30: Chapter 30 will be called League of Legends!

This month, Weikan was waiting for their big data.

This month, Douyin launched its live streaming internal testing.

Meanwhile, Qin Mo did one more thing.

At this time, on the floor below Inspur Technology, the newly renovated office area still smelled faintly of wall paint.

On the glass door at the end of the corridor, a temporary printed A4 paper was posted with four words written on it—Riot Games.

IceFrog was thinner than Qin Mo had imagined.

Wearing black-rimmed glasses and with slightly sunken eyes, he sat at a workstation that hadn't been fully tidied yet, with an open laptop spread out before him.

Several hand-drawn map drafts were scattered across the desk, densely marked with red and blue pens indicating jungle monster spawn points and Minion Wave meeting times.

When he received that overseas call from Zhao Lei, he was in a rental house abroad writing code for an outsourced mobile game.

On the phone, Zhao Lei only said three sentences: 'dota is too difficult. We want to make a new MOBA game. You can name your terms. Our boss wants to talk to you.'

IceFrog booked his flight that same day.

At this moment.

He sat across from Qin Mo, his laptop open to a design document of over ten thousand words, listing the framework he and Qin Mo had intermittently discussed during this period.

Why dota struggled to go mainstream, where the new game should simplify, and how to shift operating habits from hardcore players toward casual players.

He had thought about these questions for a long time, but no one had ever been willing to give him the chance to implement them.

After Penguin acquired dota, all design directions for dota 2 were geared toward being more complex, more competitive, and more hardcore.

"I think the general direction of this current framework is correct."

IceFrog adjusted his glasses, his fingers sliding across the trackpad.

"But there are still some details I want to confirm."

"The main points that drive new players away from dota: first is Denying, second is losing gold upon death, third is overly complex item recipes, and fourth is that the skill ceiling for heroes is so high that beginners can't understand how to play them at all."

"You told me before that all four of these points should be changed in the new game, right?"

Qin Mo sat across from him, holding a pen, with a handwritten design outline spread out in front of him.

"Denying will be removed directly, no discussion needed."

"Losing gold upon death is also gone."

"What about item recipes?"

"We'll make recommended item builds. When players open the shop, the system will automatically recommend the best items for the current situation. Beginners can buy them with one click without needing to memorize recipes."

IceFrog typed a few lines into the document and looked up.

"And what about the skill ceiling? Some dota heroes have skill descriptions that can fill an entire screen; new players can't even understand them. How do we reduce that?"

"Simplify the hero skills."

"Each hero will have four skills plus one passive, with stats controlled within a range that an average person can understand at a glance."

Qin Mo turned a page of the outline.

"But simplifying controls doesn't mean lowering the ceiling."

"In dota, a hero's difficulty is often inflated by hardcore mechanisms, such as multi-unit control and complex skill combo sequences."

"But we can take a different approach: while lowering the barrier to entry, we can raise the ceiling through other dimensions."

"For example?"

"Skill projectile speed, cast point, and animation canceling through movement."

"Beginners don't need to understand these to play, but for experts, the difference lies in a single frame."

IceFrog's fingers paused on the keyboard.

He looked at Qin Mo and remained silent for a long while.

"I've proposed this design philosophy at dota no less than five times."

"Every time, it was rejected for the same reason: beginners don't deserve to play MOBAs."

He lowered his head and typed a few more lines. After finishing, he pushed the keyboard forward and leaned back in his chair, letting out a long breath.

"Do you know what the most ironic part is?"

"I've been with the dota project team for many years, but aside from the beginning, I haven't had much of a say."

"Penguin wanted a more complex system with more emphasis on competitiveness. I argued with them countless times, and the end result was being kicked out."

"The upcoming dota 2 is an even more hardcore and complex new title."

IceFrog took off his glasses and wiped the lenses with the corner of his shirt.

"If you had approached me two years earlier, this game would probably be out by now."

Qin Mo put down his pen and smiled.

"Two years ago, I couldn't even afford to eat."

IceFrog only knew that Inspur Technology was currently quite large and had a high market value thanks to Douyin, but he didn't realize that Inspur Technology had achieved all this in just six months.

Qin Mo's voice continued.

"And it's not too late now."

"dota has already captured the hardcore player market; making another, even more difficult MOBA would be suicide."

"But on the contrary, making a MOBA that anyone can pick up, allowing people who have never played games to understand how to play within five minutes, is our opportunity."

"It's not that Penguin didn't think of this, they just completely looked down on it."

IceFrog put his glasses back on, a hint of years of accumulated helplessness in his tone.

"I spent so many years there; I know their logic all too well."

"For the MOBA genre, they're convinced that core players are the main source of revenue."

"The people deciding the product direction are all veteran planners from the PC game era, their heads filled with the idea that 'difficulty equals depth'."

"When you talk to them about lightweighting, their first reaction is that it's 'cheapening' the game."

He closed his laptop.

"So when you had someone call me, I agreed without even thinking."

"It wasn't because I could name my terms, but because finally, someone's first words to me were, 'dota is too difficult'."

Qin Mo chuckled.

He turned the outline to the last page, which contained the game's core gameplay framework and several key design principles.

Last-hitting is retained but Denying is removed, no gold loss upon death, one-click item recommendations, the skill floor for heroes lowered to a level where average people can play, while retaining the skill ceiling for experts.

Match duration controlled at around thirty minutes, with a matchmaking system to ensure fairness—experts matched with experts.

The two discussed for nearly another half hour.

They talked about everything from map size to jungle resource distribution, and from the item system to hero roles and classifications.

Several times in between, IceFrog suddenly went quiet, staring blankly at the document, then murmured to himself, "Why didn't I think of this before?"

Qin Mo didn't rush him because he knew the feeling—someone whose ideas had been suppressed for years finally getting a blank design draft where every box could be filled according to their own will.

At the end of the discussion, IceFrog flipped through the document from start to finish and suddenly looked up as if remembering something.

"By the way, our MOBA project is currently only using the codename 'L'. Have you decided on a name for the game yet?"

Qin Mo stood up, walked to the whiteboard, and picked up a marker to write two lines.

"league of legends."

He put down the pen and turned around to look at IceFrog.

"The Chinese name will be..."

"league of legends."