Riot Games - Why is Riot So Bad at Releasing Game Features?

I wanted to take a moment and look at League of Legends features that have been released, especially the most recent ones. Particularly looking at ones which are not connected to "balance". More specifically why Riot's recent feature releases are very incomplete and yet no one on the team leading LoL seem to notice or realize there is a problem? Maybe they do, they just do not care?

The most recent example is Riot's first official mobile app which just allows you to send messages to people on your friends list. That is its only feature. Took 6 years for a mobile app and the only thing it does is replicate a feature we have already perfected. There are tons of extremely common communication apps such as WhatApp and Skype. So I have to ask who at Riot thought it would be a great idea to build an official app with only a feature that gives you the ability to send a message to someone on your friends list. There are so many other great things they could do with this app, but they chose probably the one thing we need the least.

Part of me wanted to believe this was just stage 1 and there will be plenty of app improvements. The honest truth is this is highly unlikely. First Riot does not have a track record of following up or expanding on their features. Almost completely outside of bug changes the feature remains the exact same from day 1. Point two is the app layout itself displays a system that was designed for a single purpose and any additional features would involve completely rebuilding the interface. Which means it was clearly not designed with the expectation of expansion. So again my question. Why are the people who lead LoL so out of touch with reality? This should never have been approved in the state it was released.

My second example is the Dynamic Queue system. So lets forget the huge bugs and design failures with the system for a moment. The people who lead league of legends decided this would be a great idea and they removed solo Q (duo/solo) and completely removed ranked 5's (which also voided their college scene and professional scene whether they acknowledge it or not) in favor for shoving everyone in the same pool regardless of how you queue.

Sure there was a Red post regarding solo queue. It has been weeks and we do not have a single official word from them regarding the topic. I expect it is not going to happen. Riot put themselves in a terrible position with Dynamic Queue and to change it now would mean admitting a huge mistake. Their ego's wont let them.

But I digress. The leaders of LoL appear to be so disconnected from their player base that they didn't think destroying ranked would be a problem. That to me should set off plenty of flags over at Riot. The cynic in me wants to believe that Riot actually knew this was going to be a problem with ranked. I believe this is why Riot fairly recently changed their API rules to prevent sites such as lolnexus from displaying who are group queues. Because someone anticipated the blow back on this and their answer was to try to prevent us from discovering who is a group queue and who is not. So adjusting the API rules to prevent us from easily seeing group queues in games was a preemptive measure in an attempt to reduce blow back. The truth is while we can not find out by looking at just one game, we can get a pretty good guess by checking back at a players history. Going back and seeing who they played with in the previous and post games, you can pretty accurately determine group queues anyway, but it takes work and of course it does not account for people who group queued for one match. Riot is attempting to hide group queues.

There are plenty of other examples, less dramatic ones such as the pointless mastery system and the terrible honor system. Which were released at at extremely basic level and were never expanded upon. Both have great potential. Just no follow through.

In the end I just can not find a logical reason for the complete lack of thoroughness and ability to think and see things through with LoL's leaders. I want to believe the leadership at Riot who handles these kinds of things are smart people, but I do not have any evidence to support that claim. I honestly feel Riot really needs a captain at the head of the table. Someone to drive the ship. Someone who would of either canceled the mobile app or expanded upon it from day 1. Someone who would of realized just what a bad idea it was to destroy your solo queue players and completely remove ranked 5's.