It’s been about five months since we launched Nexus, and in true Riot form, we’re Still In Beta. Since there’s no Ask Riot this week (most of the folks who typically answer Ask Riot stuff are off at GDC), now seemed like a good time for a brief update on what we’re up to and where we’re headed.

So. Let’s just dive into it, yeah?

BETA STATUS

We stuck the beta tag on Nexus at launch to indicate what you were seeing then wasn’t the final version of what we intended to make.  Most of the work done since then was on building the backend (at launch, Nexus posts were hard-coded—now we actually have a CMS), but we’ve also shipped a number of small quality-of-life updates.

Stuff like:

• Category filtering!
• Ask Riot moved to Nexus!
• Any-region commenting (SHOULD BE WORKING I HOPE)

Over the next few weeks, we’ll be implementing the last few features, ending with what we lovingly refer to as “Nexus 2.0.” Here’s what to expect:

• Full Ask Riot integration (including the Ask page)
• A complete Ask Riot archive with every question ever asked
• Search! On a League of Legends website!
• RSS feed
• Some small stuff, like a progress bar on articles and minor visual changes

These new elements will go live whenever they’re ready—it’s not a one-giant-update kind of thing. Once they’re all up and running, we’ll remove the beta tag (take that, Mac client!).

LOCALIZATION

One of the biggest bummers about the current iteration of Nexus is that it’s English-only. While the content still follows the normal localization pipeline at Riot and ends up published globally, only English-speaking regions have the full Nexus experience. We knew starting with English would be the fastest way to get going and test content, but it has always been our intention to bring Nexus to every region.

Once 2.0’s features are live and functioning (which I expect/hope will be before the end of March), we’ll focus all of our efforts into getting Nexus localized and live in other regions. I’m not sure how long this will take, but it’s going to be the editorial team’s #1 priority. I do have to apologize here—we had intended this to begin much sooner but ran into some technical hurdles with the backend that slowed us down quite a bit. Hopefully we’ll be able to do the regional versions right and fast now that we’ve learned how to do it wrong and slow.

IN CLOSING

That’s pretty much the gist. We’ll keep you posted as things change or don’t change, and Ask Riot will return to its regular Thursday time slot next week. Thanks for hanging out, and thanks for reading/watching/asking/commenting. And please, if there’s any type of content you’d like to see on Nexus, let us know. We can’t do this without you.