Notorius Reputations

The mystery of where Ghostcrawler’s next opportunity has led him has been revealed: Lead Game Designer at… Riot Games. As in, Lead Game Designer for League of Legends. Needless to say, some corners of the internet flipped their shit. A response from Riot Games illuminated some of the reasons he got hired on:

A lot of the things we want to focus on with game health this year (and preseason is a kick-off to this effort) is primarily around fixing a lot of the old problems. After finishing up support (IE the gold item particulars + Annie problem), we want to focus on adding choice and depth by taking a HARD look at “ball of stats” stuff so we can actually introduce interesting stuff with trade-offs.

I have never actually played League of Legends, so I cannot speak to any of the complexities of the game. But while the jokes about Ghostcrawler balancing things write themselves, it’s worth a slight reflection on how, pretty indisputably, WoW is more balanced class and spec-wise than it has ever been. My prediction is that he’s going to tank LoL all right… in the aggro sense. It sorta sucks how his reputation automatically makes him an undeserved (IMO) target of scorn. But hey, if you’re good at something, I guess getting paid (more?) to do exactly that thing isn’t so bad.

Posted on January 15, 2014, in Miscellany and tagged , , , , . Bookmark the permalink. 2 Comments.

  1. As an old time LoL player I must say that their their balance design decisions were one of the main reason I lost interest to it . Morello’s approach was to circle nerf everything. All this lead to is that your favourite heroes were nerfed and new fotm emerged so you had to play new ones just to be on the curve. And then every patch another nerf and so on and so forth – I always thought it was partially to sell more skins (their revenue model)

    I have no idea what ghostcrawler did (as I stopped playing wow 6 month after its release), but I dont think he can do much worse than Morello

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    • Hah. I’m sure there would be people who claim that Ghostcrawler did the same thing with WoW – balance changes tended to roller-coaster from patch to patch – but at the end of the day, “Bring the player, not the class” won out. WoW is more balanced than it has ever been. There are FotM, but it isn’t like in TBC when 2 out of 3 specs for a class were useless.

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