So apparently Riot is considering adding touch controls to WR. Get campaigning, people.
Why is the onebox not working someone plz help
Twitter Oneboxing is broken atm due to a bizarro decision by Twitter 
For now, here’s the link: https://twitter.com/VaingloryFeed/status/1271424947760574464?s=20
(I’ve got a fix, but it’s going to require major changes to our Discourse instance to get it installed.)
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Ah. Thanks Hazel.
30303030303030
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I really don’t think they meant that they wanted an outpouring of support for the option. It seems more like a potential feature that could be added, not something to be seriously considered. If it was potentially in the works, it would be coming sooner rather than later, so as not to create a backlog of work for little payoff. VG players were never even a blip on the radar for Riot, so catering just to them would be a financially bad move.
Well, if they have any intention of creating a competitive scene for the mobile platform as well, it might just be worth investing in touch controls.
And it’s worth remembering that Vainglory had >20 million downloads, across all platforms. The issues were player retention and turning a profit, but those are pretty much related to everything but the control scheme.
So purely by the numbers, that’s a fairly solid “blip” on anyone’s radar - even if you can get just a portion of VG’s accumulated playerbase to stick around and spend money.
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There’s no such thing, of course: it’s not like there are 20 million lapsed VG players out there somewhere, just waiting for another MOBA to implement touch controls. 
Remember, too, that “peak VG” occurred in late 2016 or early 2017, and the player base has been declining ever since. I’d be surprised if there were more than a few thousand active players these days, in fact.
It’s pleasant to think that game developers would be interested in targeting the “Vainglory community” – but in reality, it doesn’t exist in any meaningful way any more.
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Hmm. It may be down to semantics, but I would argue that there are some 20 million people out there, who -at some point in time- had an interest in Vainglory; and as you pointed out, peak concurrent users was before joystick controls were even implemented?
Obviously, there’s no gigantic community of people interested in VG right now, but that’s not the case to be made. In fact, that VG went downhill is the best-case-scenario for Riot. Poaching users actively invested in a product is notoriously difficult. Picking up some of those 20 million people who used to play Vainglory, but do not have another mobile MOBA with touch controls to turn to now, should be piss easy.
Don’t you think that some mobile MOBA developer – say Moonton or Tencent or NetEase – would have already added touch controls if they thought it would significantly expand their user base or generate significant additional revenue?
While I liked VG’s touch controls for their intuitiveness, it’s pretty clear that they truly aren’t the best way to play a MOBA … or every MOBA would already have them.
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Sorry, but this actually made me laugh. Riot has 120+ million players playing League every month – it’s not like they really need to worry about finding an audience for Wild Rift 
A competitive scene can exist just fine with joystick controls.
20 million downloads across all platforms over five years is actually laughable. Besides the fact that it’s a pretty meaningless metric, it’s still not impressive.
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I’m sorry, but that looks like a string of logical fallacies to me:
I have no clue what kind of cost-benefit analysis the other companies were running, but if your strategy is to spam casual gamers with ads to the point where you reached just about all of your potential customers, it may not make sense to try and appeal to a different target audience.
An audience, mind you, that in all likelihood already tried your product, and decided it is not what they’re interested in. Even if you were to arrive at the conclusion that the control scheme was the sole culprit, you’d have to invest in development and testing - and then run all your ads again, specifically explaining that your product now has a new control scheme.
At that point, you would probably nope out. Understandably so.
And leaping from that situation to the conclusion […]
[…] that virtual joysticks are a better control scheme for a top-down MOBA is pretty wild.
That’s like suggesting League of Legends should be played with a gamepad, because most games are played with a gamepad. Or virtual joysticks.
Having 120 million monthly users on PC is awesome. But those are, well, 120 million people busy playing League on PC.
Yes, there will be overlap, but here’s the thing: We know the people who played Vainglory were playing a MOBA on mobile, and they’re not playing Vainglory now.
I’m looking at TFT and Legends of Runeterra, at the moment, and that’s between 5 and 10 million downloads each on the Play Store. In a short time, obviously, and not all League players may be interested - but those games are a lot more accessible on a mobile platform, compared to a MOBA. They’re precisely the type of games you might play on the go, when you can’t play League on your PC.
Whatever the case - that’s a long shot from 120 million. So it may be worth trying to be inclusive.
Make of that what you will. Personally, I don’t see why they shouldn’t include touch controls, if their engine allows for it. Adding them relatively early might help prevent issues down the line.
I’m going to try Wild Rift either way, but I won’t even pretend to play competitively with joysticks. Which sooner or later will raise the question why I play a MOBA in the first place. 
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No idea what this refers to. The rest of your post is difficult to follow, so I’ll just say this:
You obviously prefer touch controls to virtual joysticks, and that’s fine, but to assert that they’re better is, to be quite frank, just your opinion. And it’s clear that it’s not shared by most people who play MOBAs on mobile or by developers who design UIs for them.
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ill try WR for sure but may drop it not long after since i dont like joystick controls but them keeping touch controls in mind is cool ngl.
Having started playing MOBAs by playing Vainglory, when I first tried virtual joysticks, I hated them. However, as I played more AoV and less VG, I grew to prefer them – I find my view of the action is better, particularly in teamfights, and I’m faster when I don’t have to move my fingers all over the face of my device to control my character or their abilities.
Not everyone’s going to feel the same way, of course, but I remember plenty of comments during VG streams from people who thought the game looked great but refused to play it because they hated the touch controls. 
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i have tried AoV and other mobile MOBAs already they just dont click for me tbh, only VG touch controls do suit for MOBA controls on mobile devices for me.
edit: i also used to play VG a lot one handed on my iPad lol, trying to getting used to joycons sucked for me even though i played VG in a less efficient way then other people.
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Alright, let me try to fix that post by editing in the quotes.
It’s definitely an opinion I can not substantiate, but what you are doing is basically misconstruing correlation as causation.
- Mobile Legends has the most players.
- Mobile Legends has touch controls.
- Therefore it follows that most players prefer touch controls.
When, in fact, the following is much more accurate:
- Moonton ran a successful marketing campaign
- Mobile Legends has the most players
- Therefore it follows that successful marketing is the deciding factor in acquiring market shares.
Control scheme doesn’t even figure into that. And yes, I also remember people posting that they were coming from AoV / Onimoji Arena / ML and did not like Vainglory’s control scheme. Habituation is a thing.
Now, after SEMC carved and added joystick controls - did we suddenly see an influx of millions of former ML players? No.
I’m not sure whether that actually supports my argument for adding touch controls to Wild Rift, but it turns out that adding joysticks to VG made no difference at all. At the very least, we can rule out that it was control scheme preferences that made ML more successful.
I’m most certainly NOT doing any such thing, and you are putting words in my mouth that I did not say.
Are you actually arguing that touch controls lost out to joysticks because Moonton had better advertising? What? 
I think you’re kind of missing the main point of the OP: that Riot would consider adding touch WERE THERE TO BE ENOUGH INTEREST. The clear implication is that there was NOT enough interest when they set out to design the UI for WR, and they settled on joysticks as the best control system for their game. (Riot has spent a LOT of time on the UI, and ofc, they have plenty of resources to have incorporated touch if they felt it to be important or better.)
Anyway, I don’t see much point in continuing an old argument — OG VG players will almost always prefer touch to virtual joysticks, and there’s nothing wrong with having that preference. But it’s been almost 6 years since VG debuted with touch controls, and no other MOBA has bothered to implement them, so it seems that the pent-up demand some people talk about is probably a myth.
Forgot to comment on this:
I daresay that’s because (1) SEMC’s implementation of virtual joysticks basically sucked and (2) the game was already in a steep decline by that point, whereas ML was growing rapidly (and continues to do so).
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Just FYI … I might not be able to reply right away … have to head to work!
It’s a pretty good discussion — this is one where I don’t think there’s a right or wrong position to have, so it’s fun to debate!
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No. I am not saying touch controls lost out to joysticks because Moonton had better advertising. I am saying there was no contest because Moonton had better advertising.
You, on the other hand, seem to be saying that touch controls lost out to joysticks because ML is more successful than VG.
And if you are saying that, then you do have to corroborate joystick controls being the reason for ML’s success - or we are right back at the correlation/causation divide.
I may yield my point, actually, because you just reminded me that Riot are not in the business of providing a better control scheme, but in the business of earning money.
And while I think there’s a case to be made for picking up people who prefer touch controls, their focus group is probably ML players who want “the real thing”. So that’s that.
Edit: Just to be clear, this kind of market research and targeting is exactly what got us roughly a bazillion WoW-clones, and it’s a terrible standard by any measure. But arguing against it is rather futile.