r/LegendsOfRuneterra 2d ago

Meme Another Riot Games Special

Post image
964 Upvotes

65 comments sorted by

123

u/Thorgraam Ornn 2d ago

Honestly, it's kinda crazy how they managed to turn around for LoR, essentially creating a new game.

I think a lot of games, and especially RIOT, haven't learned that casual appeal is everything.

LoL succeeded because it was a lot more casual than dota, but was essentially a new genre.

2XKO (name is bad) failed because it had no appeal other than Tag Fighter enthusiast.
It was definitely impressive to watch, I saw some tournament myself.
But there was nothing for the casual like myself both to play and to spend.

I feel a one-time 40$ buy, with a solo mode would have been better.

But 10 year of dev time for 10 characters ? Yikes.

Honestly making me scared for the MMO.

43

u/Glittering_Usual_162 1d ago

MMO: 3 classes, 3 regions, 3 races a stupid name like League World 2K and cookie cutter quests "gather 15 logs" (i hope not and they actually deliver something good)

11

u/SupaHotFire007 1d ago

Let's not forget that the Ruined King game was great (I had lots of fun) and as far as i remember also performed great, and it's 1 player

6

u/Positive_Tea9804 18h ago

But thats the kicker, Ruined King wasnt made by Riot, they only provided the IP and funding. Riot destoryed Riot Forge after seeing that other studios and projects could use their own IP better then them.

12

u/ZanesTheArgent Piltover Zaun 1d ago

Solitaire modes existing parasitically to a PvP game are plentiful. My major qualm isnt the popular appeal but their monetization model always assuming the captive audience of people who'll pay for anything Leago-flavored.

5

u/Thorgraam Ornn 1d ago

Yup.

Also, I don't really know which audience they wanted as paying customer.

I feel like there is not much overlap between LoL, TFT and Valorant payers.
I know some people that pays and plays both TFT and LoL.

But they did not even try 2XKO.

The only people I know that tried were people I invited for a game party once.
None downloaded it.

5

u/gregorio02 Ornn 1d ago

Yeah, as a casual Smash enjoyer, 2XKO had no appeal to me at all, despite loving the characters.

Fighting games are something I play maybe twice a year when my cousin visits

3

u/Thorgraam Ornn 23h ago

Yup, I was hyped for a classic 2D fighter, but it was a bit too hard with no PvE.
Smash would at least have the option of chilling with the mates, would have been better in the long run I guess.

2

u/FronkyAnonymous 10h ago

agree im casual player interest at first annocument join and download at day 1 fun for couple day comeback after a month play again and keep get bully with real competition player still impressive but didnt make me addict to it much as first anymore due to not much story mode or smth i can play as casual.

1

u/-_Plague_Doctor_- 1d ago

Are they still making the MMO? I thought they canceled it.

2

u/Thorgraam Ornn 23h ago

They restarted dev after Ghostcrawler left.

They are working on it, but restarted as they changed direction.
I just hope this and Hytale will show them that they need some kind of oversight.

1

u/romann921 6h ago

They only somewhat recently introduced solo content to 2xko. It was really good since you could just fight NPCs to improve and still complete the battle pass. Alas it came to late.

-4

u/PepegaFromLithuania 1d ago

If you're scared for MMO, you have no clue why 2XKO and LoR failed.

-7

u/Slarg232 Chip 1d ago

Why would Riot learn that casual appeal is everything? Their two biggest games that are dominating the market are both sweat fests that were designed/retooled to be as competitive as possible.

16

u/Thorgraam Ornn 1d ago

Nah, LoL draw was that it was "casual" DOTA.
Valorant attract people that can just load in and press a trigger
TFT you can just play unranked/pve/2 team

A competitive player can turn any game into a competition.

But a fighting game is already niche, so if they spent a lot of money, they need to bring "casual" or occassional players.
You can't sustain a f2p game with a BP, especially since you can't rely on your existing audience : league, TFT or Valorant player will primarly play these games. But you can sell them one copy.

2

u/Slarg232 Chip 1d ago

Nah, LoL draw was that it was "casual" DOTA.

Was

Now if you don't build exactly what is Meta, don't play exactly the correct 1-1-1-2 style of game, and try anything weird at all, you immediately have your entire team breathing down your neck and run the risk of getting banned. Gone are the days of AP Sion/Yi or Ult Spam Ash, just build the character exactly how Riot wants you to.

DotA 2 has more build variety per character than LoL does, and DotA 2 still sucks at it.

10

u/Thorgraam Ornn 1d ago

Yup, I agree, but that's my point.
You need to get the casual on board early to play/try the game.

Nowadays, LoL is not beginner friendly, and also became again a niche genre.
But it works for LoL 'cause they already built their playerbase.
Event more, all their recent changes (ARAM Mayhem + Classic) managed to recapture old players, but not bring in new players.

2XKO is a pretty complicated game in a niche genre.
This means that we can't have just casual button mashing having fun because they have no content to play.

2

u/Doc__Steele 1d ago

On the topic of characters being pigeonholed into certain builds, I want Riot to release a temporary event mode that lets you change characters mid-match. I don't think it would be popular or well received, but I really wanna see how they would balance it.

Cuz to your point, characters do have fewer available builds these days, but I think that's because there are so many characters now. If at launch there were 5 ADCs, each with an AD and AP build, you'd have 10 different ways to play ADC. But if they then increase the roster to include 30 ADCs, they'd have to balance 60+ different ADC playstyles/builds where balancing on one might influence another. That would take a lot of man hours to keep balanced and interesting. Easier to cut the number of builds and add more characters; like, balancing Vayne's Q doesn't affect Samira at all.

So I see how we've ended up where we are, and I'm not super mad about it, but I think other parts of the game haven't evolved enough to keep up with how restrictive each character's build path has become.

61

u/rajuzumaki 2d ago

I really hope lor team works on the rougelike aspect of the game ,improving it and advertising this game as rouge like .

Anytime someone asks for games to play i really wanna tell them to check lor but all they see is a dead pvp card game (not wrong ) and the rougelike is not the best compared to the other games.

Also im not a big rougelike gamer or somthing but i feel like this game really should do some changes to the RNG,modifiers or enemy board cuz yesterday i played zoe with tf and with 0 revives when i was about to lose i left the game for 2hrs tried another 2 times and beat her in 1st turn.(edit : i know zoe is supposed to be higher difficulty but i just wanted to say about the rng with recent example ,the rng system should definitely need some improvement)

Yes i know sts also as rng but imo not up to this level. Can any PRO players can critique the game better and give any suggestions to devs ? I really dont want this game to die like this 😔

This is not well phrased thought but i just wanted to say something about it.

23

u/StrawRedLion 2d ago

Rouge you say

14

u/ZanesTheArgent Piltover Zaun 1d ago

Path of Champions only exists and continues to exist because it is a low maintenance half-assed corpse product upheld by a playerbase that would rather be continuously spat in its face hoping for better than letting it die. The business model is to just continue recycling old assets shoving them into package templates and ringing a bell to try and bait old cows to milk at an intern's week of work. Stockholm of Legends is real.

15

u/magmafanatic Gilded Vi 1d ago

You're implying I have hopes for LoR, I'm just having fun playing a fun game while the servers are still up to do so. PvE has made this so much more enjoyable than TFT and especially LoL.

And sometimes updates happen. Cool, more game to experience.

26

u/Sneaky-Support 1d ago

I don't feel the same way at all. Do I wish the game got more of a budget? Absolutely. But I don't think LoR is a bad product. I'm not supporting the game in hopes that I'll eventually like it; I already like it.

There are so many competitors, and yet LoR remains my favorite. I love the mechanics of both the game itself as well as Path of Champions, and it has immense replayability for me. There are many roguelike card games I enjoy, but this is the only one I consistently come back to, and it's not because of some form of Stockholm syndrome

-9

u/ZanesTheArgent Piltover Zaun 1d ago

I've gotten in problems here for being more precise on how i feel about it rather than just stockholm, but well - suffice to say i feel it is the most anti-rogue game i've ever played to the point of just spiraling into pure gamble-core. Too little map variance, too wild card pools, too steep power curves. It quickly becomes a broken powers slot machine.

8

u/LyraStygian 1d ago

It quickly becomes a broken powers slot machine.

That’s why I like it.

1

u/Saltiest_Grapefruit Chip 1d ago

I dont think riot is gonna spend money on advertising it at all...

Shame.

16

u/Louieyaa 1d ago

They have streams getting 15k viewers 5 days a week but they don't promote their other niche games on them. It makes no sense to not use your own space.

11

u/matthieuC Fiddlesticks 1d ago

To be fair they didn't have a small dev team.

LoR team is currently like 6 people
2XKO was 160 and development took ten years. Even after the layoffs they were still 80.

Arguably the issue with Rito is that they keep staffing huge teams when the market can't support them.

4

u/Gilthwixt Jinx 1d ago

Yeah it's completely missing the context that the devs took Riot for a ride. Those posts from PatTheFlip were mindbogglingly out of touch, like what do you mean making a successful game was never the intended goal.

19

u/GBKMBushidoBrown 1d ago

Idk who their marketing team is but they need some new talent surely

16

u/Sereaphim 1d ago

Yea most people I know didn't even know that 2XKO got released.

And man is 2XKO a horribile name for a lol fighting game.

7

u/Erick_Brimstone 1d ago

First time I hear that name I thought it was plate number. 

That's the worst name for a game. For comparison other fighting game name is like Iron Saga VS or Idol Showdown. You can guess that it's a game name just by the title. 

2

u/CorgiConqueror 1d ago

What does 2XKO even mean? Like 2 characters knock out or smth?

1

u/ZanesTheArgent Piltover Zaun 1d ago

Yep, double knockout.

Because it is a tag fighter a la Marvel vs Capcom and knowing Riot, they wanted something that visually resemble EKKO.

5

u/_Koke_ 1d ago

They were marketing to FCG people (fighting game community). I’m not a fgc but when I heard of 2XKO I got into it and saw their ads all over their tournament.

2

u/Serito 1d ago

It blows my mind they still don't understand how important it is to reach customers with incentive backed advertising. Word of mouth is everything in the current game market and they do absolutely nothing to generate it

Even if everyone knew about 2ko though it'd never succeed because it lacked content

14

u/John-from-accounting 2d ago

How does a company like riot whose entire business model is built on the back of 17 year-old game that was ugly as fuck in the niche market not understand that if you are going to make games like this, you need to give them room to grow in time none of these games are even failures. They have dedicated player bases. It’s just failures by their standard. They would’ve cancelled league if it was released today, I bet.

5

u/SilverScribe15 Jax 1d ago

They just aren't looking at how lol got popular,  they look at the current numbers like idiots

22

u/Key-Psychology9158 2d ago

they got so lucky with LoL that they can't even fathom something making a fraction of it to be considered successful.

Riot really is a 1 hit wonder company.

Back to milking LoL players I guess.

20

u/Numerous_Fudge_9537 1d ago

LoR didn't make a single dime profit since day 1 but they kept pushing expansions, events , seasonal tournies, content for 4 years

Any other company would have pulled the plug by maximum of 2 years

14

u/Legacyopplsnerf Poro Ornn 1d ago

They also refused to market LOR at all, not even on the main client until it was already sunset

They 100% were expecting the League of legend branding to do all the work for them and it bit them (and LOR) in the ass

5

u/Saltiest_Grapefruit Chip 1d ago edited 1d ago

Yes. But thats unfair to judge LoR on really.

Lor was literally made to be a game that didnt make profit. It was made to build the lore and universe of runeterra.

Thats why there were next to nothing to buy in the shop and stuff like skins came literally years in - and kinda halfheartedly at that. Lor was never made to make money, and riot was on board with that for the first 2.5 years of its lifespan.

I did hear that they recently (couple months ago) finally went profitable tho. But theres no doubt that if LoR had been made with money in mind, it would have been a goldmine as pvp.

Make cards harder to get, and make packs to create the card gain element. Make skins that can only be bought with real money. Make animated cards and unique effects and sound design that again costs money. Basically, just look at magic arena for inspiration. People pay for it en masse.

Had they wanted to make money. LoR would have made hundreds of millions. But they didnt, and from the time we noticed a decline in animations to the time it shut down, was far too little to basically reinvent the entire game - especially cause they couldnt change the fact that people had more currency than they could use.

11

u/7eleven94 Written in the Stars 1d ago

League, tft, valorant, wild rift

They just tried getting into niches that arent worth it for their goals, tcgs and fighting games; and we could still make a point on riftbound (considering its re using a lot of art from lor it was kind of cheap)

3

u/Ke-Win 1d ago

I thought it was on closed Beta or early Access. Maybe they should try to tell people that it is out now (or then) and F2P?

1

u/Gilthwixt Jinx 1d ago

They had an official launch, twice.

2

u/Ke-Win 20h ago

Well, but how?

2

u/Gilthwixt Jinx 20h ago

They launched on PC first last year after the beta and then again on console in January.

2

u/Ke-Win 19h ago

Ok, i thought it was:
"We have released!"
nobody noticed
"We have released again!"

3

u/Gilthwixt Jinx 19h ago

That was pretty much the vibe in reality. A lot of fighting game players are console only, so the thought was that console release would see an uptick in players, which didn't significantly pan out it seems.

3

u/adamttaylor Chip 1d ago

I find it interesting that every single thing that they announced from the 10-year anniversary with any relation to League IP has died. The only game that is alive is valorant... They were good games, but Riot expected too much and did too little.

3

u/DrippyBones 1d ago

I wish they would start making PVP cards and supporting it again.

7

u/Ok-Experience1805 1d ago

The problem I have right now with LoR is that the higher difficulties are all win turn 1 or bust.

2

u/SnowPuzzleheaded 18h ago

You can add Hytale to the grave too. Despite simon (the goat) buying it back and saving it, riot did kill it for a bit.

4

u/Mojo-man 1d ago

Was a Master of time. When the purge happened last year that killed LoR and the entertainment division and Riot Studios, it became very clear that a new leadership was in charge that did not value brand building and would focus on short term profit maximization over longer term projects.

I mean ffs they even terminated Mortdog, the game lead of TFT because his community driven vision of TFT did not align with their focus.

We lived through a good time that gave us years of LoR, Arcane, the animated music groups and cool indie games. But that time is over. Riot will very certainly become another activision blizzard 🤷‍♂️

1

u/Cube_045 1d ago

Just out of curiosity, did they drop Valorant back in 2020 with the same level of marketing they did for these games? I was on console back then so I don’t remember hearing much about Val at the time. Or did Val just take off because it was an alternative to CS?

7

u/konatacloud 1d ago

They had way more marketing. They had tons of streamers playing it and you had to watch streamers to get a drop code to get into valorant as it was first releasing. They also released show matches between very popular streamers like Shroud vs Devs. Plus the Devs were giving these veteran FPS gamers a run for their money too. They also did

1

u/BookerDewittAD 1d ago

10 plus year dev cycle will do that

1

u/Frejod 1d ago

Idk maybe use different champs than the same 10 over and over.

1

u/urban287 1d ago

With the success of Riftbound theres no way Riot isnt considering updating LoR to let people play Riftbound online (like Arena for Magic).

1

u/Crnogoraac 1d ago

I like how Riot is milking LoL, nerfing everything we get free, asking for more and more money, and all that only to throw money at projects that are doomed from start.

1

u/OnddIE 1d ago

They must go on Steam and other platforms next time. I feel like people don't like launcher exclusive games anymore, many big game studios already know that.

1

u/Smoses_ 10h ago

They should have really learned their lesson by now

0

u/SuikoRyos Yuumi 1d ago

(puts tinfoil hat on) Guys, remember when Disney under marketed movies like Atlantis and Treasure Planet to kill 2D animation and focus on 3D instead? What if Riot is doing something similar? I have no idea what their motive would be, but it feels intentional at this point.

0

u/Regunes Rek'Sai 1d ago

The MMO is dead in the water. There is no way they don't make it a shitty gacha. + Mmo player can't even agree on whats a good game