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"The boards are a small minority of the community who just want to complain."

Hyp3rfocus·1/18/2018, 1:21:43 AM·162 votes·16,079 views

Hey.

I'm here to address a comment that I hear very frequently around here... "The boards are not the entire community, they aren't even half of the community, they are a vocal minority who just want to complain and moan about things they don't like, and thus cannot be taken seriously."

Okay, so the statistics may be correct, and the majority of the League community might not be posting on the boards, but why is this used every time the chaotic boards find something that we seem to ALL agree on? Just because some people here are rude raging trolls who give no constructive feedback or ideas, does not for one second mean that we are all bumbling idiots who have no idea what we're talking about. Some of us.. a lot of us actually are intelligent individuals with valid points and concerns about the state of the game.

A lot of us come here because we want to be heard, and we have no idea how else to express these concerns we have with our favorite online game. Maybe we can write a support ticket? Why, so we can get some automated robot-like response from a Riot member who's just following 'procedure' like a tech support guy would do? That would be a waste of time and y'all know it.

There seems to be no other way to voice our opinions on issues (to my knowledge) except by coming to the actual League of Legends website, and saying what we gotta say on the boards... and hoping that maybe, just maybe someone with some power around here will listen and address it. Does every single problem we post need to be fixed? Of course not. However when there is a general consensus about something, I would appreciate if it stops getting brushed under the rug just because we aren't the millions of people who play this game, and only a few hundred or thousand.

If we are going to ignore everything said on the boards just because we are a minority of the total League population, then please just remove the Gameplay section and turn this into a memes/games and general discussion style boards. "The boards is a vocal minority," in my opinion is a cop out, and just an easy way to ignore an issue. Also if the only people that come here are angry complainers, please by all means, people who are happy with the state of the game, come here and post about it, cause I have yet to see more than 1 or 2 posts about how great the game is right now.

Honestly, most of us have lives outside of this game, with work or school or sports or extra curricular activities, and we take time out of our day to come here and give feedback concerning the game. We should be appreciated and respected, as opposed to the people who just stop playing entirely or ruin games for others due to their own frustration on the game's current state. Personally, I don't think every single decision made by Riot has been horrible, but the best way to lose your players is to stop listening to them.

  **    TLDR: Saying that the boards is the minority of league everytime an issue is agreed upon here is a lazy way to not address a problem. To my knowledge, there is no other way to voice our concerns about this game to the Riot staff, and when we try to do it here, we hear the same BS about being a minority, and therefore our statements are not taken seriously.  We are not all here to complain about every little thing, and a lot of us have valid points that could possibly make the game a lot better for everyone. If we are such a minority, why can't the people who love the game right now come here and tell us about it?**

[sg-lulu]

EDIT!-- After looking it over, and reading a few responses .. I noticed I said "ALL people agree." This is not a true statement, because obviously I don't know everyone's personal opinion. I meant to say "most I've seen" .. I won't edit it out of the original post because it was my mistake, and y'all made good points.

198 Comments

RiotRiot MapleNectar1/18/2018, 3:21:45 AM113 votes

I personally have used the statement that the boards are a minority of our population, so think I may have some response that's valid to this post. When we/I say things like that, it's almost always in response to players making hyperbolic statements like "literally every player hates these changes" or "90% of all players don't like this preseason, just look at the boards, and everyone I've talked to has said the same thing". We don't always react to what the boards are talking/voicing frustrations about, but that doesn't mean we're not listening. Take game pacing for example, our first reaction to the boards is not to try and correct the entire game because there's a number of threads where players are talking about the game feeling like it progresses too quickly. Instead, we'll take that and look globally both through objective data that we collect such as game length, game pacing, time to turret kills, bloodiness etc. We also run subjective surveys in the client to collect feedback from players globally to understand at a higher level what's going on with the game.

In regards to your final statement about "why can't the people who love the game right now come here and tell us about it?", the answer comes down to human nature. If you're enjoying something, there's very little reason to go out of your way to talk about how much you're enjoying it, you just keep doing it. When things go a direction that you're NOT happy with, that's when you tend to speak out about how you're not happy. To use a REALLY abstract example. If you go to a restaurant and order a steak and mashed potatoes and it gets to your table and it's a solid 8/10, you're probably not going to sing the praises of the chef to your waiter, but you're also not going to complain about your food. If it comes out and it's a 1/10, the steak is burned to a crisp, the mashed potatoes taste like glue, you're almost certainly going to pull the waiter over to complain about how shitty it is.

tl;dr - the boards can be considered something of a "flag" that indicates something is wrong, but rather than pivot immediately, we'll take the time to make sure something is actually a problem before acting.

Sorry this is kind of on the short side and glosses over a pretty large topic, I was just heading out of the office but wanted to chime in quickly. Hopefully what I said makes sense though, if not I can try to clarify some of it later.

Ellis Dee1/18/2018, 1:26:49 AM32 votes

i like this

ModWulf Helhammer1/18/2018, 1:33:15 AM30 votes

When people use the explanation of “boards are a minority”, it’s used as a counter to statements such as “everyone thinks the game is horrible” or things like that, where people use their own experience to justify a (mostly) rage filled complaint, and take the echoing from the boards to back those falsities

ModCaptainMårvelous1/18/2018, 2:36:33 AM26 votes

So the thing about boards (and by extent reddit) is that it's not just the small community but a large amount of other issues within the boards and reddit. So, let's just shelf the "small community" thing.

  • Little room for dissenting opinion.

One of the things you bring up is that "Well the whole boards is in agreement", which isn't always true. Often there are a variety of opinions, feelings and facts on the subject despite those who may purport them as the will of god. However, much like reddit, boards is not good at dissenting opinions. Often, what floats to the top is stuff that is agreed to be the issue. Likewise, those who disagree with those opinions, however valid or invalid, are silenced due to negative ideas dropping or being hidden.

  • Topical Bias.

A common criticism I see boards complain about is the overfilled status of esports on the reddit. Which is fair, often esport posts float to the top. However, boards can be guilty of a similar thing. Gameplay posts often float to the top and, of them, they're all often "What's wrong with Riot/League". Again, however valid these criticisms are? That doesn't mean it reflects the will of everyone. More importantly, regardless of how many problems league has? There is fatigue that becomes associated with people who peer on the boards and see yesterday's round of angry post replaced with a similar-but-slightly-different round of anger posting.

  • Failure of critical expression.

"You're just a Riot drone" "Good to see the paid rioters out in full force today" "Guess they're paying you overtime to defend them today huh?"

All of these are things I've seen levied at people or spoken to people who go against the grain. It's also not uncommon to see the same criticisms spoken out to the opposition. You're just a hater. You couldn't do better. You're complaining about nothing. Etc. Rather than find commonality or understanding viewpoints, there's a feeling that you have to disagree with the person because they're "the enemy". It's poison for critical discussion. Reddit is guilty of this as well but Reddit doesn't act high or mighty about it, the most you'd find is a sarcastic "We did it reddit".

  • Outsiders Unwelcome.

As an experiment, I decided to see how the boards reacted to Scarra's comment on Reddit/Boards balancing. As you'd expect? The response was absurdly negative. Flaming Scarra's words, personal attacks, etc. I tweeted it to Scarra and his first thoughts were "oh cool, I'm being flamed". The same happens with Riot and Rioters who talk on the boards. They feel attacked. They can't be a part of the community because you should only address serious, front-page matters. This makes the boards unwelcome for anyone who isn't a player and goes with the flow. As such, it makes it hard for people to interact if the first thing levied at them is "So when are you losing your job?"

As you said, it's not a fair criticism to just focus on the small community itself. It is, however, fair to point out that boards is a small, inclusive, very tightly-knit community with a small majority of gameplay-focused players drowning out the minority of others. Due to this feeling, it can be hard for people to engage the community and makes people question/feel unwelcome even if they want to jump in and understand.

Iffy Jarl1/18/2018, 3:50:57 AM13 votes

Majority of the people I see clearly have no idea what they're talking about but they get the most upvotes

BestJhinUniverse1/18/2018, 1:50:11 AM13 votes

"Reddit is just a large majority of the community who want to circle jerk riot." See it works both ways.

PandemicPanda51/18/2018, 5:07:35 AM10 votes

{quoted}

Also if the only people that come here are angry complainers, please by all means, people who are happy with the state of the game, come here and post about it, cause I have yet to see more than 1 or 2 posts about how great the game is right now.

If we are such a minority, why can't the people who love the game right now come here and tell us about it?**

I like the game as it is now. Plus whenever I come onto a post like this and say I like the game, you just get mass downvoted.

Yordle Xayah1/18/2018, 3:22:49 AM9 votes

but why is this used every time the chaotic boards find something that we seem to ALL agree on?

Cause it's an echo chamber of salt. Rarely is there any real reasoning in any of the popular posts and it's mostly someone posting after facing some random thing that made them angry. They put the champion/situation in a vacuum to complain about it and that's not how the game works, and everyone agrees because you can make anything seem OP or broken if you word it properly, so it's just an echo chamber. Have someone challenge that or post a different view and downvotes will flood that person's post.

I'm talking mostly about the Gameplay section of The Boards.

Omituinen1/18/2018, 5:02:47 AM8 votes

Alright, fuck it. I'll bite.

{quoted} The boards are not the entire community, they aren't even half of the community, they are a vocal minority who just want to complain and moan about things they don't like, and thus cannot be taken seriously.

That's not what Riot say. They point out that when people say "the entire community agrees!!!" that it's often just Boards they're citing, and that they can't take the feedback from Boards alone when it comes to their decision-making.

Okay, so the statistics may be correct, and the majority of the League community might not be posting on the boards, but why is this used every time the chaotic boards find something that we seem to ALL agree on? Just because some people here are rude raging trolls who give no constructive feedback or ideas, does not for one second mean that we are all bumbling idiots who have no idea what we're talking about. Some of us.. a lot of us actually are intelligent individuals with valid points and concerns about the state of the game.

I've seen numerous things that Boards seem to "all agree on" that I don't, as a player. And I've mentioned various "Boards opinions" to various friends I have who play League, and very rarely do they agree, no matter how unanimous Boards might be about it. This includes people playing various roles with various different champions. They're all "intelligent individuals with valid points and concerns about the state of the game" and they don't all agree with Boards. Sometimes they do. Often they don't. Why are your opinions more valid than theirs just because they're not inclined to come on Boards and complain about things?

A lot of us come here because we want to be heard, and we have no idea how else to express these concerns we have with our favorite online game. Maybe we can write a support ticket? Why, so we can get some automated robot-like response from a Riot member who's just following 'procedure' like a tech support guy would do? That would be a waste of time and y'all know it.

Perhaps because support tickets aren't actually really the intended avenue for submitting complaints about the overall balance state of the game and the Riot members whose responsibility it is to reply to tickets aren't involved in Balance Team.

There seems to be no other way to voice our opinions on issues (to my knowledge) except by coming to the actual League of Legends website, and saying what we gotta say on the boards... and hoping that maybe, just maybe someone with some power around here will listen and address it. Does every single problem we post need to be fixed? Of course not. However when there is a general consensus about something, I would appreciate if it stops getting brushed under the rug just because we aren't the millions of people who play this game, and only a few hundred or thousand.

Rioters have a presence on reddit. You could go complain there. Interestingly sometimes the opinions on reddit vastly differ from the ones on Boards. I remember one thread here got the top of the front page, but when it got posted on reddit it got a load of negative comments and ultimately ended up with the OP deleting it.

If we are going to ignore everything said on the boards just because we are a minority of the total League population, then please just remove the Gameplay section and turn this into a memes/games and general discussion style boards. "The boards is a vocal minority," in my opinion is a cop out, and just an easy way to ignore an issue. Also if the only people that come here are angry complainers, please by all means, people who are happy with the state of the game, come here and post about it, cause I have yet to see more than 1 or 2 posts about how great the game is right now.

Just because Riot don't act on everything that's said here in exactly the way you'd like them to doesn't mean they aren't reading it. And I'm not thrilled with how the game is now, and most of my other League-playing friends have complaints of their own, but our opinions rarely seem to sync up with what Boards thinks. I don't know a single person who likes that Riot is reverting Rengar's Q, for instance, whereas Boards has barely mentioned it at all and seems to approve if anything. None of us are particularly disappointed with the current power levels of toplaners or ADCs, though, as far as I know. And I actually know more toplane players than botlane players.

Honestly, most of us have lives outside of this game, with work or school or sports or extra curricular activities, and we take time out of our day to come here and give feedback concerning the game. We should be appreciated and respected, as opposed to the people who just stop playing entirely or ruin games for others due to their own frustration on the game's current state. Personally, I don't think every single decision made by Riot has been horrible, but the best way to lose your players is to stop listening to them.

I've filled out a few surveys before giving my opinions on League and its balance. I haven't quit because Riot didn't enact every single suggestion I've ever made. The people who post on reddit take time out of their days to post about the game as well, and Riot do read reddit threads and occasionally give feedback on them. Boards isn't the entire population of people who love the game and give feedback about it. Which is Riot's point.

If we are such a minority, why can't the people who love the game right now come here and tell us about it?

I have complaints about the game. I tend not to post them on Boards because I know that going against the majority opinion here (particularly on the main Gameplay boards, as opposed to the official Riot threads) is just usually asking for a downvote storm and a load of snarky replies about how I don't deserve an opinion because I'm not Diamond, as if being high elo somehow immunised you against garbage opinions. But as mentioned, I disagree with a lot I see on here, even if I agree with some. So, yeah, here I am. Hi. I don't love everything about League, but my complaints are vastly different from the ones I often see on Boards. Close enough to what you were asking for?

Lil Homie busta1/18/2018, 2:15:03 AM7 votes

I wish i could upvote you, but the level of this account is too low =(

Very good post!

Chill Vibez1/18/2018, 1:37:30 AM7 votes

I really never comment on threads i just lurk and read..... but I like when you post , you seem like a smart dude and I agree with pretty much everything you say lol

Upvoted and another good read!