What It's Like to Work on League of Legends | Hacker News Reader

What It's Like to Work on League of Legends

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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...

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&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

Why the hell would anyone work at a place like that

It seems to be a common theme in the video game industry. There are so many people that are very passionate about video games to a degree that they will take a lower salary and worse working conditions than they could get coding for any other industry. It's passion exploitation.

Probably a combination of wanting to work on games, and if you make it through the gauntlet you get exercise a lot of power and reap whatever "rewards" may come with that. Maybe it's a similar mindset to enduring working at a consulting/law/finance firm hoping to make partner, etc.

the sexual harassment stuff can be pretty invisible if you aren't a target yourself

regarding the identity politics stuff, some people live and breath IP and their perception of untenable conditions would be unremarkable to me (e.g. a 22 yr old saying "that's so ghetto")

work-life balance is a deal-breaker for me, but in my early 20s maybe it wouldn't have been if i spent half the work day playing my favorite video game

Reading through this I thought "this sounds like everything I heard about Riot a few years ago but I wonder if things have changed more recently" then I saw the time stamp...

Any company in the games industry is like this. It’s a sweatshop.

No, there are many, perhaps the majority, that are mature companies that respect employees’ work-life balance. I have worked in the industry for going on a decade and had mostly positive experiences. The poor experiences were either isolated to a specific team or part of a larger culture that I have seen change for the better.

That's ridiculous. Game companies are nothing like sweatshops and the reality is much less sensational than what you hear about, which should be no surprise.

Most are basically 9-5, generally with flexible hours. Often free food/snacks/games and other perks. Some take Friday afternoons off to drink and play games. Crunch toward release does happen a lot, it's a problem, but they're getting better about avoiding it.

You hear about the horror stories instead because that's outside the norm. "Game company mostly works normal hours, chills on Friday afternoons" isn't going to get much attention.

I was waiting to see if your post was satire.

Worked ~6 years in that industry, every placed I worked was a meat grinder and all the places my coworkers came from were meat grinders.

There's an attitude that if someone has "paid their dues" then new hires have to do the same and the cycle perpetuates. Saw 3 divorces on my last title alone, I don't care how much "passion" you have(and it will be exploited) that industry is not worth it.

I am sorry to hear that you had a poor experience and it is true that a toxic culture can be endemic.

However, your experience is not normative based on the best data available for the industry: https://s3-us-east-2.amazonaws.com/igda-website/wp-content/u...

Every year the IGDA publishes the Developer Satisfaction Survey that gives both a snapshot and longitudinal picture of the industry. The trends around things like work-life balance, diversity in the workplace and in the products themselves, and future outlook are all positive and have been for awhile. Most game developers day-to-day reality looks nothing like your experience, yet that impression lives on despite the reality on the ground.

The association of game developers says the game development industry is just fine?

Sure, but they would say that wouldn’t they.

I used to work for EA (five years at Ghost, specifically) and my experience there mirrors what you described. Often there was a crunch towards the end, but the last game I worked on had none. I'm currently working for Zoink and it's similar, though with a stronger stance against overtime.

Thanks. Also thanks to the silent majority who kept my post well afloat. It's weird that describing what typical game companies are like is controversial here.

Their COO would literally walk up to an employee and flick their balls, smack their ass, HUMP on them, and fart in their face (not all at once, although does that matter?)

Maybe you consider that normal in game dev companies, but I have to believe that's outside the norm.

The guy got suspended without pay for 2 months.

https://www.businessinsider.com/riot-games-suspends-coo-scot...

After basically one of the most massive media expose's in the games industry in the past decade.

[0]Their co-founder was being boosted by a player whilst going off about how boosting was evil and ruining the game and banning every booster they could find. Of course, I've seen a lot more about the dark side of Riot than most because [1]I've been around pro lol since before there was a cloud 9.

[0]https://www.reddit.com/r/leagueoflegends/comments/533ak3/com... (apologies, some of the sites originally covering this have died since)

[1]https://lol.gamepedia.com/Pulse_Esports

That is quite a generalization

Con confirm, the games industry is criminal in their treatment of employees. A studio cannot exist without the institutional abuse, as the budgets are not achievable otherwise.

Down vote all ya want, it won't change the reality and your fantasy of working there will be a nightmare of you make it. I was there.

EA and Acti have a reputation for crunch as well but only Riot has this many sexual harassment accusations.

EA, or at least Dice, have done a lot to move away from crunch as much as possible. It's been a slow process, but I definitely saw improvements during my time at Ghost. The last game I worked on didn't really have much of a crunch at all. I think I might have done some overtime, but almost every week was 40 hours and no drama.

EA is bigger than Dice, I believe. Maybe people who work for Dice (I love their games and tech!) had the leverage of opposing crunch becoming a norm. How you get such leverage over to your parent company, I do not know that. :)

Dice experimented with ways to prevent crunch by cutting down on unnecessary time sinks. It's shown good results, so it's only natural that other EA studios want to adopt it.

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)

Review volume is not a useful indicator. HR departments actively lobby employees to write positive reviews. These will always outnumber the honest reviews.

Cherry picking 1 review is a much less useful indicator. And there's no way to know if it's an honest one. Nor is there a way to know which ones were solicited or not.

So the closest you're going to get to usefulness is seeing what the common pros and cons are.

The cherry picked review is consistent with the numerous horror stories from the industry.

But I’m not sure that fact makes it any more credible. Wouldn’t a fake reviewer naturally draw from the known horror stories?

> "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.

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.

> 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?

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.

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.

I don’t disagree with anything here at all.

Sounds like really weird phrasing to me maybe some one from a different culture or its some really bizarre HR Buzzspeak invented term.

All those cons actually seem like disguisedd pros:

> Some Rioters lack a sense of appreciation

So what riot offers is amazing, but some employees don't know how to appreciate it (but you, you will of course)

> Growing pains: They talk of the flat organization which is a selling point to some people

> Tends to over-value ivy league and mbas

That's what ivy league and mbas (people they're trying to recruit) want to hear..

That's the point when astroturfing. Make the cons attractive.

Having been at several companies where management and/or HR actively 'encouraged' people to post 5star Glassdoor reviews I now dismiss every single 5star review (and look at 4stars critically).

That term, "ol' boys club" is a pretty offensive generalization. It's sad to see this person didn't jive with management at their workplace, and maybe it wasn't a comfortable environment, but it's not like employees have their hands on the knob of who gets hired.

It's incredibly hurtful to see someone draw such sweeping, negative inferences without specificity.

Whenever the word toxic gets brought up, I brace, because it feels the one making the claim is either projecting, or trying to use insults to incite others (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Projective_identification)

Who is the person being abrasive and creating a negative culture here? It's a serious claim, inducing social pressure on onlookers, if they don't support the vague accusation, they feel a party to it.

That post makes it sound like everyone's character at that company is subpar and being done personal favors because of characteristics of how they look? It's a stereotype I keep hearing - as if there aren't good, fair-minded onlookers absorbing the brunt of that. It hurts.

> it's not like employees have their hands on the knob of who gets hired.

What do you mean? All hiring and interviewing is done by the CEO?

Why do you feel this is hurtful?

It's rather odd that you would discredit this review as if it was personal against you directly.

As with all reviews, take them as a data point. Enough datapoints and you'll get a good feel/generalization for the way things are run. Clearly there are some issues. Take a glance at the one stars. I'm sure they are biased, but if you were looking for Riot games as an employer, this is definitely something to be on the watch for.

You ask for specificity, but I'm rather confused by your stance without some anchoring yourself.

I don't think you understand what the phrase "ol' boys club" means in this context. It is an expression: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_boy_network

> It is the inside track with connections to powerful and ambitious individuals formed "through school, work, professional and community service organizations, and private clubs."

I really wish someone would have pointed out how important this was pre-college. I somehow thought you just needed to know how to do stuff, but that couldn't have been more wrong.

Are you trying to gaslight people? You can’t seriously be trying to say that someone’s opinion that a company culture is toxic is offensive making you a victim. Come on! Anyone whose actually worked at a toxic company knows when to call a spade a spade. Some company cultures suck! Especially outside the ivory tower of SV. And the gaming industry as a whole is known for a lot of the complaints made!

It seems you feel very strongly about this, I believe you're trying to do the right thing. Management and cultures can be bad at workplaces.

I view situations on an individualized basis - full stop. I am not a fan of being placed to judge situations I don't know based on vague allegations. I prefer view group dynamics as cooperative rather than competitive as much as I can.

My issue is the communication style. The labeling and categorization that leaves people out, and even implies wrongdoing and malice by totally unrelated parties.

Just to take this comment as an example:

Gaslighting implies an intent to psychologically manipulate, as mentioned above, I view things on a case by case basis, and didn't witness the person in the reviews situation (to the affirmative or negative, what if there's actually shades of gray or they are actually at fault in the end?). Ivory tower denotes some semblance of power and advantage.

What if I were to say, the way this is coming across creates a difficult environment for someone who disagrees to express their observations?

I'm not a manager. I'm not part of an ivory tower. I'm not part of the aforementioned aggrieved categories. It doesn't mean my emotions and needs are less important. Disagreeing doesn't imply advantage or malice.

I think the main thing culture needs in SV is better communication. There's other employees who'd potentially be sympathetic, but are probably fearful to offer insights due to belief they'd be belittled.

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...)

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

https://kotaku.com/inside-the-culture-of-sexism-at-riot-game...

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

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.

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

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

TIL Riot is owned by Tencent

What company isn't?

Disney

EA and Take-Two Interactive (which own Rockstar) are the only big players I can think of.

It's crazy. I went through the list of big publishers and most are at least partially owned by Tencent.

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).

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

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

off topic or not, it is indeed pretty awesome

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

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.

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

I think that's less on the talent of the people and more what they're being directed to work on. Riot management would rather prioritize new shiny stuff like new gamemodes, champions, reworks, etc, and otherwise stuff they can charge players for, instead of cleaning up their messes even if it would be a massive QoL improvement.

Did they implement replays in the client? The last time I played it was '11. Even a 20+ year game like Starcraft could do this.

Sorta, but it's limited in silly ways. Saved replays are basically dead after every patch since they are a hack around the spectator system.

Are you talking about LoL or Starcraft (whose replays also randomly stopped working after patches)?

In LoL's case it's explicitly enforced. Every time there's a patch, old replays go away.

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)

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.

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...

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.

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

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.

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