At Riot Games researchers, analysts, and data scientists directly embed with development teams in order to help provide strategic advice, test core assumptions, and generally empower the team to make the best thing possible for our players.

In 2014 Riot did a massive overhaul on the visual appearance of the main map of League of Legends: Summoner’s Rift. The visual style changed completely, and the update impacted nearly everyone who plays the game. The update also came with a number of challenging issues (performance, maintaining the same feel, etc.) and both research & analytics were present throughout the process to help the team tackle these challenges.

In this talk we’ll explore our model of data collection at Riot, some individual research methodology, and the reporting process through our work on updating the visual appearance of the Summoner’s Rift map. Attendees should walk away with a better sense of how research works at Riot, a look into our qualitative methods, and thoughts on how researchers can work effectively alongside development teams.

Austin Harley
Austin Harley is a Researcher at Riot Games. His research has covered a number of topics ranging from gameplay and meta-game systems, to motivation for competitive play, all in the internationally successful MOBA League of Legends. He also works with development teams on their strategic direction, and orienting around the right product goals for the space. The Riot research team’s tools and methods vary from project to project, but include in-person labs, survey work, and in-game telemetry. .

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