Thoughts on Riot and Player Communication

Riot takes a lot of pride in being a company that tries to put us, the player base, first. Lately the general word around League seems to be there are a lot of unhappy players in regards to Balance and Design decisions. I will go ahead and say that right now I myself feel as though League has been better in the past there certainly is a lot of extra damage out there these days. Regardless I want nothing but the best for League as it has been apart of my life since there were bushes in front of Baron's pit.

What I would like to see in the future from Riot is a further attempt at communicating with the players and asking; how do you want the game to change? The greatest example I can think of for what I have in mind is something like the voting system that Old School Runescape has implemented to see what content is brought back into the game. That system seems to work really well for that player community, but if we look at the theory of why it works we can understand that it is effective because the players have had access to this content before. Therefore the player base might be timid at certain new ideas for champions and communicate to Riot that they do not like things they haven't tried yet and stagnate the games development and evolution. The way I can think to get around this is to utilize the PBE. Let players test things out for a while, and then before a change is made have a couple thousand players vote on what they think should happen.

Then we do something similar on the Live version, allow some players to take surveys and vote about how they feel about the previous patch and possibly a current patch given enough time has passed to get helpful data. Use that data to build a list of what should have your focus in terms of balance or decision making. I've taken a few of Riot's surveys and I always think are low quality for real data collection. You cannot get a feel for what a player is thinking based on a scale of 1-5 about general concepts. Give me a survey that asks what I think about the Power of X Lane, Y Champion has been voiced as a potential issue what do you think, how do you feel about champ 1 versus champ 2 getting a new skin?

Imagine you get a survey about a champion lets say GP: Do you think GP is too strong of a champion right now? "yes" >Player selects a choice and then is given options as to why they think what they do.

Do you think the problem with GP is his kit (Damage, Stats, Abilities)
OR Do you think the problem is that with the addition of klepto along with his gold passive he has access to items much faster than other characters and can keep up even when behind OR Other

At this point the player starts thinking for themselves for a second they might not have made the connection that some of his strength comes from his ability to be so ahead on gold. Some players under value the ability to spend gold, when I was bronze and silver I wouldn't go back as long as I was doing well in lane, even if I had 2k gold. I didn't stop to think that if I left lane for 30 seconds and spent that gold I would keep a lead over my opponent.

Then Riot could offer some suggested changes that they have come up with and an OTHER option because in a development setting no input is bad input, since there's no guaranteed output.

(If this is formatted poorly woops its like my first forum post in years or maybe ever)

TL;DR: Riot should explore more options to hear from the player base in a focused manner rather than getting feedback on generalizations such as: are you happy with the state of the game?

Have fun out there Summoners