Roughly 4 years ago, I joined Riot as employee #30-something. At the time, it consisted of an inconveniently laid-out office, where "Conference room 2" and "Conference room 3" were shared stairwells we had with other tenants, the pizza box grease stains had somehow sank into the carpet, and our office dinner program was a combination of Guinsoo's carne asada cooked up on the balcony, the snack bar (which was invariably down to those oreo 100 calorie packs), and coffee.
We've always questioned if what we are doing will be able to meet the expectations of gamers, and that time was no different. Thinking it through, we were just unsure on so many things... we were optimistically hoping that we could achieve 10 or 20 thousand peak concurrent users within 6 months of launch if we did a good job. I think we did a lot of things well with the game at launch, but we also have had a lot of hiccups (and outright disasters), and we are extremely thankful that you guys were patient with us when things were not good (not launching with a store, unstable servers, and play balance on the original Xin Zhao), and gave us positive reinforcement when we did well.
Thanks for making this happen, LoL players... Both for giving us a chance, and for letting us continue to do our best to bring you the most fun game we can.
- Zileas