League Of Legends

Arbitrary_sl said:

It was the most negative experience I have ever had during the hiring process in my life.

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Whaaat? Why was it so awful?

I somewhat agree with that post, but Lucian is much more versatile than a normal build guide goes into. You want to build around your team comp + their team comp. If you're getting in team fights a LOT, a more traditional ADC build is very viable and probably better than AD caster. If you can siege/poke forever, AD caster build is great. I disagree that you should EVER build 2 Zephyrs, building a Zephyr + PD or Shiv is way more useful in almost all situations. PD and Zeph cost the same, PD has slightly less MS but same IAS and has crit, and you can't benefit from tenacity more than once. You don't need more CD if you have Cleaver + Zephyr + Ghostblade like he was suggesting I believe.

Generally, you don't want to have more than 1 'gimmick' item on any ADC too. Trinity, Ghostblade, BotRK all fall under that. Low raw AD, don't scale with multipliers well (IAS/Crit), etc. One can add a lot, 2 leaves you doing less damage than you would otherwise be doing. Black Cleaver doesn't add much itself for that matter, but enough other stats to be worth it with Lucian in that build.

I had been playing Shaco since he came out and he's been a pretty disliked character for almost his entire history. Over time he got buggier and buggier and buggier so I put a bunch of footage together demonstrating everything that didn't work on him. This is S1 territory and at the time he was regarded as awful. He mostly was. His boxes were visible through the fog of war, his boxes wouldn't always fear, they didn't provide vision to some bushes, stealthed characters could see and reveal them, it was bad. I posted the video on the official forums and on SA and was told by Brackhar that he'd move it along. I was pretty happy with that.

A few weeks later I get contacted by one of Riot's engineers through my YouTube account and compliments me on the bug compilation and I half-jokingly ask if maybe I could get a Shaco skin out of it and he goes and unlocks every Shaco skin on my account (which is where I got my Nutcracko) and gives me a 10 game IP boost. Awesome customer relations stuff. I was pretty tickled at that.

Then a few weeks after that I get friended out of nowhere by one of Riot's QA people, Kismet, and he asks me if I had ever thought about applying for a job at Riot. I hadn't and he says that he thinks I should. We talk for a bit and I decide to go ahead and give it a try. This is a bottom of the rung QA position but I know people that turned those kind of basic jobs in the gaming industry into a career so I tell him I'll put together a resume. I send one out and that leads into a phone interview with Kismet. Then I have a phone interview with Veigar, the head of the department. I take some dumb online intelligence test and then I have another phone interview after that. They want to fly me out. They also will set me up for one day in a hotel room if I want but I don't really want to impose so I go with a same-day flight back home.

I fly out there and the first thing I do is I meet Morello and spend maybe 45 minutes talking with him about the game. I think he's a dick on the League forums and I hate his buzzwords but in the flesh he was very personable and fun to talk with. I'm told I'll talk with Veigar next. One of the other QA people comes in. Veigar is in a meeting and can't make it. This person doesn't know why I'm there. The interview starts to go poorly. He asks me questions like this -

"Alright, so I'm on the third floor and I send you a text asking for you to run me up a pencil to my office. Someone else sends you a text asking you for a pen and they are on the first floor. Where do you go?" He says "why did you apply to Riot? With a resume like this you could have applied...at any gaming company." He doesn't believe anything he just said. I don't have much experience in this situation and I don't know how to salvage it. From the moment I got there I have been trying to look and act as calm and professional as I possibly can. I try my best to answer the questions I'm asked but I freeze up when he asks me if I have an experience working on a team and I cannot think of anything. I completely forget my entire time in the Army. He tells me that next I'll talk with Kismet.

Then the woman who was my intermediary during all this, the human resources person, comes in and tells me that the interview process is over and puts my on a cab back to the airport. My flight isn't for 13 hours. I buy a copy of Full Dark No Stars by King to try and stay awake and it is god awful.

No one had any idea who I was or why I was there, I was flown 2000 miles to be asked the same kind of questions that I was asked when I applied for a job at Walmart, and after talking with two people for less than an hour and a half they were flying me back. I am later told that I wasn't enthusiastic enough about being there. The job paid less 11 dollars an hour. Eleven dollars an hour in Santa Monica.

That's just shitty management and if I would have got that pencil question I would have flipped a lid......

How old were you by the way? What a fucking shitty ordeal. What kind of fucking stupid question is that anyway? Fuck you. I'll get a cup of coffee first. Also, it's pretty stupid to not be interested in someone for a fucking shit QA job because they weren't "excited enough". What the fuck does that mean?

Truthfully, I was expecting a Belair reference at the end of that post.

edit to add: Poppy question -

I played vs. tank-Got last night in the one game I got a chance to play. I'm not sure what I could of done, though I think I won the lane. I was tower camped the whole time but outfarmed him. He was literally outside turret range for 12 minutes and my jungler never came up. Talk about super over extended. Anyway, we won the game while mid/bot fed Anivia 18/0 in like 15 minutes. That shit is scary.

Amzin_sl said:

I somewhat agree with that post, but Lucian is much more versatile than a normal build guide goes into. You want to build around your team comp + their team comp. If you're getting in team fights a LOT, a more traditional ADC build is very viable and probably better than AD caster. If you can siege/poke forever, AD caster build is great. I disagree that you should EVER build 2 Zephyrs, building a Zephyr + PD or Shiv is way more useful in almost all situations. PD and Zeph cost the same, PD has slightly less MS but same IAS and has crit, and you can't benefit from tenacity more than once. You don't need more CD if you have Cleaver + Zephyr + Ghostblade like he was suggesting I believe.

Generally, you don't want to have more than 1 'gimmick' item on any ADC too. Trinity, Ghostblade, BotRK all fall under that. Low raw AD, don't scale with multipliers well (IAS/Crit), etc. One can add a lot, 2 leaves you doing less damage than you would otherwise be doing. Black Cleaver doesn't add much itself for that matter, but enough other stats to be worth it with Lucian in that build.

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I looked at the thread when it was around 15 pages. It is now pushing 70 pages. Did the guy change his original post? I seem to remember him saying something about going 2 dorans -> ghostblade -> LW. Anyway, I going to go through it again (on page 10-ish) but it seems like the TL R is to rush a bloodthirster (not trinity) which is what I always do but it also looks like there is some consensus to not build trinity at all which I am not sure about (I love the move speed and phage proc too much). My favorite thing about Lucian is that you can play him like an ad caster so I almost always build him so I can dish out mean spell damage at a relatively safe distance during team fights. My normal build is 1 dorans -> BT-> boots1-> Ghostblade-> CDR boots -> LW + TF -> BC. This gives me tons of raw ad, flat armor pen, CDR, and the ghostblade steroid that jives with his ult like peas and carrots. This gives Lucian's mid game combo's silly burst damage and makes it so he can use his ult to inbetween team fights to push towers or kill dragon/baron.

Draegan_sl said:

edit to add: Poppy question -

I played vs. tank-Got last night in the one game I got a chance to play. I'm not sure what I could of done, though I think I won the lane. I was tower camped the whole time but outfarmed him. He was literally outside turret range for 12 minutes and my jungler never came up. Talk about super over extended. Anyway, we won the game while mid/bot fed Anivia 18/0 in like 15 minutes. That shit is scary.

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Tank-Got is an Urgot who builds tanky I presume? I have never laned vs an Urgot as Poppy but him being ranged and having a DoT makes him a very strong pick against Poppy. I would start dorans blade or rush a vamp scepter and be super aggressive levels 2-4 if he is rushing a tear (this is when Poppy out-trades almost every top laner anyway. By alot.). I have also found that building tear-> tiamat-> hydra-> Sheen -> manamune ->Trinity is pretty good at helping you recover from a terrible laning phase, your team just has to survive without much help from you until late game. The idea is to use Tiamat for very fast creep farms and to threaten split pushing, which Poppy is good at since she is very mobile and can escape pretty much anything, including a 5-man ambush.

I couldn't leave lane because my Jungler never came top to help me push out the wave so I could b. I ended up first B with 2200 gold from farming. I started Dorans Shield for sustain and it worked. I only died to Urgot because I was bored and attacked him. I would of won if I wasn't 50% health when I went HAM.

I've been building Poppy:

Sheen > Boots > Trin > CDR Boots then whatever. Gunblade, Tiamat, PD/IE.

I'm also running 2X/0/5 I think with CDR blues, Armor Yellows, Hybrid Pen Marks and LS quints or LSx2 ADx1 Quints.

Draegan_sl said:

How old were you by the way? What a fucking shitty ordeal. What kind of fucking stupid question is that anyway? Fuck you. I'll get a cup of coffee first. Also, it's pretty stupid to not be interested in someone for a fucking shit QA job because they weren't "excited enough". What the fuck does that mean?

Truthfully, I was expecting a Belair reference at the end of that post.

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I was 31.

I posted the story on SA when it happened and was contacted by RiotDaemon over it and he asked around and he told me that the interview process didn't go any further because "I was not enthusiastic enough about the job" and that I didn't have any experience working in a team. The second reason is my fault like I said. I was so thrown for a loop by the person interviewing me that I forgot I was ever in the army. I built Bailey Bridges! I was the guy who put bolts into place! It was a critical but small job that taught me not to keep the heavy lifters waiting!

Both interviews took place in a small office on the main floor of the building. I didn't get shown anything, go anywhere, or see anyone. I still have no idea what I was even flown out for. As I was getting up having been told I would talk to Kismet next (huzzah, I know him! we got along good!) I asked how Xerath was as he went live that morning. He said he didn't know.

"Oh, yeah. What summoner level are you?"

From initial contact to sitting in LAX for 12 hours waiting to fly home empty handed took over three weeks. I had been spending a couple hours per night looking at maps of the area and scouring Craigslist trying to find a place to live and how I would get to work and where I would by groceries and all of the little details that make such a thing necessary. This is 10.75 in Santa Monica dollars (don't worry, there's plenty of overtime). I could make the same nominal amount right here in Wisconsin at a distribution center and have more purchasing power. That's one of the things that pisses me off the most thinking about it even today. Not enthusiastic enough? Do you have any idea the kind of logistics necessary to get me from Wisconsin to a permanent residence in California and showing up to work every day? All of the minutia there is to plan? How much I've been thinking over the last three weeks about the decisions I am undergoing? I am pouring all of my time every day into League of Legends in one way or the other. I'm your guy.

During those 12 hours waiting at LAX for my flight home, desperately trying to stay awake with nothing more than Stephen King's latest terrible post accident post alcoholism novel to keep me going I started to change. I went from bright eyed and shiny happy with my Nutcracko reward for doing a silly little bug video (and all that shit got fixed, score) to disliking almost everything about the company aside from the game itself. I love the game and the love stops there.

My whole disbelief in this is that they actually flew you out for a really shitty QA job. That shit doesn't happen, and for them to just say "meh not enthusiastic enough" is retarded. I wonder what kind of enthusiasm they wanted? Maybe they wanted blow jobs.

I'm sure that they are accustomed to having kids from UCLA with debt up their eyebrows come in and blow everyone in the room.

edit - they hired Jerle so yeah, blowjobs. It's the only thing that fits.

It was a while ago now but it reinforces what we were all bitching about a few pages ago, organization of the company. They just keep coming off as a bunch of random people doing random things and none of it getting checked until the public react to it and someone higher goes 'oh, wtf is that?'. That speaks of terrible management practices. Not terrible as in the kind that employees hate, terrible as in actually bad for the company, employees, and players.

It's what happens when game designers and developers get into a position of management. They tend not to know how to run teams, manage expectations and/or deal with people. This is more of a broader statement that can be applied to any company/industry that has technical people that move upwards into positions of bigger responsibility.

You see that shit all the time in the hiring process with all of corporate America though. HR loves to use internal references to create a hiring pool, but the people doing the interviewing aren't briefed on any of that ahead of time. If the person who recommended you really wants you to get the job he'll follow up with the interviewers for you, but you can't go into an interview thinking that because someone recommended you for it that means anything to the interviewee because more than likely they don't know shit about it.

The pen/pencil question is a question designed to throw you off and see how you critically think. Studies have shown these questions are pretty much useless in determining an employee's success, but they've been very popular for a number of years. It's like that Round Manhole cover question that everyone knows the answer to now. I once had an interviewer as me if I was a piece of office equipment, what type would I be? He didn't give a shit what my answer was, he wanted to hear my response to the question.

Most tech companies, including Google and Microsoft, have banned brain teaser questions like that one. Beyond that, interviews are a crap shoot that relies both on you being prepared and the interviewer asking the right questions in the right way. It is like a game of Magic: The Gathering, you can have an awesome deck with a great game plan but sometimes you will just have shit draws. It is why a lot companies will let you try again after six months.

Sucks you had a bad experience though, seems like Riot was really disorganized at the time in terms of hiring.

Yeah, they have been waning in popularity since like I've said studies have shown they don't accomplish anything, but when Arbitrary interviewed was probably very much when they were in vogue. Or at least not out of vogue like they are today.

Xalara_sl said:

Sucks you had a bad experience though, seems like Riot was really disorganized at the time in terms of hiring.

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That's exactly what I've been told. It's supposed to be way, way better now. That was a time when they were doing crazy mass hiring and the guy interviewing me was probably sick of getting drug away from his job for interviews (the sign in clipboard was full of people there for interviews, free intel). I needed to be all Jazz Hands and I wasn't.

It still angers up my blood thinking about it through. Full Dark No Stars is just so incredibly terrible. I should have taken the fucking hotel room, goddamn it.

edit - I don't know what it is with this preseason but it feels like I'm just unstoppable in the jungle. Things are going so consistently well that I'm not entirely convinced I'm not trapped on a holodeck. No one is punishing me for my antics, no one is counter invading, enemy players are slow to respond when I'm doing shit in the enemy jungle. It's fucking weird.

LoL @ $10.75/hour in Cali. My maid effectively earns that and she no speaky Engrish even. The fact that they felt the position was specialized enough to fly a potential candidate in, yet not worthy enough to pay beyond what a Best Buy employee makes is mind boggling. I assume that's the result of "gamerz" playing "businessman". As for your "enthusiasm" level, I would have answered that it was way up there until the point they revealed the fact that you'd be forced to trick your ass on Hollywood blvd in order to make rent each month, and that free Riot points, hot pockets, and having to give Morello/Scarizard an emotional Handy each day just wasn't enough to make up for it.