LoL gameplay design director pulled, transferred to Riot’s MMO

Riot Games gameplay design director Mark “Scuffy” Yetter has announced a big career move that involves him leaving the League of Legends design team to join a different department in Riot as game director of the upcoming LoL MMO.  

This marks the end of eight years of Scuffy working on the League of Legends team. Scuffy has become a forward-facing personality for the game, delivering patch previews that offer a sneak peek of upcoming changes to the popular MOBA game. 

In his announcement, Scuffy praised the dev team and said he is confident in his former team’s direction and the future of the game. Scuffy stressed that players should expect the same transparency, quality, and openness that has been seen with him in charge. 

Scuffy will now work alongside former LoL game designer Greg “Ghostcrawler” Street on the MMO project. It’s unknown who will replace him on the dev team. Riot has already opened up applications for the job as lead gameplay designer for League of Legends, suggesting it is looking for a replacement externally.   

Scuffy leaves the LoL dev team after increasing the transparency between developers and LoL’s player base. Scuffy has been sharing the dev team’s thoughts regarding champion changes, adjustments, item reworks, and much more. This has primarily been done through tweets and dev blogs, one of the most popular being Quick Gameplay Thoughts where Scuffy shares thoughts on relevant in-game topics. These blogs and tweets have provided the active LoL players with a lot of insight into what goes on behind the scenes that ultimately make it onto the live servers.  

Scuffy will stay on the team until the end of May, at which point his replacement will take over.