2 cents from an older nerd on the direction of the game

I'd like to start by saying that I love this game and I want it to succeed. In the later, dying years of WoW I only played Battle Grounds, and to realize this game was here and was fresh was like a reawakening. This game has ents I can play, I get invited to all the raids here, and I don't need to pour several thousand hours of my life into it (though I do).

But I am worried that Riot is following Blizzard down a similar path of "If we didn't come up with it, we won't do it." I see a lot of really thoughtful, logical posts on the boards by people who clearly know what they're talking about. The kind of posts I wish i wrote and that I (and clearly others) think would help the game. They're simple, common arguments that would at least be a solution to a problem where as the community is currently faced with absolute silence on many of these problems (largely behavioral).

I can only conclude, since these constant refrains are neither implemented not rebutted on the forums, that the ivory tower of Tech is rearing it's ugly head. The concept that "we're the smartest guys in the room and no one else knows what they're talking about." It might be one thing if changes around here came slowly. But they don't. They come almost too quickly. A rapid, slap-dash set of changes that keeps everyone on their toes - I don't even mind that since it keeps the game fresh (though you should really buff Maokai) - but if changes to balance come that quickly, why not changes to the ever present problem of trolls, flamers, and AFKs?

Generally I'm referencing the argument that if you block someone, it should remove them from your queue pool, but I don't want to limit it to that because there's honestly a litany of things people have suggested to improve the QoL for the player: how autofill should work, how queueing up should function, how items to interact in the game, how the ban system works, how rotating game modes should be dealt with, the entire dominion eruption, should new champs be allowed in ranked, if we should bring TeamBuilder back, and everything said about towers.

To be fair to Riot, occasionally they do take things into account. The 10 person ban change was well executed and moved at the right pace. And some changes they correctly ignore - people asking to be able to trade one skin back in a season for their RP back...no. That doesn't happen anywhere on the planet. Look the skin up on Youtube first or be ok blowing $20. But by and large we're ignored on the vast majority of issues, and I can't help but thing we've got people manning the control boards that both aren't sure what to do, but somehow know we can't be right. And if I hadn't seen it happen with WoW, I might be less concerned. But in the end, as some gross appeasement to a fed-up player base, Blizzard reversed a decade plus of doctrine by throwing everything at the players they ever asked for. Monks, Pandas, LFR, etc. It was honestly embarrassing and it only made a dead game worse.

I don't want this to happen here. I really like this game. If I thought any other MOBA was out there trying to make a good game, and not just hit 200k subscribers so the investors were satisfied, I'd gladly do what I could to shape that game into a market-share stealing machine. But there currently isn't another MOBA out there that gives a shit about being great. And so I'm here, attempting to appeal to reason and stave off another disaster from a company I truly want to see succeed.