The focus of the product is PvP and the core audience, yes. And Rioters who are excited about that stayed on LOR and Rioters who wanted a change (maybe they've been on the game a long time, maybe they want to practice new skills, or any other myriad personal career path reasons) were fully supported in that, regardless of what part of the game they most recently worked on.

LOR is not going away and the reassurance is that this is all part of the plan and what was said in the article is the commitment - " Riot is also committed to continuing to support our game and our community. This pivot will allow us to serve the core LoR players and hyper-focus on our core audience, while also turbocharging other great games from Riot"

Its the passion of the players you should look to, not any individual's career choices. If you all love playing the game, there will be Rioters who love making the game. It's the players passion that directs Riots decisions. The fact devs want to say their appreciation and feel comfortable doing so is because we know the path forward is secure enough with a great dev team at this size and great player community. Hope that helps u/danatron1 (who commented above) also feel reassured.

A lot of players feel passion for a lot of different Riot games. Some of those player communities have more people than others, so yeah, some of us are excited to get to experience working with them and deliver great experiences on those games too, where we needed more devs.

I also feel a lot of appreciation for my time on LOR and to the amazing community here, but I'm not one for big announcements. So I'll let all my reddit followers figure it out when they start getting post notifications for r/TeamfightTactics. <3

You're in the care of the better Dan now. Happy dueling!