The Varus lore change shows how bad Riot is at envolving the community in the decionmaking process
The problem with Varus lore change lies within the decision making process. In a lot of ways it reminds me of dynamic queue and a lot of the class updates that turned out to be a failure for the exact same reason.
If you look at the complains nobody is complaining about a LGTB champ being add to the game. They are all complaining about the decision making process. People never had a voice until the decision is already made and then get told that it is okay if they are angry, happy or whatever because Riot will accept the outcome either way telling themselves they can't make everyone happy. But it is not about that. It is about envolving the community in the decision making progress.
First of all Riot never communicated with the community. They just made a unilateral decision and forced it upon everyone and then biasedly measure whether they did well or not. This approach is completely contraproductive talking as a communication manager myself. You just shoot yourself in the foot in the long run. Now they have to read through all the comments and do PR damage control and try to explain things to angry people etc. For a company as big as Riot I find it to be very amateuristic. If in the long run it turns out you did bad and have to make concessions. It means you wasted resources, lost peoples faith and lost authority because you failed at making the right decision and had to withdraw them or refuse too. So at the end it becomes a struggle of not wanting to acknowledge you did bad to avoid loss in faith and autorithy and not to accept a sunken cost in resources spent. It often leads to a rigid, patronizing way of communication with the community and disconnecting even more from the community.
Secondly if you are going to envolve the community in the decision making progress, the final decision should reflect the feedback. At my work I can't stress enough that envolving people in a decision is not just a) inform them about the decision being taken, b) letting them give feedback but not acting upon it (tokenism), c) biasedly select a few people from the community and pretend like they are the voice of the community, d) taking biased and against all rules of social enquiry surveys like I have seen a lot in the past from Riot.
A more logical approach would have been to start a conversation with the community about their plans to add a LGBT lore. Togheter Riot and the community could come up with champions who this lore would fit or Riot could have releashed a new champ. Riot would not only receive valueble feedback but also generate consensus and willingness from the community. The more people feel engaged and empowered at the decision making process, the more legitimacy the final decision will have.
It is not about whether the lore change is righr or wrong, it is about how the decision should have been made. So I basically don't understand who was supervising this lore change and why he thought that forcing a unilateral decision would be a good idea. Policy changes are needed to empower the community in the decision making process but I feel for Riot this ship has already sailed. This lesson could have been learned a dozen times by now but each time Riot makes the same misstake. At least this time they no longer pretend to envolve the community in the decision making process any more. They straightout acknowledged that they are the ones making the decisions by themselves and they will accept whether we like it or not.
