Hey folks,
We have an exciting update for you today. This autumn, our team is going to visit a couple of regional offices. The first is Berlin, Germany. We will be there between the 7th and 10th of August. Then in September we will head to Seoul, South Korea.
Our team has two key goals going into these trips. Primarily, we will get face time with developers who haven’t been able to come to LA. This includes everyone from hobbyist developers to esports teams. We will also be setting time with regional Rioters to continue to build strategies for the growth of the ecosystem.
By traveling to these regions the 3PE team will be able to have meaningful conversations with local companies, connect them with local Rioters, and scale our ability to positively impact the ecosystem. On the Riot side, this helps us build strong bonds with the regional offices. This allows us to plan strategically for the future as we roll out new API, features and more.
If you are in Seoul or Berlin and want to meet up with us, please reach out to us through an app note or through the developer discord (discord.gg/riotgamesdevrel). We would love an opportunity for a face to face conversation with as many members of our community as possible.
This work, while important, does have a cost. In order to travel and work with regional offices and the developers in those regions we need to spend a lot of time planning, organizing and executing this plan. The time spent on this journey is taking up the time we have traditionally spent on the hackathon. This means that there will not be a Riot hackathon this year.
This was a tough decision for us. The hackathon is a really fun event, that is also fun for us to work on. However, the Riot hackathon was limited to developers that had the ability to take time off and could travel to LA. A sizeable amount of our community cannot do either. So, every year we do a hackathon these devs are always left out.
Similarly, only LA Rioters had the opportunity to meet and work with the community during the hackathon. Regional trips give our team the opportunity to meet closely with Rioters in KR and EU. This will allow our team to have a much better understanding of how the regional teams work, which will surface new opportunities for us to connect developers to local Rioters in meaningful ways.
This gives us a deeper understanding about how we can help grow and support the community worldwide. When it comes down to it, we had to make a choice between tradition and impact.
We understand that this change might create pain for the dedicated hackathon community. We know there is a small, committed group of hackers that regularly look forward to the Riot hackathon. We recognize that this is a tradeoff; visiting regions instead of hosting a hackathon. We will measure the value of that tradeoff over time to see if it is worth it. Our team wants to be smart about this decision and will hold off on making any commitments until we better understand the impact this tradeoff will have on our community, which cannot be done until some time well into the future.
While we will not be taking formal feedback on this decision right now we will be seeking it in 2020. Also, while we are traveling you may experience reduced response times by our team. If you have issues that need to be resolved or questions answered please make sure to reach out to us before the trips.
Thank you for being a part of developer community and please feel free to reach out if you are in one of the regions we are visiting.
-Gene
