On Riot's communication with the playerbase.

Been a player for a long time. Wanted to chime in one some positives and negatives that I've been seeing.

Now, let's get the positives out of the way: Like the direction of the game or not, Riot has been far more open about certain things with certain teams. These teams include:

• The gameplay team, which hosts DevBlogs on reworks/goals, as well as the "state of the season" thing they've been doing.
• The Lore team, which has had both ask.fm info as well as large-scale Q&As about the recent stories and what their plans are. (Jaredan is a big help here)
• The skins team, which explain why these characters get skins, make major changes, etc.
• The art team, who have finally started addressing new champ splashes as well as be open about the Splash unification stuff.
• The sound team, although they rarely (If ever) get complaints.
• The client update team, who is pretty active on the alpha boards.

All these teams have been actually making large strides in player-to-Riot communications. Explaining changes, devblogs, etc. You don't have to agree with them (There are things I dislike as well), but they're still very open about what's going on. However, despite these teams, there are still major holdovers who don't honestly communicate with the players:

• The Social Design Team (Aspects such as Hextech Crafting, DQ and otherwise)
• The Upper-levels of Riot.
• The Punishment/Reform Team.
• eSports organization. At least of we can believe leddit.

Let's go over some examples and problems.

#1.) Teams in terms of changes.

Let's take a look at when Riot wanted to make a major change to the mages. Each mage in question had a separate devblog talking about what Riot liked, disliked, and wanted to fix. Success isn't what I'm debating here but rather how they communicated. They took advice, they wrote it down and even if they didn't listen to every single change they made, they were still open with the players. Go check any of the DevCorners about the mages. They're pretty damn in-depth.

Compare this to the social design team. When they added autofill....they just did. Socrates posted a thread saying that "Hey we turned on autofill ok bye" in -General Discussion- and left. There was no actual discussion. There was no feedback loop. Social design just did it and shrugged off any discussion. The same thing happened with Mastery 6/7 for Hextech crafting. Large outcry against it and they wanted to talk about it but, instead, Design team just shrugged and walked away.

The Gameplay Team made strides to the playerbase to make their thoughts/ideas heard and converse with players to find ground on both ends. The Social Design Team said they were doing this and did it.

#2.) Teams in terms of problems.

When the Shurima stories were published, the lore team came out for a Q&A about the direction, how people enjoyed these stories, etc. They didn't shy away from criticism either. I talked about how I was worried Amumu/Rammus lore would become the new norm. In response, other Rioters popped up from the lore team and addressed my concern. They saw the problem I feared and commented on how they're aware of the problem, will avoid this problem or don't have plans to do anything like I fear. A direct response.

In comparison, Tryndamere going on Reddit and talking about how League doesn't need a new tutorial. Not only did he seem like he didn't understand why the new player experience was a problem, it came off as stand-off-ish and out of touch with the game itself. He didn't address the problem nor did he really listen to concerns. He just said it's not a problem and asked "Yeah well why do you think it's a problem"? Players were rightly upset by this and thought that Tryn was rather uncaring.

The Lore team addressed concerns and did their best to either calm those concerns or explain why they weren't worth worrying about. The upper management of Riot disregarded concerns and brushed them off.

#3.) Teams in terms of Quality.

In terms of quality, the art team has been drastically stepping up their game in both speed and look. Skin splashes are dynamic, pretty and coming out almost every patch. Despite their lacking speed for several years, it finally feels like the kinks have been ironed out and they're fixing it. Same goes for gameplay, who have improved their quality of balance. When I say this, I compare to S1/S2, where champions who got nerfed were GUTTED ALIVE vs. now. It might be slower to hit a problem, yes, but they're generally not completely removing a character from being decent. (Lookin' at you Evelynn). This will be a contested point, I'm almost sure, but it's one I believe teams have been making advances in.

Social designs team? Look at champion mastery 6/7. They were dropped and....ok.....that's it? "Oh we'll add a champ shard thing soon" which took an ENTIRE PATCH. How about solo-achievement or 5v5s for teams? "We're working on it". Uh...ok? Do you have more info? Actual time tables? Plans? ANYTHING? Same goes for the punishment team, with the tribunal still being in the shop.

Gameplay/Art, for better or worse, have taken strides to improve their quality and speed. Social/Punishment, by comparison, have yet to fix major issues and still create new ones.

#4.) Teams in terms of Mistakes.

While this will be heavily, HEAVILY disagreed with, I believe gameplay/design has learned a lot since the Juggernaut rework. They've adapted to large-scale class updates and each consecutive update appears with less and less problems. Sure, you can argue that champions like Swain and Vlad are problems, but they pale in comparison to the issues of Graves or Corki post-ADC rework. Those few also pale in comparison to fellows like Mordekaiser or Skarner. They've seen their flaws and are striving to improve.

By comparison, upper management STILL has not taken strides to fix their communication issues. The phrase "BIG SORRY" applies here as each iteration of social design just apologizes, says it won't happen again, and then lets it happen again. They repeat mistakes that -OTHER- companies have made, the obvious parallel being the Diretide incident of 2013 for DoTA/Valve and the Harrowing Repeat of 2015. It almost feels like they're disconnected and learn on their own. Which is fine if you're a student but terrible if you're part of a massive company.

Design learns from it's mistakes and seeks to better them with iterative improvements. Upper-management struggles with the same mistakes they, and other companies, have previously made.

#Conclusion

Riot feels, at times, like a company split in half. You have aspects of the company that understand and strive to fix errors they've made while also improving their communication. Then you have aspects of the company that still treat the scene like they're an indie dev, paving their own way with a handful of dollars and repeated mistakes. I understand there's a big disconnect between these fields but come on, how can obvious problems constantly come up between different fields?

Design, Lore, etc? You guys should have a sitdown with these other teams and talk to them. Right now, you should be leading by example because these other groups and teams seem basically lost.