Why do you guys have to be so...unresponsive?

d0riyah·Oct 27, 2018·186 votes·22,386 views

I hate to make this comparison but...look at Fortnite. About two and a half days after the new event comes out, they've announced they're changing it based on player feedback. 2 and a half days! Meanwhile at Riot land: it can take up to months sometimes to get the most basic changes that a ton of people have been asking for. Won't pull any specifics, as there are a lot. However I think most people here can agree with me that Riot takes forever to communicate and respond to their players and their feedback gameplay-wise. I get it, you guys are running a HUGE game here, and it's hard to appeal and respond to everyone. But if Fortnite can do it, I'm just saying; I think you guys could aswell.

114 Comments

Frosted TipsOct 27, 201884 votes

Ok the comparison is actually trash but the message is fine.

Fortnite is a beyond casual game. There are way less mechanics to worry about and the player base is much less committed than LoL. LoL and Fortnite are not comparable besides the size of their playerbases.

Riot should be quicker atleast to communicate.

tempname130583Oct 27, 20187 votes

i would argue the comparison is good because since league requires so much more commitment than fortnite that would be incentive for riot not to disappoint them regardless of the amount of mechanics because when the community provides balance feedback for league they are usually pretty specific about what they want and why

JamareeOct 27, 201810 votes

{quoted}

i would argue the comparison is good because since league requires so much more commitment than fortnite that would be incentive for riot not to disappoint them regardless of the amount of mechanics because when the community provides balance feedback for league they are usually pretty specific about what they want and why

No they don't, do you read these forums? o_O

tempname130583Oct 27, 20184 votes

i do read the forums and while a lot of people do pretty much just cancer post there are some people that post very well thought out things

JamareeOct 27, 20185 votes

{quoted}

i do read the forums and while a lot of people do pretty much just cancer post there are some people that post very well thought out things

Some? Even less then that.

CaveslothOct 27, 20186 votes

To be fair, almost all the people who posted intelligent well thought out stuff left because riot almost never engaged with them. But yeah, not much content left, just anger. Not that it isn't deserved, but it doesn't really help anything.

JamareeOct 27, 20184 votes

{quoted}

To be fair, almost all the people who posted intelligent well thought out stuff left because riot almost never engaged with them. But yeah, not much content left, just anger. Not that it isn't deserved, but it doesn't really help anything.

Kind of hard to find them under the mountains of shit.

sir d wreckOct 27, 20185 votes

would be incentive for riot not to disappoint them regardless

I'm pretty sure this is actually why they are more careful and take longer to reply to certain thing.

EcophileOct 27, 20183 votes

Could not have said it better. On top of that, there are so many contradictions with what some people ask for as change. Yes Riot should communicate faster, but no they should not haste to do changes. When they do, people cry even more, like the AP itemization or the adc nerfs.

It is not because the OP has requests that it represents everyone in the community.

MarshbouyOct 27, 201841 votes

People have been requesting for the client to assign you smite when you're assigned jungle for years and they finally made the change recently.

lmao.

2Charmnot2CharmOct 27, 20186 votes

{quoted}

People have been requesting for the client to assign you smite when you're assigned jungle for years and they finally made the change recently.

lmao.

Best part was it was done in nexus blitz first before the actual draft modes.

ModCaptainMårvelousOct 27, 201826 votes

Meanwhile at Riot land: it can take up to months sometimes to get the most basic changes that a ton of people have been asking for.

NA Western audience for Fortnite vs. Global Audience for League.

Epic really only has to worry about the Western playerbase because everywhere else doesn't matter. League, comparatively, is a massive and global game. Reddit/Boards complaining about a problem even in unison is not even the largest fraction of the playerbase. it also means that because of vastly different demographics, you have to balance the game in different ways.

Also y'know, for-fun event vs. dedicated competitive balance. Riot was 2-ish days fast when URF came out.

EDIT: Slight correction. Had to include EU for Fortnite.

anhatonOct 27, 201823 votes

Man League sure does have a silent community, or at least that's what you Riot supporters would have people believe...

Isn't it just fascinating how popular the "vocal minority" argument is whenever Riot is criticized...

JamareeOct 27, 201813 votes

{quoted}

Man League sure does have a silent community, or at least that's what you Riot supporters would have people believe...

Isn't it just fascinating how popular the "vocal minority" argument is whenever Riot is criticized...

That is every game though, like go on the forums of every game and you won't find anyone praising the creators or whatever, you will find tons of backlash.

Look, here are the Fortnite forums, literally the same kind of complaining there that you have here.

https://www.epicgames.com/fortnite/forums/battle-royale/royale-with-cheese

anhatonOct 27, 20184 votes

And yet their most widely agreed "complaints" find answers in-game within a reasonable timeframe, interesting...

JamareeOct 27, 20183 votes

{quoted}

And yet their most widely agreed "complaints" find answers in-game within a reasonable timeframe, interesting...

Besides the damage thing, which ones don't if you don't mind me asking?

CaveslothOct 27, 20182 votes

Mans gotta a point. People have been complaining that shotguns are too OP since the game started getting popular, and it was only a few months ago they finally nerfed them... a little.

ModCaptainMårvelousOct 27, 20187 votes

I mean, it is true?

If you look at actual numbers NA is one of the smaller playerbases. EUW is apparently the biggest with Korea in second (According to 2017 stats) but both pale in comparison to China. You're free to disagree but numbers do back this up.

SmallCheeseCakeOct 27, 20184 votes

{quoted}

Man League sure does have a silent community, or at least that's what you Riot supporters would have people believe...

Isn't it just fascinating how popular the "vocal minority" argument is whenever Riot is criticized...

IDK man, it's pretty convincing when you'll only find complaints on here, people probably just don't say anything if they're satified tbh.

ParoeOct 27, 20183 votes

{quoted}

IDK man, it's pretty convincing when you'll only find complaints on here, people probably just don't say anything if they're satified tbh.

Exactly. Praise for praises sake is a bad thing. If youre a wait staff and you do really well, a 25%~30% tip is your "you did a great job". But if you do a bad job people will say "you did bad" or just not tip you at all.

"For every person who praises you, theres a hundred who hate you." and "For every person who says something, a thousand just never come back".

@thread League of legends is so decentralized and divided at the management level that could probably give information to one group in a department, and no one else would ever hear about it. In theory the whole "modular" organization archetype works, but riot has 0 chain of command, 0 accountability, and 0 ability to react to problems.

Z3SleeperOct 27, 20187 votes

Those are terrible quotes.

JamareeOct 27, 20183 votes

{quoted}

Exactly. Praise for praises sake is a bad thing. If youre a wait staff and you do really well, a 25%~30% tip is your "you did a great job". But if you do a bad job people will say "you did bad" or just not tip you at all.

"For every person who praises you, theres a hundred who hate you." and "For every person who says something, a thousand just never come back".

@thread League of legends is so decentralized and divided at the management level that could probably give information to one group in a department, and no one else would ever hear about it. In theory the whole "modular" organization archetype works, but riot has 0 chain of command, 0 accountability, and 0 ability to react to problems.

No one is saying praise for praise sake, but let's be real here, how many forums actively have people praising the game past the few year or so?

MogarlOct 27, 20185 votes

There may be tons of vocal people that disagree with the boards. However there is no guarantee that they speak English So you're probably not going to see them on the subreddit or NA boards. Pretty sure the top five for server size are China, Vietnam, EUW, KR, EUNE, and NA in that order. Chances are that players that primarily speak English are a minority, so if there is dissension on the opinion even on the English speaking boards it's not really unfair to claim it as a vocal minority. Especially sense less than half of the player base even accesses The Boards or Reddit.

Teemo GrompOct 27, 20183 votes

{quoted}

NA Western audience for Fortnite vs. Global Audience for League.

Epic really only has to worry about the Western playerbase because everywhere else doesn't matter. League, comparatively, is a massive and global game. Reddit/Boards complaining about a problem even in unison is not even the largest fraction of the playerbase. it also means that because of vastly different demographics, you have to balance the game in different ways.

Also y'know, for-fun event vs. dedicated competitive balance. Riot was 2-ish days fast when URF came out.

EDIT: Slight correction. Had to include EU for Fortnite.

Don't talk shit, mate. We also talk about the slightest changes here, not about total reworks. For example, the replay Tool. I think it was me in 2011 fiddling with LOLREPLAY, something a non-RIOT guy did in his sparetime. RIOT, the huge-ass company, would take FOREVER (several years!!!) to bring their own replay tool. Which is shit.

The other thing for example is that people want forever to add stuff to the Practice Tool. Unchanged since 2 years?

Maybe something else? I remember they said they had a "team" working for "several weeks" on this ugly-ass status bar. Something a appstore programmer does alone within 3 days.

Sorry, but if you count in FULLTIME EMPLOYEES, several of them, over several months, that's literally thousands of labour hours. And they get shit done, then the comparison, as faulty as it might be, is still sending the right message: RIOT is slow and incompetent.

Borderlands 2 would not be released today if RIOT's 100+ employees would do it. RIOT is already overwehlemed with these low-polygone models with barely any facial expressions, let alone real models. Why is the game so poorly made? Why does the loading takes forever despite people being 100%? Why does the network code sucks so bad? Why is my GTX1080 getting stutters since the last patch?

RIOT sucks monkey dicks in that department. The reason why there are still (!) big is the substance. ANd people like me, being here since mid-2010..

DOUBLE TAPPED EOct 27, 201825 votes

It wasn't always like this though, they used to care much more about timely action based on player feedback. As the company has grown, it's respect for the community has shrunk. Not entirely, but quite a bit.

InfernapeOct 27, 201816 votes

God knows. Sometimes Riot tackle things quickly, others they let it sit and fester.

anhatonOct 27, 201836 votes

When has Riot ever tackled something fast when it wasn't LeeSin falling below 10% pick rate?

MarshbouyOct 27, 201818 votes

Day one hotfixes for champ reworks/releases are a common issue and tend to result in a champion being busted and needing nerfs soon after.

CaveslothOct 27, 20185 votes

Day one hotfixes are one thing, not fixing something for months, like say Zyra's plants being bugged to hell for 4 months or Mordekaisers's... everything (How many bugs does he have again? 160 something?) and it becomes real clear unless you are their favorites, you'd better enjoy getting fucked over for a very very long time.

BigSquirrellOct 27, 201815 votes

A hell of a lot goes into a change on League compared to Fortnite. When a change happens for Fortnite, the players as a whole are all dealing with that one change in the same way. On League, the people playing as a champion will experience it different than the people playing against the champion, and the ones playing against the champion will be having that experience as one of 146+ different champions. That's a lot of learning to do, and it doesn't happen all at once. It can take a month or more for people to finally get used to bigger changes like reworks and new champions, and even adjusting to smaller changes take time. People bitch a LOT about things being too strong or too weak in those adjustment periods and listening to them is usually a really bad idea.

There's also the need to find the right kind of change. On occasion, Rioters have mentioned that when talking about champ changes. Sometimes a little numbers tuning works, other times they have ideas already for things that can be added or taken away, but other times they have to spend a lot of time figuring it out. Fortnite it can just be "lets nerf shotguns a bit" and there you go.

F Ù ŃOct 27, 20183 votes

{quoted}

A hell of a lot goes into a change on League compared to Fortnite. When a change happens for Fortnite, the players as a whole are all dealing with that one change in the same way. On League, the people playing as a champion will experience it different than the people playing against the champion, and the ones playing against the champion will be having that experience as one of 146+ different champions. That's a lot of learning to do, and it doesn't happen all at once. It can take a month or more for people to finally get used to bigger changes like reworks and new champions, and even adjusting to smaller changes take time. People bitch a LOT about things being too strong or too weak in those adjustment periods and listening to them is usually a really bad idea.

There's also the need to find the right kind of change. On occasion, Rioters have mentioned that when talking about champ changes. Sometimes a little numbers tuning works, other times they have ideas already for things that can be added or taken away, but other times they have to spend a lot of time figuring it out. Fortnite it can just be "lets nerf shotguns a bit" and there you go.

I dunno why u were downvoted. Valid points here. For example, I used to enjoy Mid Lane Taliyah, her jg nerfs affected her mid, so now I can’t play her. (I still can, just basic example)

DengedenOct 27, 201811 votes

Hard to respond to passive-aggressive BS like "...…………. ADCs …………. are still broken...………." for which none of you ever gave feasible evidence.

Besides, most of the time, their only answer's gonna be "We're working on the problem champs/items this patch and gonna overhaul whatever every 6 months." so why bother?

10 fpsOct 27, 20184 votes

Right? And majority of the boards is low elo. I'm not rank shaming anyone, I'm low elo too but people come here with a condescending attitude as if they can balance the game better than Riot. If they actually knew enough about the game, they wouldn't be low elo. Sometimes there are some valid, well-written posts on the boards but majority of the things I see here is just appalling.

Also, people here just farm upvotes. I've seen someone make a post and get 50+ upvotes then hours later someone will make the same post just worded differently. People here just regurgitate what they see others say for upvotes.

The boards is just not a healthy place for discussion.

NevrankroatonOct 27, 201811 votes

They do communicate, the whole incoming preseason post are basically "You want this? Well we try to do it" but you need to realise that in lol, a lot of changes can destroy the game balance pretty hard.

The same Riot got screamed at for making too many updates this season that shook the game meta.

Also, Riot need to know what they prepare before talking about it. Either they tell you "We will work on it" and you all salty they dont say more, or they come with the big plan later.

The EcdysiastOct 27, 20185 votes

Because there are, officially, no ways of communicating with Riot staff directly aside from Red-created posts. Reds on the boards have stated quite clearly that the boards are for discussion among players, and specifically not with Riot.

Meanwhile, if you attempt to reach them via Player Support, they will tell you to come to the boards. So there's nothing you can do.

ValentenOct 27, 20182 votes

The boards used to be full of communication between devs and players. Back when they actually listened to feedback and the game only had like 1 or 2 broken characters at a time. Now its like heres 20 characters that are busted pick your poison.

ModCaptainMårvelousOct 27, 20184 votes

Yeah, back when the community was around 100k players and predominantly in NA.

Also false equivalency. There were characters just as broken (perhaps more so) in the early days. Problem is we were all terrible and obviously broken things like DFG or Veigar's instant stun cage kept slipping through the cracks.

Teemo GrompOct 27, 20181 votes

{quoted}

Yeah, back when the community was around 100k players and predominantly in NA.

Also false equivalency. There were characters just as broken (perhaps more so) in the early days. Problem is we were all terrible and obviously broken things like DFG or Veigar's instant stun cage kept slipping through the cracks.

The game was much more fun back then, so I don't think so. The reason why LoL grew so fast was because it was good fun. I came in mid-2010 (I think I told that already before) so I know some of the "old days", and it was better than this crap. Because you had ONE busted Xin Zhao or Olaf. But that's it. Now you have spagetthi balance. (as reference to spaghetti code).

ModCaptainMårvelousOct 27, 20183 votes

Yeah, I was there at the same time.

There was even more shit, but we never realized it.

Did you know old DFG had a use rate of like less than 5%? Less than five percent of people who bought it used the item. A 15% HP point-and-click nuke that inceases magic damage done. That's more ghastly than any keystone we have today....and yet people never used it. People back then were BAD. A diamond 5 player today could probably be a pro-and-or-worlds winner in Season 1/2. We only saw a champion be busted OP if they could literally 1v5. Several 1v3 champs existed but they weren't played as well.

The reason old League was fun is the same reason old WoW was fun. Not because it was a better designed game but because everyone was at the same level, even the greats, and it was uncharted territory. It was new. It was old. You could smash the entire meta by replacing dodge yellows for armor yellows. These days it still happens (hello Viktor top) but as players got better, skill disparity got worse and now we're all playing at a level that can make even the smallest advantage gross.

One last thing: People like to complain about winrates. Then you have old Riot who would literally remove characters out of the game if they were too strong. Olaf, Evelynn, Poppy. Sej might have a 40-something % winrate but you can still win with her.

JohnnyNeverSinsOct 27, 20184 votes

Well for Rito Fucking Games it taked 2 and a half YEARS.

Dope SoloOct 27, 20184 votes

The balance in this game is genuinely trash. Ahri Yasuo Zed Kaisa Irelia Akali . They're losing money and failing because they don't listen.

DarkinPrimeOct 28, 20184 votes

Because of ego. They have too much ego on their staff, and they know best so they aren't going to jump to do what the players are asking for until we know damn well that they are ones to choose to do it when they were good and ready and not before.

If the development team of Fortnight ever made a MOBA, they would crush Riot into oblivion where they belong.

The other reason is that they have made this game as frustration as possible what with the stupid series process that makes it hard to climb, or the unbalanced champions that never get touched because they are popular...and then they wonder why everyone comes on here to shit on Riot....so they stay away.

notMineskiexoOct 28, 20181 votes

{quoted}

If the development team of Fortnight ever made a MOBA, they would crush Riot into oblivion where they belong.

I really hope this is a joke

DarkinPrimeOct 29, 20182 votes

Why? Marc Merrill is an narcissist who created a bro culture of players who literally hate the bulk of the player base.

Sire HippingtonOct 27, 20183 votes

While i agree that riot should react faster on many things, 2 and a half days is way to short for a complex game unless it's about gamebreaking bugs. Whenever they went for followup changes just a weak later, it usually ended in a disaster(yasuo buffs becuase of his poor initial performance for example)

I a complex game like lol, you need some time to proper asses a situation. That said, they definitly took to long on many things, like kaisa or ardent, and their communication atleast on the boards is also very slow most of the time. And often enough, it feels even after a long time, they still don't come up with a solid solution(again, kaisa, and kinda yasuo)

CaveslothOct 27, 20184 votes

Yeah balance changes should be done slowly and with care, look how badly they fucked up the game when they came out with all that change in Runes Reforged. And they didn't help they kept pushing more and more change at a rapid pace most of the season.

But that said, RIot is guilty of being far too slow to fix things that should be fixed fast. Look at how long Zyra's plants have been bugged (4 months or so) let alone Morde's 160 or so bugs. How long have HIS mains been waiting geezus.

Tomoe GozenOct 27, 20181 votes

Why fix Morde at all? His gameplay isn't broken, his buggs are at most annoying to deal with when they happen. And they're not consistent or making him unplayable. Refactoring ALL OF HIS CODE is a massive waste of time BECAUSE he's already unofficially on the rework list. Riot knows he's getting one, we know he's getting one.

And the whole REWORK is going to change who he is from the ground up, which means no spell is going to remain the same. Spending that time to refactor his old code (code he has now) is a pointless waste of resources because it's all going to be trashed once he gets reworked.

Having an unpaid "tech debt" is one thing. Doing old code refactoring that's going to be thrown away in the "near" future is like spending money to fix your broken older phone, only for you to buy a brand new, latest edition phone from a brand manufacturer and throwing your older one (perfectly working) in the trash.

CaveslothOct 27, 20182 votes

Very true, it would all be for nothing, unless he stays in the "We'll get to him soon category" like hes been in for years, nevermind they wouldn't have to fix him if they hadn't broken him so badly in the first place.

And that's just one example of neglect. What about Zyra? She's had that bug for 4 months and she's not on the rework list so... sucks to be her for what, another year probably at the rate they fix stuff. Is there any reasonable excuse for that?