My last post - Reflecting on my time with The Boards
As someone who hates Reddit (In general, not only LoL Reddit) The Boards truly became my hub and forum to catch up with whatever was going on in the League world at the time. I had plenty of both good and bad experiences, so why not recount some of them. This post will be nuked along with everything else in about a week so why not.
#The Good Experiences
The best kind of interactions I think I ever had here came from a couple long-form Tristana posts I made at different points in her history, both when she was the worst ADC in the game, and when she was a bit too powerful. I mostly made those posts to discuss Trist's identity and what I enjoyed the most about her, as well as things that just seemed strange for me about her current kit. These posts often got filled with many points of view (safe a couple "usual" salty boards users) and most conversations were about challenging each other's point of view with graphs and data and a bunch of interesting stuff. I enjoyed those conversations because people seemed to be wanting to drive the conversation to a place of improvement, which always was my goal. What works for Trist? What do people find frustrating about her? What do people enjoy about her? And those posts are the ones I always thought were the best I ever engaged in during the life time of this forum.
I also had a couple great interactions with some Rioters. Riot Bioluminescence was kind enough to let me know that canonically, Yordles are about 85cm or 2'9 feet tall in average, something I don't think I would have ever known any other way, since Bandle City's lore has been neglected quite a bit compared to other places such as Demacia, Noxus or Bilge Water. Also, when Trist was being reworked, I made a post about her updated splash art images, a post that Riot Reav3 kept an eye on, and we managed to make note of Trist having now four fingers for the update of her Rocket Girl splash. These were small yet very nice interactions that made me feel like there were people in Riot who cared about having a channel of communication with us through these forums.
I also have a couple funny posts that I enjoyed making. One about Tham being so fat that sometimes Yordles orbited around him, and one I enjoyed very much making was mocking the newer design style for League logos, client and general visuals. The post turned out to be strangely prophetic, as not soon after the League of Legends logo was changed to what we have today. Another post I really enjoyed making was when they updated the old lolesports site to the new Nexus lol esports site, which was an absolute atrocity (I stand by that) at the time of launch. I have NO IDEA if that most actually meant anything, but the site has improved a lot ever since that time and that just makes me happy.
#The Bad Experiences
Some people think that posting criticism is only about rage or trolling, but many forget that we post about these problems because we care. The day you stop seeing posts about balance or client problems or whatever else, is the day League dies, because nobody cares anymore about it. We want league to succeed, yet for all these nice experiences I had with this forum, I also encountered some frustration.
As an ADC player, I always got the feeling that we're not liked very much here. I always would encounter ADC mocking threads, and I rarely ever saw supports admitting they can also make mistakes. The silver lining for me is that I've learned something that I wish more Bot Laners (both ADC and Supp) would remember. Our lane is a dance of two, and while we may not always be in sync, is up to the both of us to make the best we can. It's never always just the ADC's fault, and it's never always just the Supp's fault. More often than not if the lane goes south is because we're not connecting well. I love my support the most of all players in a game, but sometimes is just hard to love you guys when I get blamed for a mistake you made. And well, I know it can go the other way around as well. In short: Let's play together. If we win or lose, it's because we're doing it together. We both need to learn to admit to our mistakes and make good of the good plays our lane partner makes. I'm not sure this part will reach many, but with so much ADC hate here, I might as well attempt something positive one last time.
Another somewhat frustrating part of these forums for me were the Quick Gameplay Thoughts by Meddler. I don't wish to make a super long post about it, but for a post about communicating to the players and interacting with them, they always felt like a "minimum effort" type of thing to me. I kept trying over and over to reach out and get any info about Trist back in.. 2016 or 2017? Don't remember the year but she had the lowest win ratio of any ADC and had not been touched for over a year. I never got any kind of answer, not even a "Trist isn't on the board right now". Scarizard used to work at Riot back then, and during a stream he was kind enough to answer the following (paraphrasing) about Trist at that time: "We're not sure how to help her right now without breaking her and making her way too strong. Her kit may need a bit of an adjustment or maybe the meta will shift in the upcoming months" which wasn't much, but a great answer to my concerns back then. Never got that in The Boards.
One of the most frustrating experiences I had with The Boards however came from an attempt to report a bug (that exists to this day) more than 15 times in a span of about 2 years with the issue never being as much as acknowledged by Riot. I just made the 15th and last repost about the issue a couple hours ago after I learned this place was being shut down. I don't expect it to be nocied now, but why not...
This however leads to the final topic I wanna talk about...
#Mismanagement yet again...
I've been playing League since 2012, since September to be precise. I remember seeing the Syndra login screen and thinking she was like the main character or something (lol) but ever since then, I've seen Riot continue to mismanage projects and services over and over, and I'm not sure they are really learning about their experiences.
When Dominion was shut down, we were told that it had entered a vicious cycle of people not playing because it wasn't properly balanced, which led to Riot just ignoring the mode and slowly letting it die. We were told that they had learned from the experience, and that they wouldn't let that happen again.
A few years later, Twisted Treeline was murdered by the exact same set of issues that killed Dominion. I just LOVED how Meddler said "We wanted to get rid of it but people were still playing it so we waited for numbers to decline" which essentially means "We neglected it ON PURPOSE so that less people would play the mode" and then they just killed it. I loved Dominion and I know people who loved Twisted Treeline. The modes were treated the same way years apart.
Nexus Blitz was killed before it even got a real chance. I never understood why let people play a Beta if you're just gonna kill it if it doesn't pull huge numbers. People were pretty vocal about many ideas for NB: Give the map a distinct visual style and design, open the door for old items, ways to make certain aspects of the game feel better. But in the end it was not meant to be.
Rotating gaming modes? Those have been MIA for years, with URF only appearing here and there from time to time. These provided variety and a place to do many things with the game, including trying out new champions, playing quick games that didn't require 30 mins but that still worked with the League mechanics, and we haven't been told what's up with them in a very long time.
Riot however won't waste any time in trying to entice us to buy achievements (Eternals) which have been a standard feature in consoles/services for more than a decade. Steam doesn't charge you to unlock achievements, and that's also a free platform, not to mention that some of the Eternals were basic stats we used to have in the old Air Client and then in the Year In Report, which was also killed in 2019. Also the move is called "Insec" Riot, not "Bicycle Kick"...
Now we're being told The Boards are being killed. I've heard that Rioters don't like this place very much, but I've never seen the company an honest attempt to make this a better platform for communication between the devs and the community.
And TO BE CLEAR... I don't mean the: "REEEEE CHARACTER BEAT ME RIOT FUCK YOU NERF CHARACTER" type of post. As a regular lurker (sometimes poster) of this Forum, I know very well that there was a bunch of useless trash being posted on a daily basis. AverageJoe posting about how he just lost to Ahri or whatever so it must mean they're broken, or some other person raging about being banned for spouting a bunch of crap in chat during a game. But this is where Riot's mismanagement plays a big part. Because Reddit is so heavily controller, many uncomfortable yet legit topics found their place here, but I don't remember Riot ever addressing them. I have no idea where those topics will be able to be discussed going forward.
You can't possibly expect an open Forum to become a healthy place without people specifically hired to manage it. Mods and Wardens or whatever were volunteers, not paid community managers.
Back in 2010, a little game was launched called Final Fantasy XIV. The game was flat out horrible, and Square for a time didn't wanna deal with it, but they then swallowed all of their pride, apologized and opened up to their players. The producer was embarrassed for the state of the game and flat out resigned. The director was demoted and a new Producer/Director by the name of Naoki Yoshida was hired to take their place. A new forum was created, where dedicated community managers served as a bridge between players and the dev team. Mr Yoshida began hosting monthly stream (Live Letter from the Producer) where he'd talk about the state of the game and show his direct response to a lot of the feedback being received. Yoshida and his team went on to update a broken (nearly unplayable game) while developing an entirely brand new game to take its place. The stage was horrible and I'd never wish for any dev team to be in that situation, but they owned up the situation, kept direct communication with their players, and managed to launch an MMO which depending on what site and stats you look at, is either the most or second most successful MMO today. The FF XIV forums still exist, with dedicated community managers still serving as a bridge between players and devs.
And what do we get from Riot on the OFFICIAL forum?? Another Dominion, another Twisted Treeline: "Nah, can't fix, nuke it".
For how much Rioters seem to hate this place, I rarely saw them make an attempt to improve this place for real. Riot Bazerka instantly comes to mind, with his short-lived Lunch Time series, which I thought was a little wonderful thing to do, just to well... talk with the community about League of Legends and/or whatever else.
We're now losing a place that many of us actually really enjoyed visiting and engaging with. A place that was FAR from perfect, but that for a lack of a better term, always felt like a "Half assed" project by its owners. The Beta sign at the top stayed up there for years, which again just makes me think of lackluster management.
In any case, I'll end my rant here (don't think may actually will read it all) and just bid you all farewell. If anything I hope Riot learned that this is yet another League product/experience lost to mismanagement, and that better efforts can be done to prevent this kind of thing in the future... just don't act surprised when Riot kill in-client Clubs next, and I wish I was kidding. For any fellow Boards member, I hope in the future we can have more discussions like the ones from my Trist posts, where we don't try to "win" an argument but rather learn from the other side of such argument to formulate a bunch of resources to understand whatever topic better.
Other than the Trist/Xayah/Zoe Discord servers I'm in, I'll now be homeless as far as an online League forum is concerned. A real shame, but not entirely surprising giving the neglect this place has seen for the last couple years.
Have a nice day and see you on the rift!
