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I am honestly getting very tired of the Boards community.

Electro522·1/11/2018, 12:24:34 PM·195 votes·17,274 views

Laughing Fish posted a meme last week, i think, of a little bird representing a player saying how they actually liked preseason, and enjoy the state of the game. However, this little bird easily gets drowned out by a crow who represents the people unhappy with the game.......and how they are just so much louder than those who support Riot.

Despite it's intent to be funny, I don't think someone has posted something more true than that.

Yesterday, The Game Theorists released a video on lootboxes, and at one point, Matpat talked about "Loss Aversion". It's exactly what it sounds like......us humans hate losing, and we will go to some pretty extreme lengths to keep it from happening. If you were to watch it, I'm certain you can see the similarities in how League works.

League, at its core is a team game. Your team HAS to work together in order to win, so, if you lose, most of the time, you will feel powerless, as if either your teammates or the game itself is against you.

Of course, if you don't like how the game is going, or if you feel that game is in a badly, unbalanced state right now, that is your opinion, and you are entitled to it. Unfortunately, when several like minded people get funneled into one place, it becomes very hard for any differing opinions to rise to the surface.

And this is where we come back to Laughing Fish. Thanks to his popularity, that meme was able to rise up along with many others he had posted, and allow his opinion to get out. If I were to make a similar post, I'd be surprised if it ever saw the light of day.

Those of us that support Riot do so quietly, even though we really don't want to. The reason why, is because the majority of the people on the boards will keep us from making our voices heard. And recently, I've noticed that people are even starting to take a stand against those that support Riot, basically implying that we are nothing but naive children who worship Riot, and the very ground they walk on.

Why even try to make a thread thanking Riot for the work they've done, and the amount of attention they give to their community, when you have people like that floating around? All that will happen is the thread will be downvoted into oblivion, and no one will ever see it again once it fades off of the "new" page. Hell, I'll be surprised if this thread doesn't have at least a score of -3 by the next time I check it.

And to make matters worse.......I see no way of fixing this. These are the official forums of the game. People will come here in hopes of getting their opinions heard, and 8 times out of 10, it will be because they want to complain about something. And what will they find when they come here? Many, MANY like minded people who are upset with the game in some way, shape, or form.

I've been a part of the Boards ever since they were made. I've seen it grow and shrink o er the years, and I've seen it's highs and lows. But this is the first time in 4 years that I am actively wanting to find a different community, because trying to be a little voice of reason in a massive echo chamber is getting tiring, especially with how the boards have been acting lately.

I don't think I have ever seen the boards be THIS negative. And you may say that its because of the state of the game, but I'd have to disagree with you. If you've been around as long as I have, you may have noticed that the Boards is shrinking. Less and less threads are reaching voting milestones, and the number of comments on any average thread have slowly been going down. We only get slight bumps in population when Riot posts something important.....such as Meddler's gameplay thoughts. Other than that, the Boards have been on a steady decline ever since their inception. It also seems as if those who support Riot, or are somewhere in the middle are the ones being driven out, making the echo chamber that much louder.

Despite what you may believe, League of Legends is not dying. If anything, it only continues to grow.

But the Boards are.........and its a shame to see something with potential do so.

TL;DR

The Boards have become exceedingly negative, and trying to be someone who supports Riot in this echo chamber is just getting way to difficult.

285 Comments

Thresh Outta Fux1/11/2018, 2:34:43 PM96 votes

The only reason all of us are still here, is because after you spend years supporting the direction a company is going, only to have them whip around and change from "Game Balance" to "Game Design", is a major heartbreaker.

We're just here hoping this abusive relationship will go back to the way things were.

We don't have an out. There's nowhere to go. The charms and quirks we all fell in love with are here, only now they're buried under a heaping mound of shit known as e-sports.

And all we can do is complain. We're destitute, there's no home, no family to go back to. We put 110% into this relationship, I and many others abandoned many/all of our previous gaming communities.

We can't even vote with our wallets, because the community is so huge and e-sports is generating all of the revenue now.

The boards are positive -> the game balance is fairly acceptable The boards are negative -> the game balance is atrocious.

RiotRiot Calad1/12/2018, 9:41:31 PM25 votes

I don't really come to the boards (or any other player community) looking for players who support Riot. I'm looking for honest impressions, and to get a better understanding of what players think. We care about your opinion whether or not you like where League is at any given time, so I don't really want boards to be about warring factions of players who support changes and player who hate changes.

But I do agree with a lot of your points. Personally, I feel boards can be pretty prone to hyperbole, and it feels like threads often become echo chambers rather than places for discussion. This can make it difficult for Rioters passing through to engage, which leads to more players feeling disheartened and unheard.

GripaAviara1/11/2018, 3:15:02 PM23 votes

Interesting because the game runs for more than 6 years and the boards were never so negative. This either means there is a real problem in the game or that the game drove away most of the positive people and remained only with negative ones

SEKAI1/11/2018, 2:36:28 PM22 votes

And you made a thread supposedly criticing the board is a negative echo chamber.

While your thread seems to be well received and the popularity is growing in this supposed negative echo chamber.

Maybe it isn't a negative echo chamber?

The Darius King1/11/2018, 6:29:01 PM10 votes

I personally love the new pre-season with all the new runes and changes they've made. Yes riot has made some bad decisions in the past but overall I love this game and unless they completely kill it I'll continue to love the game

Chermorg1/11/2018, 9:12:52 PM10 votes

The boards have this habit of turning into an echo chamber for an idea that sounds good, but is untrue or based on wrong information. We, the community, seem to think Riot must do whatever we want with the game, and if they don't, we start saying the balance team sucks (or any other team). We need to understand that the boards are just one avenue of feedback, and it is one where there is very limited population to gather feedback from. Riot gathers feedback from many places including blinded in client surveys that paint a much better picture of the community's desires. I think we need to understand this and stop attacking Riot, or Rioters, for just not doing something we want done.

It's extremely selfish and I hate seeing it, but there's not much we can do about it beyond deleting threads with absolutely no value (such as those that only say "fuck riot X should be fired"). People are allowed to complain. But they shouldn't expect a Riot response when their complaint is, for lack of a better word, stupid or selfish.

Ifneth1/12/2018, 5:37:37 AM9 votes

Man, I must be some sort of a weirdo judging by this thread's replies. I love what's Riot been doing! No more having to read a technical document to really understand how runes and masteries work. Pick two trees, one keystone, and five runes after that. Problem solved. More mana from Manaflow Band is always nice, and having my abilities hit harder is a lot of fun. Sure, a few champs got a little wacky, and bruisers sure miss Fervor, but that's the nature of a MOBA game. There's always going to be something to improve.

And judging by what longer-time players tell me, things once were a lot worse. Long ago, there was always a champ that was flat-out broken. Old Evelynn stacking Sunfire Capes, tank Ekko, machine-gun Ryze, bruiser Yasuo. Now a champ is OP if its winrate is more than 52%. We've only added champs all the way through, and the balance has actually improved. So keep at it, Riot!

Thunderneedle1/11/2018, 10:00:26 PM8 votes

Complaining about the people complaining, how meta.

Scary Door1/12/2018, 12:36:34 AM5 votes

[{quoted}](name=Paleo Electro,realm=NA,application-id=6heBIhQc,discussion-id=UA79L6EJ,comment-id=,timestamp=2018-01-11T12:24:34.415+0000)

The Boards have become exceedingly negative, and trying to be someone who supports Riot in this echo chamber is just getting way to difficult.

I'm not a fan boy, nor a hater... there was a time where I might have classified myself closer to 'fanboy' status though, but it has become impossible to defend the direction that this game has headed; I mean that in virtually every possible way.

I tried to endure the last couple of seasons and the blunders made by Riot, I even defended some of their decisions for awhile---but I have run out of patience and I have found myself playing this game significantly less and not really missing it. I used to play this game as if there were no tomorrow back in Season 1-4, but it's tough to do it now.

The community is terrible, toxicity is still way out of hand but I could certainly forgive or ignore that if it weren't for the simple fact that this game's balance is just in the shitter. The number one complaint that I have with the game and have seen by so many both here on the Boards and among the few friends that I have that still play is that damage is just too high and games snowball too quickly. Strategy and Skill are tempered by who can press a button the fastest and who picked the champion that does the most damage in the shortest amount of time.

This isn't the game I fell in love with, at all.

"So why don't you just uninstall?" Maybe I should, but truthfully I've been trying to express my opinions about the state of the game for a long time and obviously Riot isn't listening. I know I throw out my share of snarky responses to posts here, but I used to write these long, well-thought-out, reasonable posts and never had one Rioter response... all the way back to 2011...

After awhile, you just see Riot ignoring the community as a whole and it pisses you off, sometimes they write some blatant bullshit that is even more frustrating... such as the most recent "Quick Gameplay Thoughts" where they say that they don't really think games are more snowbally because they surveyed a whole one-hundred people. Of course, this goes along nicely with their tone-deaf attitudes about a lot of things through the years, most recently URF, but certainly things like Team Builder, the Dynamic Queue fiasco of Season 6, the terrible reworks/class updates, etc etc... There's practically no accountability...

Just once I'd love to see Riot offer up a mea culpa and say "yeah, we fucked up real bad on that one, sorry folks". Instead we get a lot of mysterious data for why they make these decisions (data that never gets shown or is so vague that it offers no real insight).

The preseason changes and the Blue Essence nightmare were really the last straw for me. I haven't played in over a week and I'm not really missing it. I don't know... maybe I'm just a part of the growing sect of dissatisfied customers.

Given all of that, how can one be positive about the state of the game?

Jinx Hunter1/11/2018, 4:30:50 PM1 votes

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