Any League of Legends fan who follows the title outside just playing it should be well aware of how big the Chinese community is. Riot Games now plans to pay greater heed to them in balance decisions.
In the latest League Patch 14.12 preview, Phreak, a former play-by-play caster and current developer shed some light on the company’s plans regarding the game. He outlined how the team behind patch notes will most likely take Chinese data as a priority when making gameplay changes in the future, given how big the servers in the Asian country are compared to the other ones.
“Sure, player populations are like very high in NA, EU West, and Korea. […] And we are getting to a point pretty soon, when we’re going to start doing a better job incorporating Chinese players and Chinese players sentiment in their pick and ban rate data,” Phreak said.
He underlined that it may look odd in the beginning since some changes might not reflect what is needed in North American and other solo queues. But Phreak believes it’s a necessary direction to take, given there are “tens of millions of players [in China]. […] It’s going to be weird, at some point in time, you’re gonna run into it, and it’s going to be correct,” he summed up.
Given the popularity of League in China, it’s hardly surprising to hear Riot Games is aiming to take such an approach to its primary game. We don’t actually know the precise numbers of players in the country since data like this is restricted to the Western communities by the Chinese government, but given that Riot is mostly owned by Chinese company Tencent, they likely have good reasons to make this call.
