Boards›Gameplay

Riot has changed in a bad direction

Dakuda330·12/5/2017, 3:21:39 PM·127 votes·47,188 views

So today I decided I would look through some posts in the gameplay board and I'm not too happy about the results.

   I'll give some backstory before I say whats on my mind. I've played this game since 2012 and it is currently 2017. I have over 3000 games played. that's a long time to play a single game and a whole lot of games, and so i've seen this company progress for a long time, I've enjoyed this game very much during this time and typically I like the changes to the overall game. I thought the new bushes when they were implemented were pretty good, and I loved the new updated map that we have now, I loved that champs were getting reworks and I loved when they implemented the change in champion costs when new champs came out. But lets get into the complaint now

 My favorite thing about Riot was, They were very involved in the community. You would often see their comments in posts, The post could've been about how they don't like new changes or the post could've been some sort of fun idea concept that a player would come up with, and they would typically respond, sometimes it would be funny and other times it might not have been something we wanted to hear but at least they gave us something. I don't want to see anymore videos or post saying "we hear you, and we're listening" because when they make a change it clearly shows that someone isn't listening to the communities cries for help.

When I went through a bunch of posts today on the forum I noticed that when I saw posts from 2 years ago or so there would be upwards of 4 Rioters on one post and not every post was answered but a lot of them were (note: this is only from the new forum that they updated not from the old forum before this one) But when i saw posts from a month ago or 6 months ago, even with 400 upvotes or 200 upvotes, there were no riot comments. I understand that not all posts need a Rioter to comment on them because not all of them are intended for Riot but for the community to see. 

Whenever I see Rioters responding to critical post its typically an argumentative approach and not their friendly we understand and everything. It seems like how blizzards system has been working for a few years now where its a you're a player and your opinion is wrong and Riot or my opinion itself is right. It feels more like Riot is intentionally ignoring its players cries for help as blizzard has been doing in the past few years even though the company is much younger than blizzard. Its a pretty terrible thing in the eyes of a player that has been supporting this company over the past 5 years.

My hopes are that Riot as a company addresses these issues with their current staff soon because if new players come in and see stuff like this Riots dreams of League being on top for a long time is going to come toppling down in the 7 years that this game has been public (not including the beta they had started in 2009). I don't want to see my favorite gaming company turn into something like blizzard after such a short period of time. I would like to see this young company realize its mistake and fix it before its too late and the game dies like World of Warcraft.

There are only so many things you can do to attempt so save a dying community before you become so desperate that you become sloppy and release content that the playerbase does not enjoy. I ask that you please take what I've said into consideration, and I ask that you do not make the same mistake that other companies have made because I don't want to see my favorite game die.

431 Comments

RiotRiot Cactopus12/5/2017, 7:34:18 PM173 votes

Hey Dakuda330. This might sound hard to believe, but even though we don't always respond, we actually do read the boards every day.

This is sort of taking it off-topic, but I think you're probably right that we don't really engage on the boards as much as we used to. Just to be super real with you, I guess I can share my thoughts about some problems we have with the boards:

First, the boards are really small compared to other English-language League communities. If you're just looking at these official boards, you might think the League community is tiny. But it's not. It's just that most players ignore the boards. Basically our policy when it comes to engaging with players is to go wherever players go, whether that's Discord, Twitter, Facebook, or whatever other League community pops up. We don't really care about controlling the community or trying to make our official boards the biggest community—we'd rather let players decide where to go and then join them as members there. I personally post on the League of Legends subreddit a lot. At any given point in time there's at least 30,000 people online simultaneously there. That dwarfs these boards by a lot.

One other thing I've been thinking about recently is that there are actually fundamental problems with these boards. The biggest is that there's almost no reason to go here unless you have a complaint about the game. Since we really do read everything on the boards, players with issues know they can come here and get their complaint seen. This has the unfortunate side effect of turning the boards into a super concentrated echo chamber of salt.

Just as an example, there's a poster in this thread who currently has 9 upvotes for saying "they turned a once fun game into a pile of dog shit designed to make them money, except now there isn't enough interest to actually make them any money." Compare that to the stuff you see on any other more-popular League community (like the subreddit) and it quickly becomes pretty obvious that this board is dominated by extreme opinions that don't actually reflect the feelings of the broader League community at all. So, even if we read it, we're not going to give comments or posts like that too much weight.

I'm curious about your opinions on this, OP: do you think we should have Rioters posting in every single thread in the boards? Or does it make sense for us to take our current "read everything, respond when it's really important" approach? Obviously I know how I feel about it, but I'd like to see your thoughts now that I've explained our perspective.