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Boards closure isn't like TT removal

KFCeytron·3/2/2020, 5:35:06 AM·1 votes·2,975 views

With TT, Riot actually put out a finished product. People just didn't like it. Riot then reworked the whole thing with massive changes across the board. People still didn't like it. As it turns out, a 3v3 map just wasn't popular. So Riot axed it.

With Boards, Riot put out a disgusting sham of a "beta" version that was ridiculously buggy and incomplete. Then they stopped development on it. Immediately. They just shat it out and abandoned it, like an irresponsible dog walker who left the house without enough bags and is hoping to avoid getting into trouble by just hurrying away from the steaming pile. So the platform is still ridiculously buggy and incomplete. Not only that, it's gotten worse over time, with frankly idiotic experiments like Gameplay+ and the recent obliteration of the top nav bar. And moderation... look, I know you tried, and I appreciate that, but you weren't very good at it. Moderation has been an absolute mess of the right hand not knowing what the left hand is doing, and neither hand telling anyone how things are actually supposed to work. "Dude, it's only been two days, of course we haven't gotten around to removing that rule-breaking thread, we have lives! We're volunteers!" K. "Dude, it's been three days, removing that rule-breaking thread would stir up too much trouble." K.

And we can't forget about the vote bot/group. It's not an inherent problem of Boards, but it was only able to come about because of the inherent problems of Boards. Actual platforms with active development have ways to detect and handle fraudulent voting platforms. Stack Overflow, the fact that the place is generally garbage notwithstanding, goes so far as to automatically detect and _undo _ such votes, even on the scale of one disgruntled user downvoting another user's posts en masse. Boards, however, has nothing. Remember when it was a problem a while ago, and then the problem went away for a while? Yeah, that was due to the "fix." Know what the fix was? Increasing level requirements for voting. And then the smurf accounts that were being used for the bot/group hit the increased level, and what do you know, they caught up to that can that was kicked down the road!

"Feel free to contact us on the Discord" yeah I would if the process was distinguishable from gaslighting. We do the equivalent of taking a number, and then we sit around and wait without even knowing if there's someone there. And sometimes there's no one there for days. We just wait. For nothing. Because as soon as a mod does show up to pull you into a room, there's no warning and very little waiting, so if you were e.g. sleeping at the time, guess what? You missed your opportunity. Ping them again later. I never insisted on mods being around all the time, nor a lot of the time, nor even having a set schedule. Just tell us what your schedule is so we don't have to wait around like idiots. Or allow us to make appointments. Or something. Anything other than this system that obviously doesn't work for the task at hand.

Oh, and Riot involvement. Ha ha. We get Rioters in Story, Art, & Sound to bask in sycophantic praise and preen their artistic feathers (even when the praise is for cinematics that Riot outsources), and Bazerka in GD to talk about lunch. LUNCH. That's the Riot involvement we get. Do you know who could make a thread with the exact same content and usefulness? ANYONE. Bazerka knows no more about what's going on at Riot and has no more power over it than any regular user, so this Riot involvement is a big fat phony. No offense to Bazerka, of course, but the fact remains that that's not what people have in mind when they want to communicate with Rioters.

TL;DR: TT was given a chance, but just didn't work out. Boards never got a chance.

7 Comments

rujitra3/2/2020, 6:53:14 AM3 votes

"Feel free to contact us on the Discord" yeah I would if the process was distinguishable from gaslighting. We do the equivalent of taking a number, and then we sit around and wait without even knowing if there's someone there. And sometimes there's no one there for days. We just wait. For nothing. Because as soon as a mod does show up to pull you into a room, there's no warning and very little waiting, so if you were e.g. sleeping at the time, guess what? You missed your opportunity. Ping them again later. I never insisted on mods being around all the time, nor a lot of the time, nor even having a set schedule. Just tell us what your schedule is so we don't have to wait around like idiots. Or allow us to make appointments. Or something. Anything other than this system that obviously doesn't work for the task at hand.

Preach.

The moderators did a lot good, but I will never be able to believe that had they done a lot more then this may not have happened.

Mod accessibility and timeliness of evaluating reports was a big problem. Mod explanation for and reversal of punishments that were poor took days sometimes for some players to get a response in violation discord. By that point a player isn’t going to care.

The mods also didn’t ever put serious effort into content curation to ensure constructive discussion and remove spammy rants. I understand they felt they couldn’t do so with their staff levels, but really, it’s been months if not over a year since they asked for more moderators to apply... so that problem is their own creation.

It furthermore is clear that many on the moderation team have held personal grudges against users and let that influence their moderation. They were not impartial. They specifically have waited until this time to start insulting and denigrating users (including myself and others) publicly. That is absolutely unfitting of any moderator, and if it had come out sooner would’ve been grounds for dismissal from the team.

I think they are all likely good people. But they were not the team the boards needed, or if they were, they let it get to their heads - not being able to take criticism and forming cabals against anyone who dared disagree with them or call them out.

And that’s why the only solution is to kill the boards. They’re too far gone.

jtkitten3/3/2020, 6:51:17 PM2 votes

"finished product" I don't know about that. I have this summoner icon because I have played over 100 games of TT and on the top of my head I can name that monsters didn't have animations when they spawned like SR and the zone you could buy from the shop was messed up on both sides so you could buy things way outside of the fountain. The last patch notes for TT were back in the summer of 2015. Definitely a neglected mode by developers. There was a decent amount of players that played TT in NA. It was a fun and different gamemode to play and gold funneling originated from 3v3 and has been there for years before it hit SR. I will say that Draft mode for TT was where most bot accounts stayed because everyone who played TT was in ranked. I have never seen a bot in my hundreds of TT ranked games.

Hellmaximus13/3/2020, 1:05:52 AM1 votes

One thing that was amazing and showed the potential of the Boards was the Star Guardians Events. Where they had a subsection just for the LFG SG Game mode with a format to follow, they haven't tried this despite numerous more events centered around 5 Man Pre-mades.

True Garen3/4/2020, 10:04:27 PM1 votes

Clubs will be the next to go.