On October 19th, a piece of news in the gaming and NFT community garnered significant attention: former "League of Legends" mobile game producer Jonathan Chao has officially joined the development team at Chiru Labs, a part of Azuki. He will be responsible for building interactive games within the Azuki metaverse.

Regarding this news, as an Azuki holder, I must admit that I am not particularly optimistic. In fact, I have various unsettling premonitions about it. At the same time, I am also a player of "League of Legends" mobile game.

Why do I have opinions about this? First, let's take a look back at Jonathan Chao's past.

According to publicly available records, Jonathan Chao has previously worked at prominent gaming companies such as Ubisoft, Riot Games, and Tencent Timi. During his tenure at Tencent Timi, he served as the Balance Director responsible for managing the character balance of "League of Legends" mobile game. It appears that he has a wealth of work experience. However, when we mention "League of Legends" mobile game, what comes to mind for most people? Yes, it's the issue of game balance.

When "League of Legends: Wild Rift" was first announced, players had high expectations for it. After all, this game is the mobile version of the beloved PC game that holds many players' memories. The mobile version had the challenging task of adapting the champions, player structures, maps, and other content from the PC game into a mobile MOBA format. At that time, Riot Games had publicly shared development updates for the mobile game, with a significant emphasis on "balance adjustments." However, as the game was launched, players' complaints about its balance were constant and widespread. Many players even chose to quit the game due to this issue. And the Balance Director at that time was none other than Jonathan Chao.

During his tenure at Riot Games, Jonathan Chao openly stated that their goal was to make "League of Legends: Wild Rift" the most balanced MOBA mobile game. He mentioned that the balance team would be responsible for adjusting all aspects of the game from the beginning to the end of a match, including champion attributes, abilities, runes, and more. Their aim was to ensure that "League of Legends: Wild Rift" became the most balanced MOBA mobile game, where every champion had competitiveness, and there were no overwhelmingly powerful champions or strategies. The team analyzed various data such as win rates and champion pick rates on a daily basis and made adjustments accordingly. However, in reality, the game's balance issues have continued to persist.

What's even more disappointing is that when players turned to Jonathan Chao on Twitter to inquire about balance issues and hoped for solutions, his response left players feeling thoroughly disgusted.

At that time, Jonathan Chao's response seemed to indicate that he was well aware of the severity of the balance issues but had no intention of addressing them further. He suggested that players should set aside their personal interests and unconditionally comply with the platform's arrangements. This attitude was perceived as, "I am the authority, and there's nothing you can do about it." This high-handed stance left many players feeling discontented.

It is worth noting that Jonathan Chao had been working on the balance team for this League of Legends mobile game for over a year at the time. Additionally, he had achieved the rank of "Master" in the PC version of "League of Legends," being a League of Legends player himself. He should have been well aware of the importance of balance for the game's content. Unfortunately, it seems that he lacked empathy in this regard.

While it's true that the update process for mobile games differs from the PC version because each change in the mobile game needs to go through the approval process of third-party app stores (such as Apple and Google), and these approval processes do take time, it is also true that due to these limitations, each balance adjustment in the mobile game should be handled with greater caution. However, it appears that the official team was unable to achieve this.

Jonathan Chao had indeed left Riot Games in 2021 and subsequently joined NetEase, and now, he has announced his involvement with the Azuki team, responsible for interactive games. I can understand your concerns about the development of games within the Azuki metaverse with his involvement.

Regarding Azuki itself, I must mention once again the new NFT series launched this year - Azuki Elementals. A series of mysterious operations related to this series caused Azuki's value to plummet by 3/4, a significant drop. This series was controversial from its release, with many users accusing the team of profiteering and inaction. The new NFT series didn't seem significantly different from the original OG Azuki series, and there were even instances of "copy-pasting" artwork, attempting to use technical issues to deceive users. This led to an uproar in the community. The team had to hastily modify the Elementals series metadata, causing some NFT platforms to fail to display preview images properly. Such technical challenges and dark moments had, at one point, raised concerns about Azuki's future development.

In summary, Jonathan Chao's past performance hasn't been satisfactory, and Azuki is currently facing various significant challenges. I hope that the Azuki team takes user and holder feedback seriously and truly does something meaningful rather than continuing to be unproductive.

In the end, I hope Azuki can prove me wrong and create an interactive metaverse game that players genuinely enjoy, restoring our confidence in Azuki. However, until then, I will maintain my pessimistic outlook and look forward to a satisfactory response from Azuki.