Riot and the Sunk Cost Fallacy

When designing the GreatForge RPG system, on two different occasions that I can remember (and probably a few that I can't), we ran into enormous tangles of problems so bad that we had to scrap everything and start over. A system would throw out an issue. We'd try to correct that, and a new problem would pop up, and that solution would show two more problems, and we'd figure out that the system itself had to be taken out. That would unravel the systems that relied on it, and we'd end up tossing the whole thing and started over. We had the luxury of doing that, because we were purely a hobby group, doing this because we loved doing it.

In economics, the sunk cost fallacy (also known in game theory as the Concorde fallacy) is (roughly paraphrased) the impulse to continue down a dead-end path for fear of losing the resources already sunk into it. You can't just drop it all; you put too much time and money into this to just waste it by starting over. Maybe, if you sink more into it, you can salvage it all. But it just digs you deeper. You've thrown good money after bad.

Sometimes, this is unavoidable. The ones signing your paycheck aren't going to be happy if you tell them that you're throwing away the past few months of work. It's easy to understand why they might see it as throwing away those months of money (it isn't, really; time spent screwing up is time spent learning what does and doesn't work, but that's a whole different discussion). But it doesn't mean that nothing can get thrown away.

Riot Games, the studio behind League of Legends, is not shy about throwing out bad ideas. The champion Evelynn hinged on a binary stealth mechanic; either her opponents could see her and she had no fun, or they couldn't and they had no fun. Riot removed her from the rotation, and then completely redesigned her. She kept the theme of an assassin who could sneak around, but stealth stopped being an integral part of her kit and turned into a nice bonus on top of her burst damage.

With their big tournament over, they're starting a new Season and shaking up everything. Items that were too bad or too good have been reworked or trashed. Masteries have been completely redone, radically changing how certain character types play. The Support role is now more dynamic and exciting, with new items and sources of gold.

I've always liked Riot for their open communication and dedication to quality and detail. This just makes me like them even more.