Down The Rabbit Hole of Performance Monitoring

Hi, I’m Tony, and I’m an engineer on League. This article is a followup to my performance series, where I talk about optimisation and profiling. This will be a high level overview of how we monitor game performance in League of Legends, how we detect when a performance degradation has slipped through QA and escaped into the wild, and how we track global trends in frame times over many patches and millions of players. I hope you enjoy it!

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Posted by Tony Albrecht

Supercharging Data Delivery: The New League Patcher

For the past 8 years, League has been using a patching system called RADS (Riot Application Distribution System) to deliver updates. RADS is a custom patching solution based on binary deltas that we built with League in mind. While RADS has served us well, we felt we had an opportunity to improve some key areas of the patching experience. We knew we could deliver updates much more quickly and more reliably by using a fundamentally different approach to patching, so we set out to build a brand new patcher based on content-defined chunking.

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Posted by Javier Blazquez

The Riot Games API: Transforms

Hello all, Leigh Estes, aka RiotSchmick, here. I’m a software engineer at Riot Games working on the Riot Developer Experience team. Our responsibilities include providing the edge infrastructure that supports both internal and external developers. I previously wrote a series on the infrastructure that supports our public API product. I’m excited to revisit this series to tell you more about a new part of our infrastructure - the feature we call transforms.

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Posted by Leigh Estes

Key Conjurer: Our Policy of Least Privilege

Hi, my name is Reza Nikoopour and I’m a security engineer on the Security team at Riot. My team is responsible for securing Riot infrastructure wherever we’re deployed - whether that means internal or external data centers or clouds. We provide cloud security guidance to the rest of Riot, and we’re responsible for Key Conjurer, our open source AWS API programmatic access solution. 

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Posted by Reza Nikoopour

Better Apps with React Server-Side Rendering

Imagine you're a web developer. You have to create an app that leverages five different data sources. The project has 26 different views built in - and don’t forget to make it fast, easy to test, and reliable. I work on creating the tools that make this kind of app as easy as possible for developers to build and manage. My name is Matthew Drake and I’m a member of the Riot Data team.

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Posted by Matthew Drake

Stocking Your Shop With Data Science

Hey there, my name is Riley “WhoaNonstop” Howsden, and I’m a Data Scientist who works on League of Legends, focusing mainly on personalization. Over the last few years I’ve been a part of the launch team for “Your Shop,” a product within League that creates personalized offers for every player around the globe. Data scientists like me work with engineers, analysts, artists, and publishing to create experiences that players love. From matchmaking and player behavior to artificial intelligence and game balance, data science is a key contributor for many initiatives at Riot. 

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Posted by Riley Howsden

404 Tech Blog Not Found: Welcome to the Bug Blog

So, why do Bug Blogs? Well, at Riot, we believe that a fundamental component of the development process is understanding that failures can and do happen. We make mistakes because we’re humans, and humans are far from perfect. And that’s okay! What’s important is to recognize failures for what they are, work to understand why they happened, learn from them, and make needed changes based on those learnings. That’s how we grow and that’s how we get better.

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Posted by Jane Jeffers

Reducing Rendering Complexity with Gun Goddess Miss Fortune

Hi, my name is Eric Friedman, and I’m a Software Engineer who has been working on League of Legends for 8 years, focusing mainly on gameplay systems. For the last several years, I’ve been working in the Player Immersion and Expression (PIE) initiative, bringing you skins like Elementalist Lux and personalization options like Emotes. If you’re interested in how Elementalist Lux was implemented, check out our previous article. I’m excited to bring you another article about an ultimate skin, Gun Goddess Miss Fortune, and the technology it took to bring her to players.

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Posted by Eric Friedman


Runes Reforged: A Technical Retro

Hey folks! We’re going to take a trip back in time. The year is now 20xx, and we’ve decided that it’s finally time to send one of League of Legends’ most long standing, revered or reviled features (depending on who you ask) to the meme graveyard.

That’s right - it’s time to retire runes and masteries.

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Posted by Dave Le