A Rioters response I found on reddit
Looking around reddit posts about the Dynamic/Solo video, and found this by a Rioter. Thought it was something I should post on hear for everyone who doesn't go on reddit.
Hi, I'm Ronnie. I'm a Researcher on our Communications team at Riot: I recently came to the team to conduct surveys, labs, analyses, etc. to help us understand specifically where we're falling short and how we can do better. I was one of the people helping with the Dynamic Queue video, and I'd like to clear a few things up.
Warning: super long; tldr at the end of each section.
"You don’t really care – this was just a PR stunt!"
We had no delusions that this video would "make every single player love Dynamic Queue.” If that had been our goal, I'm not sure we could've done anything to succeed. It's literally impossible to make everybody happy.
Some feedback we've received over time is that we aren't transparent enough, and we don't seem like we're listening. It's really hard to try to communicate everything you want to say in written article form, especially when there's so much to explain behind the decisions, and you don't want to lose your audience with massive walls of text. Written articles about controversial topics can also come off as overly sanitized / PR-ified, which was the last thing we wanted/needed here.
So, the team decided that we should try something radically different: sit in a room and have a completely candid discussion about the whole problem space – what the pain points have been in the past, what we've been doing behind the scenes, how our communications became fragmented, what our plans are for the future, what solutions we’re exploring, etc. – both from our perspective and from the player perspective. It would have been really difficult to do this without having player community members to have that discussion with: how can we try to say we’re listening if we only talk amongst ourselves?
TL;DR: We do care, and we were trying to show that with the discussion video instead of just shoving out another wall of text, which hasn’t gotten particularly great reception in the past.
"It felt scripted!"
The roundtable discussion was not scripted for any of the participants. The entire conversation was over an hour long, but we pared it down to ~27 minutes to make sure we were putting out a video that still had ample discussion & covered all the topics, but wasn’t unbearably tedious. Perhaps the trimming of some tangents and repeated topics in the editing process made it feel scripted? The team is super open to feedback here, so please let me know if you can pinpoint anything more specific.
TL;DR: It wasn’t.
"Gbay wat?"
We wanted to get one person who could speak from the pro scene / very high-ELO side, and one person who could speak from the perspective of non-pros in the community who had fundamental disagreements. More specifically, we wanted to invite people who have spoken out against Dynamic Queue in the past, so we could have tough critics to challenge our thoughts and provoke solid discussion. Scarra was an obvious choice for the pro side in that regard, especially since this was filmed while most current LCS teams were either at MSI or bootcamping in Korea. Gbay is a decently prominent YouTuber – he has several videos where he dove into his frustrations with DQ in an articulate, unique way (e.g. "THE SOLO QUEUE RANT"), and we felt he had some really solid points. His videos showed us that he’s very passionate about the subject & very logical when he discusses it, and that's why we invited him.
TL;DR: Gbay is anti-DQ and has good points, and that’s why we invited him.
"Distinction between New Champ Select and Dynamic Queue!"
The distinction is less clear than it appears on the surface, because the problems that arise from the system come from both components, not just one or the other. The engineers do discuss the individual problems at a more specific level than just the NCS vs. DQ new queue components: because some parts of NCS are completely irrelevant to the issue. The piece of the NCS/DQ system that's causing the most high-ELO queue health issues is the role selection piece, as the engineers discuss in the video. If we only removed the ability to queue for ranked with any number of players and left everything else the same, that wouldn’t be enough to fix the queue health – as we discovered after hastily promising soloq could return and then realizing after extensive testing that it wasn’t going to work.
Regarding the issue ranked representing an index of your individual skill – that is something we are looking forward to tackling, BUT we had to be sure to prioritize playability of the queue itself at every ELO. How can we start talking about individual skill index when a segment of players can’t consistently get into quality matches in a reasonable amount of time? It would be a disservice to the players if we spent a majority of our time & resources on a philosophical representation of skill index when the queue itself was still in dire need of work.
Personally, I’d love to start having the “what would feel like the best indicator of your individual skill?” discussion with everyone.
TL;DR: The problems come from both components of the system.
“This was filmed like 3 weeks ago!”
Yes, it was – tbh, I didn’t realize it would take that long either until realizing how many steps are involved in the process of releasing a global video. First, our video guy had to make a cut of the video that the team agreed was comprehensive and represented the conversation well (this took a couple iterations). We then sent that cut to Gbay and Scarra, to make sure they felt like they were being accurately represented in it (i.e. that we hadn’t cut the video in a way that stifled or distorted the things they wanted to discuss). We then focus-tested the video with a few groups of local players to see what their thoughts were on the video. We also had to create a transcript, and then ask the localization team to translate this massive amount of verbiage to 20-something languages. So, yes, we took 3 weeks to release it after it was initially filmed – and I was one of several team members who worked around the clock (weekends included) to make sure this video got out as soon as it possibly could.
TL;DR: Yeah, there was a lot of stuff we had to do to make sure we could get this out to everyone effectively.
"Roundtable isn't round!"
Fwiw, my vote for video title was "Dynamic Queue & A", but it doesn't translate particularly well in other languages ;P
TL;DR: IKR
Here the link https://www.reddit.com/r/leagueoflegends/comments/4m7r9o/dynamic_q_megathread/
