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Comment by Macha | Hacker News Reader

I'm not sure Riot is experience that would make me trust someone's advice on running a company, even where the contents seem reasonable. Their work culture has led to some pretty public problems.

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I think most HN readers are intelligent enough to be able to consider the quality of advice as something separate from its source. That is, a source need not be perfect to be worth listening to.

Riot's obviously far from perfect, but this advice seems reasonable to me. Do you think following it is likely to lead to problems similar to Riot's? If there's some sort of causal link between empowering teams and failing to build an inclusive culture, I'd really find that interesting.

Good point, and to penalise companies practicing transparency also means boosting those that work to hide problems and fake the context in these kinds of interviews.

What transparency are they being penalised for?

The implication is that many companies have the problems which Riot are notorious for. They are just better at hiding them from public view.

Riot wasn't transparent about them either. They just failed at hiding them.

I think that's what I wrote?

Ignoring context is not a sign of intelligence.

Ignoring context where necessary is a sign of intelligence.

It really isn't.

I think you're missing some context here.

Ah, but was it necessary?

The way you replied to a comment that mentioned people being "able to consider the quality of advice as something separate from its source" as if it had instead said "Ignoring context" breaks the guidelines in several places, e.g. Be kind...Please don't sneer...Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize etc.

I didn’t consider that to be an unreasonable response.

Ok thanks, fair enough. It seems to me a textbook example of attacking a straw man.

Advice always depends on the context, which includes the circumstances and history of the provider. The comment was a bit too mean (I'd have objected to "not a sign of intelligence"), but it's definitely not bad for the "ignoring context."

I've already given a reason in a sibling comment why I thought the phrase "ignoring context" was bad—it's a straw man: it acts like it's refuting a particular argument, but it's actually refuting something else.

> Advice always depends on the context

It's not clear to me whether that's true, or what it means exactly. It seems to mix at least two senses together, one (A) where it's self-evidently true, one (B) where it's not true. (I believe that's called equivocation, and it's a very common way of going astray, in philosophy, informal arguments etc)

(A) Yes, when someone tells you something, you should take into consideration who is telling you, like when you assess the credibility/reliability of what an unfamiliar website says. Not doing that would be very foolish.

(B) The sense of the original "quality of advice" quote: You can read a quote somewhere, not knowing where it came from, or it's some author you know nothing about, or anonymous etc, and think it's good advice, and follow it. Where it came from doesn't really matter, i.e. the quality of the advice is separate from its source. Good advice can come from a "bad" source, or bad from a "good" source.

How do you determine quality of advice separate from the source without research? "seeming reasonable to me" is not science; In a vacuum, all you have is one case study that links this set of advice to a toxic culture.

> If there's some sort of causal link between empowering teams and failing to build an inclusive culture...

I don't know. Listen to yourself. There are a lot of companies out there that manage people well, and also didn't have such pervasive sexism problems. Let's talk about those instead.

And before you say no such company exists, listen, I personally just don't say and do obviously sexist shit. It's really easy! A lot of people go their whole lives without farting on someone's face, unlike that Riot exec. So of course if you can't get these basic things right - if you don't know you can't fart on people's faces - why are we elevating your opinion on "self managed teams"?

The bigger takeaway here is that their sexism problem was so much more devastating than their executives could have ever anticipated. It has miscolored every single aspect of what they do, a complete trashing of years of hard work by thousands of people. Why in the world would you ever want to work for these people? There are a lot of shitty MOBAs out there, truly, there is nothing they have besides a player count, that will someday be zero that no one else has or ever will have.

Whatever their problems, their results are pretty damn consistent.

League of Legends remains the premier e-sport, dethroning all competitors in viewership rates and numbers.

Valorant is rapidly rising, and threatens the long-incumbent direct rival Counter-Strike

Teamfight Tactics, while not an e-sport, still remains in the top 10 streamed games on twitch.

3 releases, all (at least by twitch streams) major successes. From the product point of view, they're clearly doing something right, and whatever work culture issues they're claimed to have, they're certainly outperforming.

Note: As most of riot's releases target the e-sport crowd, I'm using twitch viewership numbers as an analogue for success. Sports, after all, are judged by popularity amongst viewers above all.

Success isn't everything. It is very possible (and arguably more likely) to be a successful company and still have a shitty culture and/or work environment.

Riot is a prime example of this, but unfortunately they are hardly the exception - it is a fairly common pattern amongst the AAA game companies and publishers.

The specifics are not the same from company to company, but arguably the end result is. People are unfortunately willing to endure a lot just to get into their "dream industry".

That's debatable

League of Legends is a premier e-sport more so because of marketing than game design or engineering. In fact, their game client remains worse than dota 2's in every way. It's actually pretty hard to take them seriously considering their client is still such a buggy mess after about 10 years.

While the viewership of casual Valorant is greater than CS-GO, it's also not "rapidly rising" - https://sullygnome.com/game/Valorant/365/summary

And the esport viewership of CS-GO is much larger compared to Valorant.

And while Teamfight Tactics was an success, Legends of Runeterra wasn't. So they are 3/4... which is still pretty good - but can also be explained by good marketing and IP handling. Similar to the new Activision-Blizzard.

>League of Legends is a premier e-sport more so because of marketing than game design or engineering.

Indeed, it's debatable because it sounds weird

I don't play LoL for close to decade due to their marketing (is it even marketing? or actually their Esport stuff?)

For me LoL is great game because it changes often, so you don't get bored fast, also it's highly competitive with decent ways to express your skill

Not to mention they've had money flowing like water. When you don't have to worry about being financially efficient a lot of management structures and unstructures seem like they "work".

It's when the money dries up that cracks in the foundation are evident.

Even without considering the "boy's club" stuff, LoL never seemed to be very competently programmed back when I played it (admittedly I've hardly touched it since ~2012). I wouldn't really trust them for engineering and programming expertise either, except maybe from whoever manages their servers/online infra.

You're not wrong. Their engineering seems incredibly incompetent. I've often postulated that they have like 500 junior developers and like 12 people with more than 5 years programming experience. There is probably like 2 people who keep the game engine running and when they quit the game will fall apart.

I think all the Riot employees on this thread are down voting us, sorry

No, I down-voted each of you because your comments are anecdotal at best and don’t add to the discussion at all.

Saying the game doesn’t appear to be “competently programmed” is analogous to the “coded badly” that gets thrown around, not taking into account that all successful consumer software has tech debt and inefficiencies.

(I don’t work for Riot and have no affiliation with them)

You should look at some of their dev blogs. Their engineering team has done some pretty remarkable things, like re-writing the game server to be deterministic so they could better deal with problems that occur in pro play[1]. They've also talked a bit about the past and future of the game engine specifically [2]. They also have blogs talking about operations- taking the game from something written by 2 dudes in a dorm room to being one of the most played games in the world- how their stack has changed, how they're set up to do patches and rollbacks, how they do their internal testing and playtesting, etc.

[1]: https://technology.riotgames.com/news/determinism-league-leg... [2]: https://technology.riotgames.com/news/future-leagues-engine

their networking staff seems to be very decent

they pushed significant changes in backbone infrastructure in e.g EU

https://technology.riotgames.com/news/fixing-internet-real-t...

https://qz.com/790208/how-the-company-behind-league-of-legen...

I don’t know much about League of Legends or its architecture, but I could imagine they were making tradeoffs at times for the product’s sake. I think they hint at this with `std::string` usage in their tech debt article. [1]

It’s been said to death at this point, but technical shortcomings can be orthogonal to a video game’s success on the market.

[1] https://technology.riotgames.com/news/taxonomy-tech-debt

As a prime example of this, I'd point to the horrifying source for VVVVVV, a darling indie game of its time:

https://github.com/TerryCavanagh/vvvvvv (my favorite piece: https://github.com/TerryCavanagh/VVVVVV/blob/master/desktop_...)

(There was also discussion about it on HN before as well, if one is interested: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22011358)

That said, refactoring for later gains might be wasted time if you have only a certain amount of scope planned for the rest of time, counter to the typical heuristic.

Some of their decisions didn't make any sense, even at the time. For example, each champion is coded separately for each team, there isn't just a single champion where they toggle a flag or something. That's led to bugs where champions are stronger depending on what team they're on. Skins work the same way; instead of just changing the appearance, every skin is a seperate hero in the code.

Yeah, I've gotten into it recently. Ignoring the nearly impossible problem of game balance, the actual software is not well engineered. The non-game client is chock full of bugs. They do have quite a legacy problem: 11 years is forever in computer game time, but still, with their resources you'd expect the big bugs to be fixed by now.

As a counterpoint, they have had those lessons and so could have learned from them if they were perceptive.

Would you elaborate? I'm curious about public problems you mentioned.

Disclaimer: I am not voicing any opinions about Riot or the people mentioned in the articles below. Just compiling what I’m aware of and letting people make their own opinions.

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

- https://kotaku.com/current-and-former-employees-sue-riot-gam...

- https://kotaku.com/top-riot-executive-suspended-without-pay-...

- https://www.espn.com/esports/story/_/id/26686991/riot-games-...

- https://www.vice.com/en/article/dy8g87/league-of-legends-fak...

- https://www.polygon.com/2020/7/29/21347587/riot-games-saudi-...

From your sources [1]:

> COO, Scott Gelb [...], as a comedy bit, [...] has repeatedly touched subordinates’ balls or butt or farted in their faces. [...] his punishment—two months of unpaid leave and training. [1]

From OP's interview with CTO Mike Seavers:

> Every time we sat down to go through the past quarter and plan the next one at Riot Games, we came up with a leadership theme for the quarter. For example, we weren’t going to make decisions for others for a month. This put all of us on the same page, and we got everyone to think about it and talk about it. When my direct report came to me asking, “Can I do this thing?” It was easy for me to say, “I’m not going to answer that question. You know the theme of the quarter, so you need to at least think it through before I give you an opinion.”

At least they are consistent.

[1] https://kotaku.com/top-riot-executive-suspended-without-pay-...

Per his Linkedin he is still with the company. All these "suspensions without pay" are just for PR.

"Toxic boys club" sums up a lot of the historical problems, but a quick Google of "riot games culture problems" will give you literally dozens of articles to read.

I have work with a few ex rioters and have interviewed a few (at the time) current ones, and have heard personal confirmation of many of these problems. It's a big company though, so some departments are better or worse in this respect.

But yeah, it's not really a great place to emulate if you're trying to build a healthy culture, at least IMO.

I interviewed with them a few months ago. They are really -really- putting work into 180'ing their culture. I'm sure it's not there yet but there is a serious effort being made, even from the hiring side.

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