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What do we mean when we say the boards/reddit are a minority?

RiotRiot MapleNectar·2/15/2018, 6:09:30 PM·1 votes·101,739 views

Hey guys!

In the past few weeks I’ve seen more players calling out our usage of “oh but the boards are a minority” as bullshit when we’re talking about why we might not immediately jump on a problem that the boards/reddit is talking about. The sentiment from you folks is justified, because other than saying “oh but you guys are a minority”, we’ve never really presented you with much/any evidence to back up our claim. That’s not really fair to you guys, and I want to take this post as an opportunity to outline what we mean when we say that the boards/reddit are a minority of our players base. At the same time I want to stress that while we don’t always respond immediately to a problem that’s being talked about on the boards/reddit, it usually serves as a flag that we should potentially investigate something, even if the end result is that no action needs to be taken.

A very recent example I want to use is the top lane conversations we’re seeing a lot on Reddit and the boards in NA, and want to dig into that briefly through the lens of looking at the game from a global perspective. At the end of the day League of Legends is a game that serves as a competitive outlet for millions of players around the world on a daily basis, and being hypersensitive to the issues raised by players in one region can cause us to completely ignore the reality in another. Disclaimer: This post is NOT intended to prove/disprove anything regarding top lane, my only intended purpose is to highlight regional differences and how that can impact the way we iterate and change the game.

In English speaking dominant regions, we’re seeing a lot of discussion around the state of top lane in regards to lane specific champion power, items, agency over outcome of the game, lack of specific keystones, which all boils down to a belief that top is a far less desirable position to play than in the past. When these conversations come up, we definitely talk about them, and we try and figure out if they actually are problems. Whether that be comparing the problem across regions, whether it’s an issue only in high level play, only for specific classes etc etc, before we jump into definitive action. Unfortunately this means that some problems may take longer to find resolution than others, or their priority isn’t as high as some would like compared to other things we’re trying to solve. To highlight the regional comparison, I took data from a few (not all) of our regions to illustrate how position preferences can vary depending on what region you’re in - you can see it in the charts below.

https://i.imgur.com/k0qmr7l.jpg (Top is the red line; "utility" is support)

Comparing North America, Vietnam, and Korea there’s a few immediate trends that you can see.

  1. At all MMR in every specific region as well as all regions, top lane is in the top 3 for preferred queued role, even sitting at #1 by a decent margin in Vietnam
  2. At high MMR (1800+) top lane preference goes from 3rd to last in NA, 1st to 4th in Vietnam, 2nd to hovering between 3rd/4th/5th in KR, and 2nd to 4th in all Regions.
  3. At high MMR the delta between least popular and most popular position generally shrinks pretty substantially
  4. Jungle, Support, and Top tend to cross either frequently in regards to position preference at high MMR.
  5. Despite efforts over the past season, support is still by far the least preferred role in Vietnam by a very wide margin.

Quick tangent on the support line (purple)! Our graphs unfortunately only go back ~6 months, but utility used to be FAR lower across the board, at all MMR, in all Regions.This is what prompted us to pour a significant amount of development time into making the role more desirable and have a greater impact on the outcome of a game beyond just controlling vision for their team. It's undoubtedly had some knock on effects on other positions as more of a teams power was concentrated into bot lane, but we’re in a far more sustainable world now than we were a year and a half ago.

I digress though - the point I want to illustrate is that we see differences in player preferences and behaviors across world which have impacts on things like position preferences, game length/pacing, meta, popular champions etc. When we make changes to League we're trying to keep all of these in mind (which is hard given that our dev team is primarily English speaking working out of LA). This is why it might not seem like we're jumping on a problem that's identified by players in specific communities, because we're generally trying to account for what's going on in other regions as well lest we accidentally exacerbate a problem somewhere else in the world where a different meta is dominant.This doesn’t mean that we don’t have work to do on top lane, the high MMR graphs does suggest that it becomes a less desirable role for likely a wide variety of reasons (which is in progress), but again, I hope it illustrates why it’s not as easy to just jump on one problem the minute it’s raised in one region.

For another interesting look, this is what the distribution looks like across all regions, when filtering down to only include games from roughly ~Gold 3 down to 0 MMR.

https://i.imgur.com/csd5ghp.png

When you zoom out and look at the big picture, a problem for a specific subset of players doesn’t necessarily translate to the entire player base which can make solving those problems more complex. We are a game that serves millions of players around the world, all with different motivations, and we’re always trying to balance and adjust the game with everyone in mind. While, we tend to focus more of our changes around high level play due to the nature of players getting better at League and the never ending path to mastery, we still need to think about players at all levels because every player is important to help cement League as a game that will last for generations. We're not perfect at this, but we're always attempting to walk the fine line of balancing the game for pro play, for our heavily engaged ranked players, and for normal players. It’s also worth noting that these regional differences also influence the type of work we do in regards to champion VGUs, Gameplay updates, skins, and all manner of decisions that we make every single day.

This is glossing over a pretty large topic, but I hope that it helps to illustrate what we mean when we say that various communities are oftentimes a minority and don’t necessarily represent the player base as a whole. It’s never intended as a dismissive remark, but rather an acknowledgement of the costs that comes with operating a game played around the world. If you guys would be interested in me going deeper into this or another topic let me know in the comments below!

I won't be able to answer every question you guys have, but will try to respond to questions in the comments as I have the time over the coming days.

Maple Nectar

173 Comments

redniwediS2/15/2018, 6:27:43 PM40 votes

I always love posts like this. Hearing more about what goes on behind the scenes is always fun, and definitely helps us understand the thinking that goes on at Riot. As an NA top lane main who can get rather frustrated with the role, but plays it anyway, it's definitely helpful to know what you guys are looking at here, and I always appreciate clarification.

I know it's a long shot, but has there been any thought to make graphs like that publicly available without needing a Rioter to post it?

RiotNot Surrendering2/16/2018, 4:24:38 AM38 votes

One thing Maple didn't mention was Vietnam is the 2nd largest region (slightly larger than Korea and EUW and 1.5 times NA). I think a lot of people are interpreting it as Vietnam being the smallest region or something.

ChargeItDownMid2/15/2018, 9:20:08 PM33 votes

[deleted]

ModKnightsKemplar2/15/2018, 6:17:45 PM21 votes

Great post!

I would love to see some of this data on positive things that you guys have done; I think it would have helped months ago to see that the support role is getting picked more; having players understand that might have helped ease concerns about it (maybe).

Question pertaining to that: do you have data on queue health from before and after the changes to the support role? I would assume it's gotten better, but would love to hear specifics if you have them. Seems like the problem mainly ghosted, and that's one of the situations where I think it would help for you to remind players about a HUGE problem that you successfully fixed.

LostFr0st2/15/2018, 7:09:07 PM17 votes

[{quoted}](name=Maple Nectar,realm=NA,application-id=A7LBtoKc,discussion-id=nfTpwemT,comment-id=,timestamp=2018-02-15T18:09:30.292+0000)

[...]

Comparing North America, Vietnam, and Korea there’s a few immediate trends that you can see.

  1. At all MMR in every specific region as well as all regions, top lane is in the top 3 for preferred queued role, even sitting at #1 by a decent margin in Vietnam
  2. At high MMR (1800+) top lane preference goes from 3rd to last in NA, 1st to 4th in Vietnam, 2nd to hovering between 3rd/4th/5th in KR, and 2nd to 4th in all Regions.
  3. At high MMR the delta between least popular and most popular position generally shrinks pretty substantially
  4. Jungle, Support, and Top tend to cross either frequently in regards to position preference at high MMR.
  5. Despite efforts over the past season, support is still by far the least preferred role in Vietnam by a very wide margin.

Quick tangent on the support line (purple)! Our graphs unfortunately only go back ~6 months, but utility used to be FAR lower across the board, at all MMR, in all Regions.This is what prompted us to pour a significant amount of development time into making the role more desirable and have a greater impact on the [...]

The above summaries, while factual, can all be rewritten to carry the opposite argument using the exact same graphs. It's in how the person chooses to read the graphs.

Example:

  1. At all MMR in every specific region as well as all regions, top lane is in the top bottom 3 for preferred queued role, even sitting at #1 by a decent margin in Vietnam at a solid #4/#5 with support at high MMR across all regions.

Therefore I ask:

Would it be possible to know the summoner weight of each region's data? Not saying it is or not, but if the Vietnam server is 1:8 of the Korean server the data tells a completely different story.

robotmaster2/15/2018, 7:12:42 PM15 votes

That a lot of words and a lot of stuff I don’t understand.

HowPlayGAEM2/15/2018, 7:34:05 PM12 votes

[{quoted}](name=Maple Nectar,realm=NA,application-id=A7LBtoKc,discussion-id=nfTpwemT,comment-id=,timestamp=2018-02-15T18:09:30.292+0000)

... illustrate what we mean when we say that various communities are oftentimes a minority and don’t necessarily represent the player base as a whole. It’s never intended as a dismissive remark,

It may not be intended to be dismissive, but it certainly comes off that way the vast majority of the time.

Nobody's asking you to pander exclusively to the boards/reddit, but it doesn't feel like you guys actually register issues or concerns raised here, and then when shit hits the fan globally you act all surprised "like woah we totally didn't see this coming xDDDD"

TerraRising2/15/2018, 8:41:01 PM12 votes

How about when the phrase IS used as a dismissive remark.

The recent Varus update drew a small but vocal backlash against the writers. However, the team's apparent attitude (which was echoed by the rest of the company) was to just ignore anyone critical as "bigots" and pretend they never existed. All except one Rioter who kept saying "you guys are a vocal minority." before giving tepid, corporate responses.

It's happened with the skins team as well, where killing memes was more important than delivering high quality skins to long suffering fans (Cass, Viktor, Yorick).

MrPhamtom2/15/2018, 11:34:55 PM11 votes

So today I learned that Riot balances for plat 5 Vietnam

Altonius Amakiir2/15/2018, 9:36:12 PM9 votes

This is fine and understandable, but it feels like this minority thing is also used as an excuse not to respond to questions. Whether that's true or not, it feels like Rioters use it as an excuse to not answer questions. In all likeliness this is probably true to an extent as the Rioter might need to look into all this stuff to be able to say "Yeah I can see that happening, I will bring it up". But at the same time there are other questions like "When might you guys work on this aspect of the game?" that are seemingly always ignored and don't really need any in-depth research to find an answer to.

That being said, I have two questions I've been trying to get answered for over 6 months that I would think fit the latter description of being easy to answer.

What happened to the monthly Q&A with Ghostcrawler and Scarizard, I know Scarizard left LoL, but there was still one other after that. I really liked these, and it kinda hits hard to not even know why they stopped (especially since I can't even get confirmation they stopped, so with my paranoia I start thinking maybe I am missing them). In the last one I saw they were talking about how they would try to upload the next to YouTube since Caffeine doesn't save streams, so I expected another... TLDR: Anything you can tell me about what happened to the Q&A would be appreciated.

When will the item set cap be removed? I had over 250 sets when the client switch happened so I can't make any new sets for champions I want to pick up or new champions/VGUs. I know that the Item Set Tool is being worked on behind the scenes now and then with small updates coming out fairly regularly, but we haven't really had Riot say what their priority is on these. I don't even know about it until I update a main's item set and see the changes. They aren't even in the patch notes (except for the import/export I think). This is something extremely important to me, as I like theory crafting and having item sets for each champion in each role, plus some "troll"/fun builds. On the old client the Item Set Tool was roughly 20% of the enjoyment I got from league because I like theory crafting that much, I would spend over an hour a day just on item sets (up to 3.5 hours some days). I just want to know whats going on with it. I feel like I was promised a better tool than on the old client (because it was annoying to spend those 3.5 hours some days and find it all gone the next), but it's been 9.5 months since it came out and it is still not in a spot where I can use it like I used to, which is disappointing and infuriating in itself, but paired with the lack of communication, it's soul crushing. I still don't even know why there is a limit. Anyways, I digress, at this point I just want to know if I should give up on my hopes of ever being functional to the degree it was for me previously. Maybe not as simple to answer as I would like to think, but I'm not looking for a complete reply at this point, there's been so much silence on this that I would just be happy knowing it was read by a Rioter at this point. TLDR: I want to know the status of the Item Set Tool, why the silence, why the limit?

JabaTheHat2/15/2018, 6:57:51 PM8 votes

A perfect example right now is how people on the Boards are heavily complaining about the Baron buff changes, thinking it would make games end too soon.

However, the Boards is the only place where people think games are too short(they think snowballing is VERY heavy right now). Reddit already does not share this mentality as much. And when you take into account of surveys that Riot did, you'll find out that most people are fine with the current pacing of the game.

But the few people who are so active here cannot hear the truth in their echo chamber.

Fisherman Fizz2/15/2018, 10:34:07 PM8 votes

  1. Is this data you used for the graphs only available internally or can anyone access it? My professor is encouraging me to learn Tableau, so I just downloaded it earlier today with a student license. I think it'd be really cool to mess around with League data to learn how to use it but I have no idea what I'm doing.

  2. Top lane seems to be universally less picked the higher up in MMR you look. What would you look at as your next step trying to figure out why? Are the people playing top lane unable to climb? Are the people that get higher MMR playing top lane simply not playing anymore? Are they switching roles once they get to higher mmr? Is it a psychological thing? (You can see in NA that top is picked less than korea for example, could the consensus on Reddit that top lane sucks make people in NA play it less? People at higher MMR are probably more likely to keep up with 3rd party sites like Reddit)? What exactly would you look at to try and figure out why?

  3. Similarly, I notice the opposite effect with supports. As MMR goes higher you see a lot more supports in most regions. Since support is generally just an inherently less popular role in general, does the higher play rate mean that it's become more fun to play, or that it's too strong of a role or that it's "easier" to climb with over a large number of games? Theoretically, is having an equal play rate to other roles necessarily something you want to shoot for if it means making the role unbalanced?

Slythion2/15/2018, 6:21:08 PM8 votes

I loved this! It really helps a lot when Riot opens up about decision making processes and how things work.

Regardless of the context, I always love it when Riot shows data and background information. It makes me feel as though you guys are aiming for a better company-community relationship when things are transparent like this. I really appreciate it

ShiniXII2/15/2018, 11:11:50 PM7 votes

LOW ELO VIETNAM

Kai Guy2/15/2018, 7:11:12 PM7 votes

How can we encourage mores posts like this that share this sort of internal data you guys look at with the community, to help bridge the gap in player understanding of Dev actions.

Madsin252/16/2018, 4:48:01 AM7 votes

Just because someone queues for a role doesn't mean they are not potentially shooting themselves in the dick. Bronze and silver make up probably 100x more players than gold5-3 alone.

Once you get good at the game you obviously see it's problems.

mrnm2/15/2018, 11:42:22 PM6 votes

So what this tells me is that I need to stop playing toplane before riot will make any changes?

WestTiger2/15/2018, 7:03:06 PM6 votes

I have a question regarding the Vietnam statistics. I am assuming that you are able to still gain information like this even though they're served by Garena Vietnam. Where exactly is that information from? Is it from the player logs, some central forum etc.?

Thing is, I'm guessing the Garena Vietnam forums are still up? Because Garena shut down the Singapore and Malaysia LoL forums since October 2017 last year.

We, Singapore and Malaysia, are the largest English speaking regions in Southeast Asia, maybe in Asia overall. We have not been provided an alternative way to communicate with Riot or Garena on LoL developments. Heck, I don't think the old Garena forums were even noticed by either Garena or Riot support staff. I almost had to Facebook message Riot ShadowDame directly because I noticed the Swain promos were a day behind other regions on the SG/MY LoL Facebook page.

I made an NA account so that I had some way to communicate with Riot through the NA forums here, but it feels like SG/MY and Garena regions in general are segregated from the majority of other servers. We have no forum to discuss, and no way to know if Riot even notices our opinions or discussions even when we did.

Even the Facebook page is confusing btw, because there is both a Riot Singapore page, and another for Garena Singapore or something.

So I want to know if you are being provided information from Garena, but exactly what source is it besides probably player in-game logs. Even then, I am not sure how much in-depth chatter or discussion goes on through in-game or lobby chatter, because we have no forums and no representatives to communicate with us over here. Reddit is the only global forum now for SG/MY since and before the forum shutdown.

I know you have a Riot Singapore office that's very new, would we finally see more direct Riot support in our region once that office is properly up and running?

Aurelion Solari2/16/2018, 3:52:17 PM6 votes

As someone who’s job it is trying to communicate things effectively and concisely I just wanted to say I like what you did, there were pictures, and it made sense. I’d love to get a deeper dive on this, maybe even as a universe article? There’s still a lot I don’t know about how you guys handle international data.

Carnicore2/16/2018, 1:38:30 AM5 votes

At high MMR (1800+)

plat 5 = high mmr lul

that would explain a lot about the balancing around here

AMYS GRAVE2/15/2018, 8:28:27 PM5 votes

While, we tend to focus more of our changes around high level play due to the nature of players getting better at League and the never ending path to mastery, we still need to think about players at all levels because every player is important to help cement League as a game that will last for generations.

If you want to make league a game that will last for generations, then doesn't the experience of older players have to continue to be applicable years later? If you compare the game as it is today i doubt that anyone who got unfrozen into today's game who played heavily in S3 or S4 could give any real meaningful advice to a younger player picking the game up. If the game changes so as to be largely unrecognizable to those who played before, then what?

Also, what is the long term vision of what league looks like for the next generation? Watching patch to patch i see the balance team playing whack a mole with the meta every patch but i can't seem to take away any unified direction that the changes are aiming towards.

Morning Raven2/15/2018, 7:08:18 PM4 votes

Very interesting to see. I think it should be noted that every region pretty much loves mid the best. It's a solo lane, with a wide variety of usable champions, has impact but less gimmicky and fits in with the whole "I wanna be the best, put me in center stage" kind of competitive mental trends. I wonder if there's anything you could do to spread the appeals of mid to the rest of the map.

Yes Ender's the hero and protagonist in Ender's Game, but there's still enough of Bean to give him the spotlight in Ender's Shadow.

TomiMan72/15/2018, 6:27:21 PM3 votes

It would have been nice if you would have included what all those colors mean not just top and sup :(

Alpha777Omega3/3/2018, 6:52:50 AM2 votes

Graphics are shitttt, match system is worse than shitttt, end in game chat , end matching, develop a system where individual game performace is the way for promo not relying on how many afk's you get to manage in bronze. The system is shitttt

Northmund3/7/2018, 2:20:39 PM2 votes

You mean that we are minority, a cattle for you. And you are a farm owner :P Cattle will end one day, i can promise you that...

CoolKnightST2/15/2018, 11:24:09 PM2 votes

I don't think these charts will give proper information regarding the state of toplane. To start with under plat you can basicly play anything in the toplane so it doesn't really aply their. Secondly it was never a question that the impact of a toplaner was to low from a role perspective. The issue was the impact of a toplaner from a champion perspective what is a hugh differents and the real issue why toplane is in the state it is now.