The way we thought about this isn’t like “Should we make a loading screen indicator or not?” but more “Should we focus more on some of these big things that we think will be really valuable to players (New Client, Hextech Crafting, Replays) or should we delay some of that work in order to ship some of these smaller changes?” It’s more a question of how we were prioritizing.
Didn't the Rioter comment in a thread somewhere saying that it took him like 5 minutes to add that indicator......?
Maybe the loading screen indicator ends up being a poor example because it’s a particularly small change, so the “cost” to other development is super low. But not all of the smaller features we’re talking about here only take one person a single day of work. Some other things, like pinging the HUD or something else, might take a small team several weeks to go through a couple iterations, implement in our game, test, QA, etc. Sometimes they might even require follow-up work or updates, like adding the ability to ping your xp bar a couple patches after the initial HUD ping feature went out. So making that feature, or others like it, does have an effect on our overall development, and that’s something we have to consider when prioritizing them.
I’m not saying that we were correct to deprioritize these kinds of things before, but sometimes they do come at a cost that we have to weigh. I think it’s definitely worth it to look for these opportunities to improve whenever it’s feasible.
RiotCalad
Maybe the loading screen indicator ends up being a poor example because it’s a particularly small change, so the “cost” to other development is super low. But not all of the smaller features we’re talking about here only take one person a single day of work. Some other things, like pinging the HUD or something else, might take a small team several weeks to go through a couple iterations, implement in our game, test, QA, etc. Sometimes they might even require follow-up work or updates, like adding the ability to ping your xp bar a couple patches after the initial HUD ping feature went out. So making that feature, or others like it, does have an effect on our overall development, and that’s something we have to consider when prioritizing them.
I’m not saying that we were correct to deprioritize these kinds of things before, but sometimes they do come at a cost that we have to weigh. I think it’s definitely worth it to look for these opportunities to improve whenever it’s feasible.