Does Riot actually listen to our feedback?

Yes, constantly. Rioters check the boards several times a day, have reddit up on a second monitor, watch streams while they eat, survey players both in-client and in-person, and track popular topics from many different countries.

In some cases, a Rioter might agree with your sentiment and be actively working to improve something, but not be ready to talk about it yet - in others, they might agree but feel there is another important project that they have to prioritize. In still others, they might listen, and decide they actually disagree with your perspective. Disagreement happens a lot - even people who agree that a problem exists might have very different ideas of how it should be solved, and taking all that into account, not just from a small group on boards or reddit, but on the huge scale of players all over the world, takes time.

We hire designers not to look at what players say and then immediately do it, but to take different perspectives into account, dive into the data, and then use their best judgment to determine a course of action.

In regards to your examples, I think a good first step would be to figure out what the gameplay team currently thinks about the questions you have.

For example:

Does the gameplay team think turrets are strong enough at the moment?

I’m not a designer - so I don’t know the answer to this question. It could be a good thing to ask on one of Meddler’s “Quick Gameplay Thoughts.” He usually hangs around for awhile after he posts, and I’d be interested to see how he feels about it.

*I wrote most of this last night and just finished it off over lunch...hoping it all makes sense/flows.

I'm typing this as a reply to this thread in general, not necessarily to the OP.

I'll echo what Calad said in that we pay attention to the boards/reddit/twitter/youtube etc etc more than players realize. Walking around the office, it's super common to see people pouring over threads, reading player feedback and reactions to the latest patch, feature, CG, skin etc. We ourselves are players, but by keeping in touch with the community we can understand and keep a better pulse for how something will be received, or what's paining the players at the moment. This requires walking a very fine however. Pivoting to every demand/request from Reddit/boards can mean we hyper focus on a portion of players that doesn't represent even close to the majority of our players base - players in western countries can have completely different opinions than players in eastern countries on specific topics. It also means that we're devoting time solving temporary problems when we should be working on longer term solutions or bigger bets that can help push League forward. This is super contentious as the OP points out - working on things for the future means we're not solving player pain now - and we may need to find a better balance here looking back on the latter half of this season. Let me illustrate some of that risk with an example.

I personally was pretty involved in the "Enemy Vision Here" ping, I'd seen a thread crop up to the top of Reddit again, and it was one that I'd wanted for YEARS and just made sense, so I pulled in people from a few teams around me to get it put together and shipped. That comes at a cost though. The engineer and vfx artist were in the last few weeks of development on Urgot, the audio designer was finishing up some work on skins, our QA was testing stuff that fell out of the usual day to day, and I wasn't doing the work I'd usually be doing. Was it worth it? I think so, but could Urgot have been that much better if the engineer and vfx artist were only focusing on him? Potentially. Or maybe that was time the engineer could have spent prototyping an ability for Eve (the other champ he was working on). I'm not illustrating this to illicit some form of pity, because at the end of the day working on League is a job, it's a job we love, but it's a job and we're expected to do things while we're at our desks. What I'm trying to illustrate is that jumping on every request or bit of feedback from players can cause us to deviate or lose sight of the bigger thing we're working towards, all the little things can add up to a lot of timelines slipping. We also don't always agree, hell, even the community doesn't always agree with eachother. Look at jungle plants from last pre-season, or elemental dragons, or even Rift Herald from this midseason. When they first were teased, some players were up in arms about them, while others loved the idea. We listen to feedback, and we frequently iterate based on it, but it would worry me if we suddenly stopped taking risks and pushing big new changes simply because a vocal minority voiced opinions against them. I'm not saying that they're wrong, but that we have to be careful with how often we adjust course, and how often we stick to our called shots and push forward lest we only end up shipping changes that are always vanilla (this goes for new champs, VGUs, reworks, systems changes, balance tuning, skins, etc etc).

In regards to why you may not see as much Rioter participation you (or we) would like, it's likely because engaging can be very sharp double edged sword. Speaking as a Rioter means any sentence you write is likely to be taken as an official statement from the company in regards to our stance on the game and our plans with it. It's also likely to be dissected and held under the microscope by everyone - but especially when your statement jives with another players opinion. To use a very current example. I'd been talking with some players about ancient coin gold generation on this thread, when one player asked what my opinion of sightstone was, I gave a reply, and the next thing I know there was this post on the front page of reddit where my comment and credibility was being shredded. In the thread I was in it seemed like a pretty innocent question, and I didn't think twice about posting my reply, but had I known it was going to get the level of scrutiny it did (which I should have seen coming), I probably would have either just avoided replying to save myself the struggle, or taken much much longer to write a perfect reply that had the lowest chance of being misconstrued as a direction I personally was championing for League. Combine that with the fact that the number of Rioters who can actually engage in the topics you guys are super passionate about (we are too), and you're down to ~20-30 people that have the context, the experience, and the knowledge to actually give a detailed reply. It can be easier to just read a thread on the boards, and then talk about it with co-workers if we think there's something there than to engage in what will likely turn into a multi threaded conversation with a bunch of people who all have varying opinions on a subject. I feel bad when I drop a one liner on a post and then never go back to the comments on it, but I'm also trying to juggle my day to day responsibilities at work, and then my role as a father and husband and I have to prioritize my time. It feels crappy, but I prefer to touch base when I can even if it's the bare minimum than just stay silent just because I'm not always able to have an in depth conversation.

None of this is to say that we ourselves make the right decisions each and every time, and it would be blatantly false to do so. We fuck up, but when we do we try to correct as quickly as possible. We constantly seek to improve the quality of our work with each and every patch, and we're also trying to find ways to be more transparent with our decisions to more of our player base than just those on Reddit and the boards. Even if we managed to convince people here on a direction we're taking, we still have a long ways to go to inform players in every other region of those same decisions - and that's a problem we're actively trying to solve. I hope this doesn't come across as hand wavey and dismissive of the sentiment. If you feel like we don't listen to feedback there's certainly something that's leading to that feeling and we need to figure that out, but the solution can't be "change things to match what the community thinks is correct", since that can be the right move just as often as it can be incorrect.