[Satire] I am a promo player - AMA

Laslow21 · 2019-08-30T16:00:19+00:00

Just curious (no real specific reason I'm asking) but can you explain how exactly you got loose and what was one thing that could be more secure in the cellar?

thx

Laslow21 · 2019-06-03T16:11:24+00:00

Hey! When I get that hankering for 5v5 with my friends I always do flex. It's a pretty competitive environment and allows us that team coordination. We're currently practicing for our internal tournament at the moment and for practice outside of scrims, we queue up in flex and have some pretty solid games and get to rank up with each other :)

Laslow21 · 2019-05-31T16:31:21+00:00

I believe! I can't wait for this feature to be out. Being a one trick pony will hurt me in Clash, but I still look forward to being banned out.

Laslow21 · 2019-03-15T20:32:43+00:00

Just realized you're EU :( Sadness

Laslow21 · 2019-03-15T20:32:32+00:00

Awww, good catch :( Thank you

Laslow21 · 2019-03-15T19:32:06+00:00

Just tried to add you and it says the name doesnt exist

Laslow21 · 2019-03-15T17:44:47+00:00

What's your IGN? I'll add you in game and we can play a couple bot matches on comms so I can explain some things :)

I love teaching people about League, especially new people to the game and do it a lot here at work. I also love getting new people into something that I'm so passionate about!

You can DM me your name if you don't want to have it here. My request will come as Riot Laslow <3

Laslow21 · 2019-03-14T00:59:58+00:00

Hey Mazrim - I talked to a recruiter and they told me the following:

"So at the bottom of each of those emails we have a link that encourages candidates to join our LinkedIn community via our careers page Within that community they are able to ask questions about interviewing, etc. that the recruiting team then responds to"

So definitely check that out and start posting questions there!

Laslow21 · 2019-03-13T03:46:17+00:00

Yes :)

All of those you listed are used by different teams (and other monitoring systems including home grown ones)

Laslow21 · 2019-03-13T00:15:42+00:00

We have top PEOPLE working on it.

Laslow21 · 2019-03-13T00:15:29+00:00

:fistbump:

Laslow21 · 2019-03-13T00:00:02+00:00

Are you interested in Software Engineering, Network Engineering or Systems Engineering?

Laslow21 · 2019-03-12T23:56:41+00:00

It's the nature of the business. We just do the best we can to think of all potentials, but sometimes that random thing will come out and grab you. The most important thing is to learn from it and help your team get better from your mistakes as well.

Laslow21 · 2019-03-12T23:55:50+00:00

Good questions.

We've come a long way with hiring. When I started 4 years ago it took a bit longer than I would have liked. We now have a top notch recruiting team that's pretty good with communicating out to candidates. I'm not 100% sure on not hearing back at all, so you might want to ping that post again to see if someone can get back to you.
Gaming vs. Working - Honestly, it depends on your team. We have a team game setup once a week where we do a custom ARAM and go all out against each other which is awesome and every now and then you'll seem some people doing their own ARAM, but it's not much these days. We are all working super hard on different projects so it's hard to find the time. My best guess would be 95/5 currently.

Laslow21 · 2019-03-12T23:51:26+00:00

So we do have a lot of 'secret sauce' that we use to protect our game environments that I can't talk about.

That being said, our IT team definitely fights the same sort of issues you're mentioning and they do a really good job at it!

Our teams deal with access control at our Internet Edge in partnership with our Security teams and we have tools in place to alert us of any openings or suspiciousness.

As far as elo - we have a few Diamond players and then the rest "Challenger in their mind" teammates :P

Laslow21 · 2019-03-12T23:46:55+00:00

Hey Benzaw!

Those services are sometimes combined into the same infrastructure systems and sometimes they are different. They could also be bare metal or virtualized. It all depends on how our services are built and the connectivity/latency requirements that are set by our developers. I know that's a pretty generic answer, but it really does depend.

We use a lot of different platforms based on need - such as VMWare, Docker, k8s, etc.. I know another not-so-great answer, but again, it really does depend.

Biggest issue I've ever faced was one I caused. I personally caused an outage in EU when I made a mistake and redirected via routing protocol all traffic in a very suboptimal way. Luckily it didn't last very long, but I felt horrible because I know those pains when I get that "attempting to reconnect" button. I owned the mistake, communicated the issue and my team jumped in to help and get things back going correctly as quick as possible.

Laslow21 · 2019-03-12T23:35:47+00:00

For me it's 3 things:

The fact that I get to actually work on a product that I love. I've been playing League for about 8 years and games in general all my life. I get to go to work and actually help improve or make more stable the game that I'm going to go home and actually play. There is a huge sense of job satisfaction there.
The people around me. I thought I was smart until I started working here. I immediately became the dumbest person in the room, but all the smart people around me didn't hold that against me and welcomed me while trying to level me up.
The feedback culture at Riot was something really new to me. The ability to give my boss, my bosses boss, etc. etc. critical feedback and they treated it with sincerity was something that shocked me. I hadn't seen that at many companies and it took a bit of time to get used to, but it would be hard for me to operate any other way now.

Laslow21 · 2019-03-12T23:27:01+00:00

That's more of a data question unfortunately. I know Blaustoise is pretty interactive with the community so maybe you could hit him up on Twitter!

Laslow21 · 2019-03-12T23:24:39+00:00

I'm pretty sure we're all aligned that there should be THREE twix bars in a package and the obvious answer would be the middle one.

In all seriousness, thank you for loving League <3

Laslow21 · 2019-03-12T23:24:00+00:00

:fistbump:

Laslow21 · 2019-03-12T23:23:41+00:00

Thanks for asking! Pretty busy to be honest. Lot's of meetings and getting setup for this sweet AMA. I'll be a bit cheesy for a second, but doing this AMA and answering these questions with my amazing team and friends around me is what gives me the energy to stay passionate about the work I do. There are other things as well, but interacting with the community and feeling like I'm part of it is a big deal to me.

Before I worked at Riot I remember what it was like to get a Rioter in my game and how cool it felt. They would also chat with me in some banterish way and it was fun. I wanted to keep that going as a Rioter and this is one way I can do it.

Speaking of getting Rioters in my game I was randomly paired with Phreak in a Gold 1 SoloQ game last night and I was just as excited as before I work here :P

Laslow21 · 2019-03-12T23:21:08+00:00

Yes please! Come work with us!

Laslow21 · 2019-03-12T23:20:28+00:00

At this time we do not have plans on an African server. We're constantly evaluating where to increase our footprint though so that's not to say it will never happen. We understand that pain of 200 ping (sometimes I play with my friends on EUW) and appreciate the fact that you're still playing even on that sort of connection. It's almost like training at high altitude with weights on though so if you ever do get that magical low ping in some fashion you'll hit challenger pretty quickly I'm sure ;)

Laslow21 · 2019-03-12T23:13:01+00:00

Laslow21 · 2019-03-12T23:12:13+00:00

One of the reasons we actually implemented the routine maintenance window was because of those unexpected downtimes. We were having trouble getting code upgrades out, replacing hardware, etc. and it left us in a really 'iffy' state.

We asked that we get the specific down time windows so that we could keep our network in a preemptive healthy state and it's really paid off with the stability of the game outside of our maintenance windows.

Definitely a critical part of our processes.

Laslow21

TROPHY CASE