A letter to the Wild Rift community (spoiler: I'm leaving Wild Rift)
Tl;dr I’m leaving Wild Rift at the end of April. It’s been an honour to be your comms and community lead, and thank you for all you’ve done to help me improve.
I’m not gonna write too many words here because I’m planning to reply to tweets instead, so I'll try to keep it brief, but we’ll see how it goes I guess? (spoiler: I failed lol)
I started playing League when I was 19, and joined Riot at 22. I’m now 30 (LMAOOOO), and it feels like the right time to try something a little out of my comfort zone. I’ll be joining a Riot R&D team, but I’ll talk about all that at a later date. I wanted to address the rest of this note to a specific group of players that mean a lot to me, so here goes!
TO THE WILD RIFT COMMUNITY:
Hey there! First, I trust you to be real with me, so I’ll start with some real talk of my own: For those of you who have stuck with us through our ups and downs, thank you.
Looking forward, I genuinely believe WR has a super bright future. Imo, Riot doesn’t release amazingly polished out-of-the-box smash hits. We release a scrappy lil’ nugget, but it needs players, commitment, and time to really be refined into something special. I look at the growth and the stride of VALORANT (all caps gang), or the set-by-set improvement of TFT, or LoR’s commitment to its core players. Even League PC is well into its 13th year!! I think Wild Rift will get there too, but we’re a little earlier on that journey than any of us hoped.
Through all of WR’s unique quirks shines a product that is really. goddamn. fun. A little unwieldy, a little rough around the edges, but when the plan comes together, sneaking that crucial Baron into a Nexus backdoor victory… it’s CLEARLY League. And there’s nothing else like it. To be transparent, Riot is extremely dedicated to making sure the real promise of Wild Rift comes to fruition—hundreds, thousands of people across Riot care about the success of the game and improving the experience of Wild Rift players. I hope that becomes clear in future updates.
For many of you, I might have been one of the only ways you found out info about WR, but the 150+ Rioters on the dev team see your feedback, they feel your pain, and they appreciate your kindness. Many of them actually choose not to be public for fear of messing up in front of you. Seriously—I surveyed the dev team and that’s the #1 reason many of them choose not to chat: they’re afraid of not meeting your standards. So if you do happen to talk to a Wildling (that’s what we’re called at Riot lol) please be kind!
It’s probably no secret that this project has been difficult at times. Something I think about a lot is the fact we launched this game, which is vastly improved by playing in person, during this horrible pandemic. If you’ve never played WR in person with your friends (and it’s safe to do so) I strongly recommend it!
And for me personally, this role became most tough when players doubted my intentions—you know those replies like “he’s just lying because his bosses told him to” or “he doesn’t actually care” or whatever? I thought I’d be able to see through those by now but if you ever wanted a shortcut to making me feel truly crappy, the power’s in your hands
That said, all player communities are incredible and important to me in their own way, but I have a few callouts to specific local groups that I wanted to share:
To the Brazilian community, your passion and dedication to this game is amazing. I receive so many messages from the BR community that I can’t respond to them all (also they have so much internet slang that Google Translate explodes). I hope that one day I can come to Brazil to eat real açaí, and to yell “muito legal” when you pull off big plays. obg & bjs
To the Chinese-speaking community across the world, you have shown me new levels of memes that I did not think possible. I hope when this message is inevitably posted on Weibo, I can be roasted by you one last time. 加油!
To the Indian community, I think you may be the most patient people on this planet. I’m sorry I couldn’t be there when we launched in your region, but when we can, I’m all ears for your feedback—you’ve got a free pass to flame me for whatever you want.
And to the Philippines community, you… are just really weird (and that’s amazing). Filipino player culture is some of the funniest shit out there and I absolutely adore you all. Thank you for all the laughs when you’ve made me say weird things in Tagalog.
There are so many more groups I’d want to shout out but I’m approaching 1000 words o god. I’m thankful to all the friends I’ve made and all that you’ve done to make Wild Rift what it is today. I will never take for granted the fact that I get to talk about video games for a living, and I want to give new folks a chance to be your advocates.
So… I think that’s it from me. I’ll be back on the Rift again as a normal(ish?) player soon, and looking forward to what you think of the Patch 3.2 Preview when it hits in May. I try to avoid overhyping stuff, but I think dedicated players are gonna love it.
Thanks for reading, and may our paths cross again soon,
Ben
(draggles)