, and we saw players dedicating significant amounts of time to reach its upper limits.

This fits with our overarching philosophy of Game Modes as “palate cleansers” providing a nice change of pace from the core experience of Summoner’s Rift. When you are frustrated with a ranked loss, or you want to kick back from the stress of the climb, game modes are avenues for you and your friends to experiment with.

We expect many players will try each new game-mode, but that it may take several new modes before everyone finds the one they want to go deep and spend countless hours on. This is why we don’t keep modes as permanent fixtures, and rely on events such as Rotating Modes to offer new and unexpected surprises.

I would expect PvE to come back again, not in the form of a complete core game experience, but as a rewarding element of another game mode. PvEvP has been on our minds as something interesting to explore as well!

Wild Rift exclusive thematics are awesome and resonant

Caligraphia was our major exclusive skinline during the Ruination. We saw players across the world resonating with the quality and design of the skins. Anyone familiar with Jay Chou experienced an additional layer of really fun nostalgia.

Being able to bring exclusive skin lines to life is a tremendous joy for the team as we contribute to the Runeterra story. And it’s fun for long-time League players who get to see their favorite champions in new environments.

Having WR-exclusive thematics will be a major part of the Wild Rift content strategy going forward. While we still expect to have headliners from League of Legends PC, don’t expect us to follow up with every skin that League PC releases. Instead, we’ll focus our attention on Wild Rift exclusive themes, expanding their worlds in ways that help us set up major patch themes to connect gameplay, events, and skins.

We want to thank everyone who participated in the Ruination event. We are grateful for your support and eager to deliver new experiences for you to experiment with. See y’all on the Rift!