Welcome to 2016, Riot Games

The long and short of it: Riot Games are finally giving players a Replay feature on the League of Legends client.

About. Damn. Time.

On Thursday, October 6, 2016, Riot Games announced that Replays will be available for download as well as viewing on the League of Legends client come the pre-season, around January 2017.

The feature comes with some truly useful bells and whistles, including the industry standard scrubbing functions to easily navigate footage, and new innovations like an annotated timeline with footnotes on important game milestones.

Also included in the new  game feature is the ability to easily clip highlight-reel worthy plays for easy sharing on social media.

Your replays are downloadable from the end game screen and watchable on a similar interface as the current Spectator mode. The clips and highlights are stored directly onto your computer.

The Good: Finally, commitment to the “ESPOOOORTS” Mantra

Let me say this right now: What a wonderful move by Riot Games.

Credit should be given where credit is due. The ability to watch game footage is an integral part of getting better as a competitor.

During the 2010 NBA finals, when the then-defending champion Kobe Bryant was preparing to defend the title against the Boston Celtics, he admitted that he has, “plagiarized everything in his basketball portfolio”.

In an interview with ESPN’s Jackie MacMullan, Bryant said that: “I seriously have stolen all my moves from the greatest players.”

Bryant, whose work ethic and insane training regimen are the stuff of legends and high-school commencement speeches, said that he improved his play through breaking down hours and hours of film of the greats. His inhuman feats on the hardwood are a direct result of focused study of his own play, his opponents, his idols and then emulating them into perfection. Until they were a part of his repertoire.

The result is an unstoppable force of nature in Basketball and a paragon of competitive excellence.

The importance of being able to study hours of film footage cannot be overstated. As people, we are prone to developing blind-sides to our own imperfection. Understanding that you blowing your Flash in lane wasn’t “#Worth” but instead a boneheaded move is made easier by having video proof.

So to hear that Riot Games is going to implement such an impactful feature for the health of their competitive environment is such a welcome change of pace from the unyielding Riot Games of recent times. To hear that they are also including social features for those of us not willing to pour slavish devotion onto a videogame is equally a nice touch. It shows that competitive features aren’t just meant for the 1%.

The features are sensible too. Having milestones on the timeline gives coaches, analysts and players an easier time to navigate through entire games. I know for my own work that it gets frustrating and time-consuming to write down timecodes. Being able to instantly find most (not all) important moments and hit rewind/fast-forward around them makes the actual work of analyzing easier.

The feature could use a little more data points to it, but I’m not hard to please. Where we are right now in data-collection for League matches can use some updating but replays are really the more important thing right now.

The Bad: This is what it takes, Riot?

Now before we get into it, let me make one thing clear: I am not disparaging Riot Games for listening to the wants and needs of the community.

In fact, I welcome it. This is what needs to happen in 2016. You have a lot of data and feedbacking coming in from some of the most dedicated audience and fan-bases in any industry. Take advantage of it.

The Replays feature comes on the back of other community-driven changes: the return of Solo Queue, branded in-game content, and crowdfunding to the Worlds prize pot.

Neither am I disparaging Riot Games for only acting as a result of media pressure. Again, this is what needs to happen. The Fourth Estate’s duty is to serve as a medium of record and as an amplifier to the voiceless. It’s the press’ job to keep Riot honest and to call out the PR/marketing jargon.

What am I critiquing Riot Games for then? The fact that it wasn’t only the community and the media that covers their coveted game that was enough for them to put in sensible features into their game.

What it took for them to finally succumb was the market pressure from rivals. In the end, the money talked and Riot listened.

It’s no secret that the industry is talking more and more about Overwatch. Some of League of Legends’ icons such as Christopher “MonteCristo” Mykkles and Duncan “Thorin” Shields have started to make content for the space. There’s no shortage of write-ups, graphs and news coming out of South Korea, where League of Legends’ stranglehold in the PC Bang market has been loosened overnight by Overwatch.

And what contributed to Overwatch’s runaway success? The fact that you can share your own highlights socially through the Play of the Game feature.

Lest I be accused of shilling for Blizzard (Oh, Blizzard. You and I still have to talk about Hearthstone competitive. Also, please apologize for StarCraft 2 in the wake of Neeb’s victory), let’s get one thing clear: the fact that Overwatch doesn’t have a replay function or that you can’t natively record Plays of the Game drives me crazy. For the exact same reasons I stated above.

But there’s a difference with a game release that’s barely a few months old and a game released in 2010. The League community has been asking for replays since 2013.

That’s why, upon seeing the feature on Riot’s announcements of a clipping and sharing option, that immediately triggered the conspiratorial region of my mind. Could it be that this was the only feature Riot Games wanted to implement? Did they start here and went back to include full replays just to save face?

Perhaps we shall never know. For what it’s worth, I’m just glad that we finally have replays. I’m only disappointed that it took this long.

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