Riot opens up about Wild Rift's developmental priorities and highlights its troubleshooting plans 

Riot's Game Director Alan “Mirross” Moore recently shared his thoughts on Wild Rift's server issues and highlighted some of its key focus points over the next few months.

According to Mirross, Riot wanted to be more transparent about its development priorities. He threw some light on the organization's key areas during the current investigation.

On his dev blog, Mirross spoke about improving the overall gaming experience for Wild Rift players and addressed some of Riot's top priorities.

This included issues with matchmaking, latency, and in-game cheating. He also hinted at the introduction of new content and hopes of spreading the game across various new regions as soon as possible.

Riot dev talks about Wild Rift’s plans for the next few months, highlights matchmaking and latency issues

Matchmaking

Screengrab from Wildrift

This area has been Riot's prime focus for quite a while. The devs are now planning to tighten the rank spread between players in the same game and make matchmaking better and balanced.

To Riot, some variance is acceptable here, considering that players at different ranks can have the same MMR. It will keep working to make the matches fairer as time goes on.

These are the areas where Riot is working on to keep matchmaking healthy in Wild Rift:

1. Ensuring that the skill level between and within teams is even so that matches are fair.
2. Keeping matchmaking durations short.
3. Creating matches with people close to a player so that he or she can communicate more easily with lower latency.
4. Providing a player with more choices over his or her position in-game.

The devs have already managed to reduce the rank spread to a significant extent. They will keep working on the same and try to balance this as much as possible.

Latency

Lag is one of the most infuriating aspects of multiplayer games. Alan Moore explained that latency varies from region to region and is impacted by the internet service providers or local networks.

This variation in latency makes it difficult for developers to evaluate individual situations and apply one-size fixes.

Here are a bunch of targeted improvements:

• Latency optimizations will be done in all regions, and that might feature some broader improvements like spinning up new servers.
• Riot will focus on improving backend logic, which will determine the specific game servers the players are getting connected to.
• The devs will work with the regional service providers to optimize the traffic routes.
• There will be an active investigation to understand all the issues with ping spikes before Riot can prioritize fixes.

Cheating

Image via Riot Games

Here's a statement from Riot:

"Cheaters have no place in Wild Rift (unless you’re Twisted Fate)."

Mirross has ensured that Riot is working diligently behind the scenes to address cheaters, cheats, and everyone behind unethical gaming practices. The management won’t be communicating frequently on this subject, as it doesn’t want to give too much information away on its detection tools.

Riot has made it clear that a player will be permanently banned from Wild Rift if found cheating in the game.

Launching new regions

Image via Riot Games

As stated by the game director, one of the biggest priorities of Riot is to ensure the availability of Wild Rift to a larger global community.

Launching new regions requires immense collective effort by hundreds of Rioters across development, engineering, publishing, localization, and countless other departments. Each set of launches present new challenges and constraints on the teams and pipelines.

Wild Rift's open beta version was already out in North Africa, Europe, Russia, Oceania, and the SEA nations. Recently, the American server's launch date has been scheduled for March 29th. With further launches under Riot's belt this year, the management has made many of the processes smoother and more reliable over the past few months.

Champions

Champions are the foundation of content in Wild Rift. According to Riot, each champion should feel fun, unique, of high quality, and authentic. Wild Rift developers have been spending thousands of hours developing and testing the champions before they come out.

Mirross has assured fans that the devs are on track to release two champs per month on average in 2021.

What's next in Wild Rift?

Image via Riot Games

The director has hinted at the upcoming "Big Moments" in Wild Rift, featuring patch 2.2 to be released on March 30th. The patch will include tons of new in-game features, including big events like the Yordle Expedition and Lunar Beast. The new events might involve League PC and other games across the League ecosystem.