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A word on the API and Vainglory Esports

A word on the API and Vainglory Esports

  • Vainglory
  • |
  • May 21, 2019

Reviving regular communication is something that we are focused on improving here at SEMC; especially as we take our next step into becoming a multi-title game development company. We want to take this time to address some of the topics that often pop up on various social media platforms in the hopes that we can create an honest and open dialogue with you, our community. As we move forward, and begin to build on the Vainglory universe in new and exciting ways, we want to include you in the journey.

As most of our players know, the API has been out of action for some time now and we’d like to take a moment to explain what happened and what the status is for the API currently. The Vainglory API was originally developed and managed by our partners MADGLORY; they did an amazing job building it. The API showcased how Vainglory data could be visualized in practical, fun and informative ways,  however, from the outset, the API was designed to be maintained externally. The development team was ultimately acquired in 2018; and support of the Vainglory API was shifted to our internal team within Super Evil. As things progressed, supporting the full function of API in its current iteration became more and more difficult for the team to keep up with, due to the pace of our update cycles and shifts in focus. We’ve tried our best to adjust what we’ve been able to support and how we can best achieve that since then but ultimately it proved too difficult a situation to resolve. We hope to explore this further down the road; but at this time we have hit pause. We want to give a huge shout out and thank you to the API development community for all of your patience and hard work in building with us on this journey and being a core thread in the fabric of the game.

Secondly we want to take a moment to talk about Vainglory esports and our decision to shift focus away from it. Our goal with Vainglory has always been to build a deep and immersive gaming experience on mobile; the nature of the game combined with the depth Vainglory had to offer naturally gave rise to an immediately competitive community. What began as an endeavour to create tools for our budding esports players (at one point there were no spectator slots!) quickly snowballed into a full-scale esports production ran by our entire team at the lair. The passion we had and the experiences we tried to create for our most engaged community fueled our passion to build the esports programme; but it very quickly became clear that the planning, resourcing and running of our esports events sapped huge amounts of time away from our development team and ultimately the development of the game itself. Esports is something that we’re hugely passionate about but the sacrifices we had to make at the time to keep it afloat weren’t worth the results. Our changing strategy has meant we have had to take a more supportive role in esports, allowing our partners and community (we see you EPL!) to take the leading role when it comes to organisation. We will continue to support esports initiatives when they present themselves but the mainstay of our focus will always be on the development of rich and engaging gaming experiences such as Vainglory itself.

Expect more regular communication from us in the coming weeks (in blogs, in vods, in streams… ) where we will share more developer updates (yes including the status of bugs where we can!), developments on upcoming projects, and our roadmap for Vainglory!

Ciarnan ‘Excoundrel’ Lowe