How Research at Riot Games Informs Player-Focused Decisions

Riot Games is coming to MIT to talk with us about how data and research influence the design of their game, League of Legends. We have two speakers:

How Research at Riot Games Informs Player-Focused Decisions
Speaker: Genevieve Conley

At Riot Games, we view research as a pathway to collaborate with players and make player-focused, data-informed decisions. Specifically, this talk will delve into: our research philosophy, how we distinguish between “data-informed” and “data-driven” decision making, and examples of research that have impacted the design of recent additions to the game.

Genevieve Conley is an MIT alum and user researcher at Riot Games, specializing in personalization content and the new player onboarding experience. She’s been working in, on, or around games for four years and has worn many hats during that time– most of them silly. Genevieve loves ultimate Frisbee, college football, and the Olympics because – hey – sports are games, too.

Scaling to Track Millions of Games In Near Real Time
Speaker: Garrett “Grizzly” Eardley

Riot Games’s League of Legends supports millions of concurrent players at any given moment of the day. At that scale, tracking even simple gameplay statistics results in the creation of terabytes of data that must be aggregated and presented to players in near real-time. Scaling the system and developing additional features became difficult while using Riot’s initial technology choice for statistics. To enable rapid iteration at scale, Riot is building a new stats system using more flexible technology. In this talk, I’ll describe our legacy tech stack, its challenges, and our next generation stats system.

Garrett “Grizzly” Eardley is a software engineer at Riot Games. He is intimately acquainted with the difficulties of scaling the distributed systems that power League of Legends’ 67+ million monthly active players. Garrett holds an M.S. in Computer Science from Washington University in St. Louis, where he currently resides with his wife, children, and beard.