What's it like to work on a game that's also on eSports and how do you approach patching and balancing when it comes to a competitive eSports standpoint? Today, we'll be tackling those questions with Patrick Scarborough, a former game designer at Riot Games. Patrick, thanks for being here. Thanks Chad. I'm happy to be here. Patrick, what makes a good eSport? I see. So, well, I'm glad you ask, Chad. No, I think real talk, there is this idea I think among fledgling game designers that all I could come up with the perfect set of mechanics that are going to make an eSport. I could design like chess. The perfect numbers. Yeah, but that doesn't work. That's not how it happens. Esports is actually kind of this unique interaction between the people who play your game, the rules of your game, and then the desire to compete. Sports already exists dude, we don't need to reinvent the wheel here. You're not going to make something that is truly outstanding unless you start kind of fanning the flames of what makes that really fun. I think people talk about, hey it's PUBG, PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds, very popular gamer right now. Is that an eSport? You have people who are like, "No it's not any eSport because of this and this reason." But at the end of the day, if a lot of people are playing it, if they're competing, and if that feels kind of meaningful, then that is an eSport. So, I think it would be good for anyone watching this course to disavow all notions that you're going to make an eSport on your own and you're going to make it outside of your community because you absolutely are going to need all hands on deck, players, and developers to make that happen. So, when you're patching and balancing in eSport, how do you even approach that when you have a different set of audiences for both the professional players and then the general audience? Yeah. Not easily is kind of the answer here. So, I worked at Riot Games for a couple of years as a game designer which I assume is kind of what you're alluding through here. For people out there who don't know, Riot Games patches every two weeks. That is a lot of patches when you think about them, and they're not always small. So, you might say to yourself," Well that's kind of fatiguing. Every time I'm going to log in, they're going to be something new." Riot seems to think that, that is actually a very powerful component of what makes their game good. I think to get to your question, you're saying how do you do it for the top level or how do you do it for the bottom level? I think it's important to understand and take a step back and ask why patch at all. The reason to patch at all is to create constant excitement. It's to create reasons to engage. To say that, if you as we all know, the best League of Legends player in the world, you might not login for months at a time if you're already the best. So, how do we keep giving you opportunities to be the best? How do we give you opportunities to really show off and be good? I think patching does that. It also doubly serves and perhaps more critically serves as the opportunity to fix imbalances and issues with the game, whether that's game breaking bugs, whether that's one character's dominated for way too long. So when you start to understand, patches exist as sort of a regulatory outlet, it's kind of a lever in that regard as well as a way to spice things up. Take that to an eSports level and say, "Hey, I watched the League of Legends world championship or I watched this big game, say Fortnite, say which may be an emergent East Berlin PUBG." Let's say I watched the Fortnite world champions or I watched Smite. How do I know when I watch the next big tournament, it's not going to be the same thing again? How do I as a viewer know I want to show up? Then, on the other side of the coin, how do I know as a player that I want to engage? How do I know that my skills are being tested in a way that feel fair but also challenging and drive me to improve? So, patching is you have to strike a delicate balance. But when done correctly, it can kind of stoke those flames on both ends of the spectrum. So, why do you think that there are successful eSports that don't patch frequent. So for example, Super Smash Brothers especially for Melee and then there's also Smash four. Melee hasn't patched in 15 years or how long? How is that still successful eSport if they haven't patched in 15 years? There are two versions of Smash Brothers Melee. There's the one they released in America, or Europe or something, and the one they released in the rest of the world. Those are all the version differences you're going to get without modeling which gets into a whole different kind of worms. So, we will leave that to the side. So, you don't need patches to make a good game, obviously. There are many games that have gone a very long time without patching. Most notably like you mentioned Super Smash Brothers Melee. While they certainly help in and they perform a service like I mentioned, the thing about communities that form around games that don't patch, they need to take on a very different set of responsibilities. If there is a game defining bug or if there is a character whose balance is so out of whack, some people might say Fox in Melee, best of the best, people go back and forth on that but generally proven, it's the best character. You might ask yourself as someone who came from those other games and say, "Well, how can that game flourish if there's just the best? " A lot of that is adaptability. You have everyone's saying, " Okay we'll take it as it is and we'll learn to play around it." Different strategies arise, different ways of playing arise because you have these focal points of imbalance that everyone kind of rallies around. This ends up being one of the larger considerations for games. I'll use an example of Hearthstone, a non-standard eSport, if there is a standard for eSports because it's a card game. Blizzard balances but infrequently. They balance maybe once every expansion cycle which is three to four months. So, we'll say maybe they drop three to four balance patches a year compared to maybe what million that League of Legends does along with the season shake up the knowledge. It's a rough amount. So, anyways, the thing for them is they tried to strike a balance between letting problematic or powerful things be sorted out by the community, but also watching to find out when they can't be. That, I think is something that when we're having the patching conversation like is it important? How important is it? Is something to come around because some players don't want to play a game like League of Legends because everything's constantly changing. They want to learn their one character, their one match, and get really good at it. Some people don't want to play fighting games because they don't want to lose at the same stuff over and over again. They don't want to feel like the game is solved. There will never be anything new again in Super Smash Brothers. There will be new players and old players, they will rise and fall but it's going to stay the way that it did. So, I think when you're considering eSports, you have to really figure out that balance of saying if something shows up, how long do we go before we respond? Or when do you just not respond because the sorts of play, the sorts of decks that people are creating such as characters that people were playing to dominate or kind of countered that strategy start being a thing? So when you understand that there's really this big sort of ecosystem of designing and curating an eSport, that isn't as easy as just pushed that button or pull this lever and it's all sorted. Everything's fixed. Yeah. Oh my god! It would be so easy. I would love if that were the case but it's definitely not the case. So, let's talk about specific game developers then. Outside of the patching and balancing, there are some companies or some game developers that aren't as interactive with their eSports and most famously I think we mentioned Nintendo very briefly. I'm sorry, what did you say? Nintendo? Nintendo. Okay. They've been around for a little bit. Yeah. I think I've heard of it. So, what do we do or what does the community do when organizing tournaments or other things like that and they seem pretty hands off? What do you do with a grassroots community for example? So, to take a step back, I think there's two important things that I've identified that I think make an eSport able to grow. It basically boils down to, you need your top players and you need everybody else. You need to find ways to service them. So, the needs of the everyone else, the 99 percent are you need ways to show them how to get better. You need ways to motivate them to play, which can be difficult for fighting games because they cost a good bit of money to get into. That's not withstanding controllers and stuff like that. Then you've got to find people who want to play. Grassroot communities have their work cut out for them in this case to say, here's tournaments, here's game, here's some kind of like fighting game, jams, or we just hang out on the weekend, some smash fest or whatever. How do we get people into the community? How do we make them welcome? How do we make them feel like they can actually go up the ladder and make it to maybe one day be a good player? How do we get them to realize their potential? The other thing, focusing on the top players, is you need to be able to tell the story of why these players are the best and how they are so good at what they do. In every game from now until the end of time, there's always a strategy that is dominant. There's always a character that's really good. There's a certain way you can play the game that's deemed the best, and because it's deemed the best, you'll hear cries. If you've even casually touched games in your life and you're listening to this, you know you're going to be like, "That's cheap." The salt overflows, that they're like I that's not the real way to play the game you're going to hear that a lot. For a really established community that maybe has an Esports league or casters that are very well known they're trained to say no, this is why this guy is way better than all of you at this thing regardless of how good you think it is. But for grassroots communities, you need to find ways to sell those stories. You need to be able to say, "Hey, ice climbers for example, in Malay has a glitch they can execute that will essentially one hit kill their opponent, and everybody hates it, for the most part. But those people put in just as many hours and compete just as hard. To make it work. As everybody else. So, there come up questions of like should we discount someone's effort and blood sweat and tears they make to being an athlete? So, as a developer or as a community organizer you need to find ways to get those stories out there, you don't want inviting, you don't want people saying, "Oh I won't watch when this character shows up." You need to get people to love all aspects of your game and you need to find ways to tap into that. All right. Patrick, let's talk a little bit more about yourself. You worked at Riot Games as a game designer for a while, but now you're doing independent consulting and full-time streaming, what led to that transition? That's a pretty big step. Yeah. I don't know I was going to take this steps at first. What happened? Yeah. It's we're here now. So, I ended up switching jobs about midway through my tenure at Riot. I went from being a full-time game designer to working on the communication side of design which was basically, we found that talking to players was kind of a full time job, doing things like writing patch notes appearing on podcasts, videos, things like that. That's a lot of time and it didn't always make sense to have the people who are perhaps most qualified to speak on those topics like your leads and seniors. Do a lot of that work because they have to do the work. Do you think that you have to make the video game that they're doing. So, I had a mix of expertise and enough stuff that my jobs were changed they still worked with a lot of those guys, but I was now instead of pitching things that we're going to go into the game in meetings, I was trying to take the role of saying, "Hey, how is this going to look to people?" Remember, this is something that we did a couple of pages back how is this going to affect people are we being consistent how's this going to work. Is a weird being the messenger? It is a little bit, but I think for a lot of the people at Riot, and a lot of people in games in general you always have to do some amount of this, you cannot design in a silo you won't work, you're going to have to talk to them sooner or later and if you don't do it well it's going to go really badly for you shut us to EA. But so it wasn't too weird to transition especially because I still got to hang out with a lot of the people that I cared a lot about. I still get to have a decent influence over the game in terms of I would hang out with people and really grind out design ideas and solutions to stuff, I just didn't have to do it in the implementation. Jokes on them. I get to do other stuff. No. But anyways, through this process, I think one thing that I realized that I'm talking about right now is that they go hand in hand. You can't be a full on communications person and messengers so to speak without dipping your toes into design waters and he can't do it the other way around either. So, I was in a place where I was like, "Hey, I've been doing this for a really long time, I want to try some different stuff." I thought maybe I would be doing YouTube essays, I thought I may be doing some more long form stuff and I thought streaming would be a good way to dip my toes into this world that I think I can influence. What ended up happening is not something I could've predicted not something I think many people I know could have predicted but maybe, which is the community that started to form around the sort of content that I make whether that's just having fun or actually talking about the impact that a lot of the games were playing have on the industry, have on society. Our role as developers is to not just make the things that you see on screen but also create the experience over all of it. It has really led to the formation of a community that feels very sincere, feels very unique, and feels to me within gaming just really unlike anything I've ever seen people have got like jobs, you'd like meetup and their hometowns and hung out and people are really bonding in a way that I've never seen them. I'm sort of committed to chasing that to the end of whatever road that's going to lead to, and it's given me a lot of feeling that being there at the beginning of League of Legends gave me. Which is like, "Hey, I don't know what this is? I don't know where it's going?" But it doesn't feel normal, it doesn't feel usual and it feels like, Riot became top of their class because there are a lot of people who are good at their job but they also weren't afraid to talk to people, they also weren't afraid to really go out and to say what's on their mind. Someone posted and said "Hey, how'd that bug get in there? They're like, yeah that's me my bad. Let me fix it." If someone's like how do I get into the industry there's people talk in their stories and really relating to people. So, I now find that I'm able to have a significant degree of impact on the lives of people that I want to give back to, because when you work in games no matter where you work in games you can't do it without the audience can't do it without the players, and they can't really do it without you and it is a relationship that you really have to focus on. So, yeah, I'm along for the ride, I'm having a lot of fun I think the people hang out with me you're having a lot of fun and we're going to see how far we can go. I think the big takeaway from me is the community as a whole. You mentioned it whether you doing patching and balancing or for your own personal thing and I think that for Esports as a whole took community is such a big deal. So, I appreciate you taking the time to come down and be part of this community and talk about things. Thank you do you [inaudible]. I'm very happy to be here. So, there you have it, whether it's patching, balancing, or tournaments, game design is just one part of the Esports puzzle.
