Over the past year we've both delayed and cancelled releases entirely. It ultimately is weighing the question of "Is what we're shipping worth the risk we're imparting on the player?" Usually we're pretty confident in that equation when shipping a release, but in the times that we're not, we have to consider delaying or cancelling until our release candidate meets our intended criteria.

Our full CI/CD process for a release is roughly a month.

2 weeks in Integration, and then roughly another 2 weeks before it lands in your hands. Both time periods can (and do!) give-or-take a bit depending on how the release is progressing, but that's overall the general flow!

I'm not a designer, but the general approach to picking champions were to pick ones we felt: 1) Were ones players resonated with/would want in the game, which we used both data and lots of discussions to determine 2) Could be translated reasonably well into card-game format. That isn't to say that there are champions that we think could NEVER be translated, but the ones we chose were partially because we had exciting designs for them that playtested well internally and we believed were for champions that as many players players as possible would enjoy.

Generally, a skill card SHOULD help a champion achieve either their level-up condition or win the game for them once they level-up, or both! There's not an 100% mapping on that, but that's generally the philosophy when it came to mapping champions to their respective skill cards. Ultimately though, a designer would better be able to speak to all of the thought process/methodology.

We try to, but if for instance an issue where none of y'all could play sprung up, we certainly would release a fix on a Friday (or weekend, if need be!).

Sure!

One of the things that we did over the last year was to overhaul the way in which we release things to utilize deployable plans instead of builds. This does several things: -Gives us flexibility in terms of what we actually want to push out to production environments, IE if there was a terrible gamebreaking crash, we could simply deploy out a previous package that didn't have said crash in it, rather than wait for a fix or revert to actually build out (think 15-20m with a lower chance of failure instead of 90m+ with a higher chance) -Less volatility/likelihood of builds failing when trying to fix things quickly for players.

As for general release flow, we're not too dissimilar from League in that we have an eventual landing point from all of our development teams in one environment (we call it master). At a certain point, we'll take what's on master and cut a Release Candidate. We then do more testing there and fix blockers to the release, and then ship it when it (and us!) are ready to go.

As for challenges, one of the current hurdles for Legends of Runeterra is juggling PC and Mobile. As you may know, we're going to Mobile later this year, and there's a whole host of challenges that arise with that. For instance, if we need to do a Client-based fix on PC, we can simply deploy a new client to players with minimal impact/disruption. Once Mobile is in the mix, however, things get a bit more complicated. Now we need to consider several things: -The time it takes for Apple+ Google to approve our new client on their end, as both have standards around what they want (and don't want!) on their stores -Players needing to update and patch data in order to play the game

Both of these weigh on the decisions we make when making changes, and also weigh on our agility to make changes in the first place.

They've been fun and challenging problems to work through, to say the least! :)

It really depends on the position you're applying for! There are lots of different types. Here's a couple of helpful links:

https://www.riotgames.com/en/internships-frequently-asked-questions

https://www.riotgames.com/en/university-programs (if you're a student)

In many ways working at Riot provides the feel of working at a startup with the stability of a larger/more stable company. Everyone is focused on the player experience (same mission), you're often asked and encouraged to wear many hats, which not only improves your own skillset in the industry but also keesp the job fun/interesting, you're not micromanaged, and most people here really don't take themselves too seriously and are a pleasure to work with. The workplace culture really is the high point of working at Riot for myself!

I hit Challenger for a week back in early Season 4 playing mostly Sona support. I haven't played League competitively since 2017, and believe I ended that season around Plat 3 or so. Been playing lots of Legends of Runeterra lately though!

what about DNS blips?

Languages I've seen in use at Riot: C++, C#, Java, Javascript, Python, Groovy, Go, and a bunch more. So yeah, we need people with experience in all sorts of different languages :)

LoR release engineer here :) on Fridays at 5 pm we have a slack reminder that says:

PLZ DO NOT MERGE INTO MASTER
ITS AFTER 5 ON FRIDAY
PLZ DONT DO IT
ITS NOT WORTH

I can answer your second question, I work on LoR's CI/CD system. Our build pipeline does a lot of clever tricks to reuse stuff that hasn't changed. As a result, build times vary depending on how much stuff you've changed. Typical time from pushing a commit to being able to test it on a local patchline varies between 40 minutes to 80 minutes, including building everything, running a bunch of automated tests, and deploys.

Our repo is gigantic (tens of gigs) so we mostly use persistent build nodes with persistent workspaces with a ton of locally cached data. We do also cache a lot of stuff in artifact repos (such as Artifactory) and download/reuse as much as possible. We've also been using our internal patcher tech (described in https://technology.riotgames.com/news/supercharging-data-delivery-new-league-patcher) as internal artifact storage/caching more and more, such as for caching Unity's Library folder. Part of how all this works is that at the start of each build, after syncing source code, we hash all the files in the repo to determine what has changed and what needs to be rebuilt. Our artifacts all get tagged with hashes when they're uploaded.

https://technology.riotgames.com/news/down-rabbit-hole-performance-monitoring I think this is relevant to your interests :)

yeah, +20 to pen testing

I can answer part of this question. On LoR we have extensive test automation. There are unit tests that run using xunit, functional tests that run using pytest, load tests that use locust, and more. They all run in Jenkins and use a bunch of off-the-shelf tech like ADB, docker, various python and dotnet libraries, etc. Besides all the automation, there's a ton of manual testing, but I can't really speak to the details of the manual testing.

Hello! We host internships every year. The positions available differ annually, but they're usually posted here.

The positions generally get listed in July/August/September for the following year and close a few months later.

The UX team sometimes posts on Medium about the process and what it's like to work at Riot.

Did you know that our first interaction was during my writing test when you highlighted my em dash and freaked out?

What I'm saying is that I'm upset you used the evil -- in your response instead of the far superior — . Please respond.

/u/RiotWolfPack
You're in the afternoon session! I will ask you appropriately softball questions at your allotted time!!!!!! Also, let's get coffee soon.

/u/RiotAryeila
As the official Queen of Puns and Grammar at Riot Games, how does it feel to have a platform to share your love of the highest form of humor with the masses?
In the same vein, which pun are you the most proud of? Alternatively, which Champion Spotlight video has the most puns that you're proud of?
Also, what do you actually do? I know we're on the same team, but I don't understand big tech words. Help me dumb.