About the GDC Vault

I disagree completely,
I think this is a case of delusional tooting ones own horn.
Riot has fallen into each possible pitfall of rapid growth, and the sole saving grace is that (I believe) the streamlining of the game makes it a better, more approachable experience for players, and this inspires people to soldier through the clear problems with the game.

First of all, the technical platform of League of Legends has always been mediocre at best: the front end client (is it adobe air?) is slow, buggy and unstable, with many glairng usability flaws. Moreover in-game, for a "lowest common denominator" engine supposed to run on any computer, the performance across the map is terrible, and the core game is severely bug-ridden (there's bugs that have been around as long as the game has existed, and they have never been fixed). Comparing the game to other competitors such as Dota 2 in server structure, performance, scalability, and polish is really shines a light into how under par Riot's game is, and how they never got around to really finishing their game.

A ridiculous example is the VS AI matches in league of legends and Dota 2. AI enemies in LoL act exactly like minions. When confronted, senior AI programmer has said that given the structure of the game it is "IMPOSSIBLE" to make smarter AI (sound familiar?). While Dota 2's bots behave as a team, creating a challenge that is a lot closer to the experience of playing against human players, even when Dota 2 has many more complex mechanics (I personally feel it is too contrived, but that is not the point here).

Another clear issue is their monetisation practices: It is evident that Riot makes more money from selling champions than anything else. So one of their main focuses is releasing a new champion and skins at least monthly. This has created a mutant bloated champion roster plagued with unbalanced, unviable and borderline broken champions that only serve as filler. Instead of managing a balanced echosystem and making sure each champion has a use and can be thoughtfully significant in a match, they hope that sheer numbers will dazzle the new audience, and the classic tried and true few champions will progress into higher level game. They have clearly prioritised quantity over quality.

And thats only the start ...Hire A's he says? then why is a lot of the champion art extremely amateurish? I used to be an illustrator, and I love games with rich character art. But I have to say that the irregularity of Riot's art team is astounding. While some of the splash screens are polished:
(http://www.devilsmmo.com/sites/default/files/uploads/images/leagueoflegends/rive
n_splash_2.jpg)
many are absolutely unacceptable:
(http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-u7oYQJ6gmwo/Tm67RTfBwPI/AAAAAAAAAMI/Tj_m5WfJrZI/s1600/
Riven_Splash_0.jpg)

Invariably though, the chinese made character art for the asian version of the game is always miles ahead from riot's original illustrations (so much that they have localized a few of the asian art assets globally)

Another great flaw is how LoL begun giving a decent amount of importance to its lore, promising a deeper structure in the game world. But as it became increasingly hard to connect the heroes to the story, Riot decidedly WIPED OUT and modified all the lore, using shallow references instead of delving into the narrative (I get it, narrative in a game like this is hard to mantain, but its the inconsistence that is more of a problem).

Again comparing with Dota, Lol went for a simplification of the MoBa Genre, and it worked, but maybe it took it too far. It is one thing to streamline the systems. but its very different to eliminate complexities simply because they might make the game "not fun". I suppose with their business structure, the smartest thing they can do is keep it as basic as possible, since there is no attempt to balance the game bringing teams into account, but I wonder how long it can stretch before they run out of slightly different champions.

It's funny that he mentions that they got rid of the term "Impossible" because a quick revision of their community brings up a lot of their staff declaring many changes as IMPOSSIBLE, unviable, or anti-fun. Although their community communications are great at making the players "fans" of the game, it also has terrible effect on technical critical observation of the game as creative media.
It all transmits that the company is stagnant, as he says, all they do is League of legends, and when the next fad comes around, what else do they have? of ocurse, money, true. But its risky being a one trick pony.

To be honest, as I said initially, I think Riot has a fantastic game on its hands, and in spite of how badly they have handled it, it's still blooming. But I would never say it responds to their evidently greedy managing.

My sole experience of LOL was riddled with server-related problems which you could only describe as resulting from the pitfalls of rapid growth. I tried to play it at the end of last year, i.e. long after it had launched. The initial download was never at full speed (and I have a 6mbps connection which is fully utilised for GMG, Origin downloads etc) leading to the longest download I have ever done. Once installed and patched, I spent a week trying to play the game and did not achieve a single successful connection. My connections attempts either timed out, produced login errors or, more often than not, resulted in 2 hr+ waiting times which never seemed to reduce at a rate of 1 LOL minute per actual minute. Launching a game and having to wait even a few minutes is pretty unacceptable to me. 2 hours is simply ridiculous. None of these are problems I have had with other small and big MMOGs i play regularly. To me this was evidence of a clear inability to scale infrastructure with demand on Riot's part.