League of Legends and Wild Rift have many similarities—but not everything is exactly the same.
Fans of League have been asking for one Wild Rift feature for a long time, and the devs at Riot Games have finally explained why it hasn’t been added to the game.
Wild Rift developer, Kam “boourns” Fung, shared his story on creating the pick order swap in the mobile game and detailed why the popular feature hasn’t been brought over to League.
Pick order swap allows Wild Rift players to swap their pick order during the champion select. For example, if one player gets seeded first in their team but would rather pick last for the sake of counter-picking, they can trade their pick order with someone else on the team.
Boourns said that adding a feature to League like this would require a lot of work and would basically force the developer team to remake the client from scratch.
“The answer is not actually spaghetti code. It’s really more about the opportunity you have when rebuilding the game from scratch for a new audience,” boourns said.
On PC, players have the option to trade champions at the end of the champion select. But rebuilding the game with the order pick feature wouldn’t be valuable for players in the current state of the game, according to boourns
The dev explained that adding pick order trade was easy and beneficial in Wild Rift but not so much in League. In the mobile game, the costs were much lower due to it being relatively new. League, on the other hand, is already far too complex.
“I had proposed this when I was working on the champion select redesign on PC,” boourns said. His first designs were “a bit too complex,” however. Later, he moved on to the Wild Rift team, where he and the game’s developer team successfully turned the idea into reality.
