
What It's Like to Work on League of Legends - cammm
https://builtin.com/media-gaming/riot-games-technologists-working-league-of-legends
======
trenning
Another take on what it's like to work there when the copy isn't curated by HR
and PR.

[https://www.glassdoor.com/Reviews/Riot-Games-
Reviews-E247538...](https://www.glassdoor.com/Reviews/Riot-Games-
Reviews-E247538.htm)

Written 1/24/2020 - 11 days ago,

Pros

\- Colleagues who really really care about what they're doing

\- The best campus and amenities you're going to see in LA

\- Being surrounded by other gamers/people of similar ages and hobbies

\- Cool products - a ton of R&amp;D

Cons

\- toxic, extremely harmful culture for women/nbs, poc and those who don't
play the game with the ol' boys club

\- lawsuits galore

\- sexual harassment left and right, especially from executives and skip
levels

\- work/life balance is non-existent, and the great amenities help keep you
there. (Lots of divorces happen because of this place.)

\- don't expect a title that reflects your actual skillset unless you're
sleeping with someone, or are a man who knows how to trade on social currency.
Riot likes to hire people who are overqualified and make them battle to the
death for promotions

~~~
Reedx
Why cherry pick 1 review? You could've copied the more representative
aggregation of reviews:

Pros:

"Riot is a great place for gamers" (in 79 reviews)

"Cares about Rioters: Riot has fantastic perks because they want to keep the
talent (that's us) happy" (in 67 reviews)

"Best free food I’ve eaten, benefits are great, and there is a lot of
opportunity if you are willing to work for it" (in 40 reviews)

"people that play League of Legends each month" (in 38 reviews)

"The company is obsessively player-focused" (in 32 reviews)

Cons:

"work/life balance can be an issue if you don't know how to handle it" (in 66
reviews)

"Some Rioters lack a sense of appreciation" (in 59 reviews)

"Growing pains: Flat organizational structure doesn't work well when you start
to hit 3k people" (in 32 reviews)

"Tends to over-value pedigree from ivy league and mbas" (in 28 reviews)

~~~
keanzu
> "Some Rioters lack a sense of appreciation" (in 59 reviews)

This phrasing immediately struck me as odd so I went looking for an actual
review:

'Some Rioters lack a sense of appreciation. Some Rioters, particularly those
who have never worked a "real job," do not seem to appreciate what Riot offers
them.'

Smells like astroturfing.

~~~
AmericanChopper
The parent comment smells like outrage mongering. How could I know that you
didn’t post it yourself? All the reviews are equally unreliable, you can’t
just pick out the ones that you like.

~~~
keanzu
> How could I know that you didn’t post it yourself?

You can't? How could anyone else know that I didn't write "smells like outrage
mongering", maybe I enjoy arguing with myself. The only people who know for
sure are you and I ... if we are even two different people, maybe you are my
sock puppet, maybe I am yours. Who can prove that we are or aren't?

Assuming that I did write every comment in the entire tree - what difference
does that make to any of the arguments?

~~~
AmericanChopper
All perfectly reasonably points. Which is why anecdata should generally not be
taken very seriously. Especially when the author of it has some seriously
questionable motives, which is the case with Glassdoor. The two groups of
people who have the strongest motive to post something on Glassdoor are
disgruntled employees (and an employee can become disgruntled in any work
place, no matter how good or how terrible it might be), and astroturfers (and
perhaps also competitors, but I have no idea how good they are at policing
that). It has exactly the same set of problems that any review site has.
Perhaps it’s aggregate data can reveal some truths, perhaps not. But a single
review (especially one that is either strongly negative or strongly positive)
reveals nothing.

~~~
keanzu
Upvoted.

> But a single review reveals nothing.

Agreed. The top comment presents a single review. Anecdata, little
informational value - outrage mongering, fair point. That was responded to by
Reedx who disputed the value of a single review (ok) and presented what was
implied to be a broader cross-section of reviews. One of those felt peculiar,
not phrasing I would expect in 59 independent reviews. I dug up the only
sample I could find and smelled astroturf.

Although my comment was negative I didn't address the point: "Why cherry pick
1 review?". Perhaps I should have opened by agreeing with Reedx that ancedata
!= data.

Perhaps we can both agree to:

Is Glassdoor a reliable and unbiased (including selection bias) source of
information? Hell no.

Did I contribute in some part to the outrage mongering by not affirming
Reedx's good point and writing a wholly negative reply? Yes.

~~~
AmericanChopper
I don’t disagree with anything here at all.

------
cranium
I used to enjoy reading the bugfixes section in the patch notes. They make me
wonder "how the heck is this game implemented ?!" due to the weirdly specific
interactions.

Eg: _Winter Wonder Neeko will no longer lose a significant amount of base
stats and the ability to basic attack when Lulu uses W - Whimsy on her as
Neeko is using R - Pop Blossom while disguised._

-> A character using a _specific skin_ is affected by a _specific spell_ when this character is in a _specific form_ casting a _specific spell_. (Btw, I don't know how the bug was even found.)

(Coming from a 4 months old patch: [https://na.leagueoflegends.com/en-
us/news/game-updates/patch...](https://na.leagueoflegends.com/en-us/news/game-
updates/patch-9-20-notes/))

------
DavidVoid
I wonder if the work culture has gotten any better there since 2018.

[https://kotaku.com/inside-the-culture-of-sexism-at-riot-
game...](https://kotaku.com/inside-the-culture-of-sexism-at-riot-
games-1828165483)

------
Areibman
I spent a few days at Riot for one of their hackathons. First of all, the
entire space feels like a video game inspired theme park. It's really unlike
anything I've seen before. While I can't speak to what the daily routine looks
like, I was blown away by how passionate Rioters were about shipping great
software and UX. I spoke with one of the lead designers for the Ezreal re-
work, and it's shocking to learn just how much effort goes into every minor
detail. They do everything in their power to ensure users love the product.
That's not the kind of culture you find at your typical software shop.

Also, Riot has an excellent developer community and API[0]. Riot believes that
the community, not just the engineering staff, makes the product great. So, a
lot of effort goes into making sure 3rd party developers can work with the LoL
brand.

[0] [https://developer.riotgames.com](https://developer.riotgames.com)

------
egypturnash
I was waiting for the answer to "what position do you play in League of
Legends" to be "basically I don't" and there it was at the end of the last
interview.

------
henryw
Interesting that 3 of the 5 employees play support and the other 2 play top.

~~~
JimTheMan
To completely stereotype: Teamplayers do interviews that make the company look
good?

------
dickeytk
TIL Riot is owned by Tencent

~~~
Kiro
What company isn't?

~~~
Fnoord
Tencent only owns 5% of Activison Blizzard, Paradox, and Ubisoft.

They own 40% of Epic Games, and 100% of Grinding Gear Games (Path of Exile).

~~~
Kiro
Also 100% of Supercell and they dominate the Chinese mobile gaming market with
Honor of Kings and PUBG Mobile.

------
frostyj
might be off topic, but the monitor wall they have is awesome

~~~
jtms
off topic or not, it is indeed pretty awesome

------
Firebrand
Does Riot outsource their animation and music production? The cinematic and
music videos they’ve been releasing every year are always amazing.

~~~
jaaron
Cinematics are outsourced. There was an effort to build an in-house cinematics
team, but that was abandoned years ago. They often partner with Blur, but use
others as well.

Music production is largely in-house.

------
Madmallard
It's baffling seeing all these credentialed people talk and the game still
having an utterly horrid bug riddled client for so long now.

~~~
jrockway
My impression from playing games is that bugs don't kill the games, stopping
feature releases to fix bugs kills games. Everyone just laughs at the bugs,
even when they change the outcome of an esports matchup with millions of
dollars on the line. In the end, the players keep playing and the sponsors
keep buying ads, so it's no biggie.

Looking through Blizzard's tech talks about Overwatch (they do exist!) is that
they focus their testing on making the game fun. They do not say that this
comes at the expense of thorough unit and integration tests, but from playing
the game, my impression is that it does. Sometimes a patch will come out and
the patch notes will be along the lines of "that ability didn't actually work
in the last release, but hey we fixed it". Unit tests always notice abilities
not working; playtests don't always pick them up. But unit tests will never
make your game fun, and nobody will play a game that's not fun. So I'm
guessing they don't work on that.

(This video shows what happens when you uncover a lot of untested corner cases
all at once:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hl11iqagWIc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hl11iqagWIc))

There are many software engineers that do enjoy bug-free software. Nobody
cares because people are given passes time and again for bad software. Some
bugs in a game? "OMEGALUL". Some credit card numbers stolen? "Oh, we're deeply
sorry." The software crashes the plane from time to time? "Hey, we'll fix that
in the 737 MAX v2." If engineers working on safety systems don't really care
about bugs, why should a game whose competitors don't care either? It's just
throwing money away. When Dota2 starts stealing LoL users because of their
amazing bug-free client, then suddenly everyone will be working on testing
frameworks. Until then, I expect some bugs in my games.

~~~
pingyong
It should be noted that the client and the game are two completely separate
pieces of software. The game itself certainly has a bunch of bugs, but those
bugs tend to not be game-breaking, and are mostly "this doesn't behave as
described" \- for many of these things, it's not even clear anymore what the
intended behavior even is. Until it's fixed, it's intended, for better or
worse.

But apart from that, the game is actually somewhat bug free.

The _client_ however, is just an honest to god embarrassment. It is
legitimately terrible in every aspect that could possibly be terrible. It's
slow, so slow that many things temporarily break on laptops, like opening rune
pages in champion select. It uses more RAM than the game itself (?), it runs
on like 4 different processes that interact in who knows what ways, but if the
client crashes and you're trying to kill it that often (but not always)
initiates a repair for no apparent reason. Often it doesn't even shutdown
properly when you close it. On a friend's computer it one day just died and
didn't start at all anymore, with no indication of what went wrong. He had to
reinstall the game.

[https://www.reddit.com/r/leagueoflegends/comments/epm9c8/all...](https://www.reddit.com/r/leagueoflegends/comments/epm9c8/all_the_things_that_are_wrong_with_the_league/)

It's a mess. And not only it is it a mess, it's an embarrassing mess because
the client was always a pain point of many players, until they decided to
completely re-write it in 2015. From the ground up. Clean slate - scalable,
durable, lightweight, all that jazz. And now it's widely regarded as worse
than the original client. If there was ever an example of how not to rewrite
something, that would be it. Just a catastrophe on every level.

------
jayd16
I'm more curious to hear about what its like to work at Riot but on any of the
other games.

------
BigolJones
Ironically I was listening to an interview about working at riot (the one with
darmar). It did sound like there were no major flaws, which is pretty
impossible ain't it. Reading the discussion proved the point I guess.

