League of Legends
Updating LEAGUE OF LEGENDS is a mammoth task, but this year Riot Games has taken more risks than usual
After almost 15 years, League of Legends remains one of the most popular PC games in the world, boasting over 100 million players every month. But keeping a game fresh and exciting for that long is no easy task, especially with so many people to please, so Riot Games has taken some risks with the new 2024 season.
Updating League of Legends is not simple at the best of times. With millions of players to keep happy ,each patch has to improve things in some way but not break everything that players love. Throughout most of the year the risks are minimal for a new patch, with one arriving every two weeks Riot tends to keep them relatively small, making balance changes and introducing one or two new things at once, be it a new champion, game mode or a change to a system. It is, usually, only once a year when a lot of big changes are made all at once, and that is with the launch of a new season.
Andrei ‘Meddler’ van Roon joined Riot Games in 2011 as a champion designer, before the idea of seasons was even in place and the focus was just on adding more and more content to the game. But after a while, he and the dev team started to realise that just adding more and more content all the time wasn’t a sustainable option, and that they would need to change strategy a little.
“Over time we gradually refined [the update system] and realised, this works well for players if we turn off [ranked matchmaking] right at the end of the year, we make a bunch of changes, then we turn it back on once the game is a bit more stabilised,” explains van Roon, who has risen through the ranks and is now head of League Studio, overseeing all of the games built internally at Riot in the League of Legends universe.
This was the format for a new League of Legends season for years. Around November time the previous season would end and ranked matchmaking would be turned off, which for some players would mean it was time to take a break. Van Roon says this was “a pretty healthy cycle” for players, but for many, it meant that, when all the fun new features dropped, there was little competitive reward to try them out.
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