Why is Riot Flaming a Thing

ok, can you guys just shutup? please? for once? first off, they HAVE acknowledged it on many occasions, second, 99% of the people complaining about their east coast server lag have a ping only a tiny bit higher than mine. really people, the highest steady ping ive heard anyone complain about was like 120. that's 3/25's of a second. that's not going to effect gameplay, so if that's your ping and that's what youre complaining about then that's not your problem. I play with about 90 ping on avg and im literally seing some east coasters complaining about 50 ping. if you actually do have significantly high ping then ignore this, otherwise please stop complaining.

If you believe that we're well-intentioned and that we want the best for players - and we're striving to build a great product for millions of great people then you should certainly not give up. Help us find our footing as we're working through the nuance of execution and complexity of scale.

League of Legends was built on a foundation of listening to players and making decisions based on our understanding of players want and need and I can make a strong argument that we're excellent at doing that with lots of supporting examples. Why would you invest your time and energy to us if you're not confident that we care about players, or that your words will have an impact to the decisions that we make?

I completely agree. I think it really sets Riot apart. There are advantages to a one-way, top-down relationship between developers and the community, but I think Riot has shown that there is also an extraordinary strength to be drawn from the community and its ideas.

I do wish that Narrative would follow this lead, however. I've more or less made my peace with "The Great Retcon"; I don't agree with kicking us out of Runeterra like that, but on the plus side, it's easy for the lore community to incorporate the new lore into our community-run League of Legends universe (the one that also contains a League of Legends—crazy, I know). As I've said in another thread, I believe the lore community can survive, and even find some silver lining here. While I do wish they'd stop enforcing the retcon so aggressively, e.g. by censoring the voicework, I'm not asking Narrative to undo the Great Retcon. I get it; that's locked in.

What I would like to see from Narrative would be something along the lines of how the gameplay team handles major Champion reworks. If Narrative is planning to seriously rewrite a Champion's story, personality, or voicework—and they obviously are—I'd like to see them hold some mid-development discussions with the community, share their current ideas, gather the community's ideas and insights, and engage in some real back-and-forth.

So far, Narrative's process has been:

1. Write their material in secret
2. Publish it in a shock reveal
3. Show up on the forums to answer questions about what they've already decided and published
4. Disappear, repeat

This is rather nervewracking for people who are invested in League's lore. I like a lot of their new material, but I honestly kind of freak out when I see that a new lore-block has been released, because I know they're not shy about crushing old lore when they drop the new stuff in. I keep expecting to log in one day and find out that Veigar is now an undead Noxian lizard-man or an Ascended chipmunk or whatever. (Well, I mean…Ascended Chipmunk Veigar, that might have some traction.)

I'm not trying to "call out" any members of the Narrative team, and I am painfully aware that at one point the community behaved in an utterly repulsive, disgraceful way toward a particular member of the team. (I spoke out against that behavior then, and I'm speaking out against it now: that was not acceptable, not at all.) CarnivalKnights has been quite helpful and friendly on some occasions, and they've even made a few token steps toward Riot-style community engagement. Still, the pattern remains fundamentally the same: secret development, massive rewrites, shock reveal.

I love playing the game, but the recent lore developments have lowered my enjoyment. I won't quite quit LoL just because of the lore retcons, but I'd like it to add to my experience rather than detract. I also haven't seen evidence of Riot listening to the countless discussions going on about the retcon safe for putting up the Azir and Xerath stories, let alone defending the retcon. Only CarnivalKnight seems to venture in that board now revealing tidbits about the new lore (even though he doesn't discuss the retcon, he does seem entirely willing to pop in a thread, make a good post and just be a nice person, yay for CK).

I would've expected a great deal of communication when the very premise of the lore gets retconned out. There's just about nothing however, we just have to swallow it and watch narrative as it seems to ignore the impact removing the very core of the lore and is just happily creating new lore, retconning Xerath so that he fits the story better as well.

Personally, I can enjoy the without IoW, though it feels like a lot of missed immersion potential, I can't invest in the lore if I know that my favorite character could just be replaced, as this already happened with Trundle.

I trust every other part of Riot to do what they feel is best for the players and to be willing to give their arguments as to why they did what they did, I've seen many a post proving this. Narrative seems this mysterious outlier that operates with its own separate ethics/methods to me and I feel like Riot can do better.

If you believe that - you should quit. I'm serious. If you actually truly in your heart have this belief that we're an evil money-hungry company that doesn't care what players think then really you're just going to constantly look for evidence to support your world view and ignore any evidence to the contrary which is what it feels like you're doing here. League of Legends was built on a foundation of listening to players and making decisions based on our understanding of players want and need and I can make a strong argument that we're excellent at doing that with lots of supporting examples. Why would you invest your time and energy to us if you're not confident that we care about players, or that your words will have an impact to the decisions that we make?

That doesn't mean that we don't make mistakes or shoot ourselves in the foot sometimes or that we don't always provide the right context for the controversial decisions that we make - but if you're really sitting there questioning not just our actions - but the integrity of our intentions, then the relationship that we have with you I'm not sure can be salvaged.

IMO riot listens, but not perfectly. Take cass, she's a great example of riot messing up on listening to players and then publicly having to eat crow. Let's just say I'm terrified of the poppy rework that's incoming because of this imperfect listening.

However most of the time, riot listens.

At the very most, the thing I can say about Riot is that they have terrible management. I truly don't believe that I can lump together Riot with EA and ActivisionBlizzard because they're giving out their product for free, truly. Out of the sea of "free-to-play" games, Riot, Hi-Rez, and Valve have stood out as the companies that actually get the phrase right. I've spent a fuckton of money on this game, way more than any game that is charged on arrival, but I've felt that none of my dollars have been used to make me at an unfair advantages (skins get wins cuz usually it's an indicator that you're good enough with a champion that you're willing to show off your skills in an aesthetic way.)

Also unlike the faceless ooze monsters of EA and ActiBlizz, THEIR OWNERS TALK TO US DIRECTLY. Seriously, I can't describe how cool it is that fucking comes on the boards and talks to random League players. It's cool as shit. I can't stress that enough.

But I think in terms of constructive criticism, you really need to stay consistent and to be brutally honest with players. None of these "oh we're getting to it" or "we've got something better planned", be brutally honest Rito. If you think that what the playerbase says is going to hurt them in the long run, don't pull any punches or shy away from the conversation, be direct.

"We've thought about it, but we cannot forsee x in League because x+y = a future of no fun."

"We're not nerfing Lee Sin right now because we don't know what direction to take him, and we know that eSports is going to be a lot less fun to watch without him. So until we get a solid foundation for Lee Sin that allows him to be balanced but not unviable in eSports, we're not going nerf him."

"But why did you Olaf Cassiopiea Riot?"

"Casseopia was in a position that it was safe to make harsh changes to her kit. Because she wasn't played as much as X or Y, and was unviable in the meta, and because the Shurima event coincided with this, we decided to take a gamble on making Cass awesome and we screwed up. We're sorry to all the Cassiopeia mains and we're doing our best to give Cass her identity back. We understand that you've lost faith in us after Skarner, but we're hoping to give her as smooth of a transition as him."

DONE! Half of the people complaining will instantly shut up. They may not like it, but you're honest about it. 85% of the forum community will be ok with not getting their way as long as you're honest and upfront about it. They'll understand what your vision is and what they had in mind is not the vision, and there's nothing they can do to change that. But 100% of the community will be pissed with half-truths, white lies, and just outright huge lies. Don't write for hours and not have a single thing to comment on Riot. We want the cold honest truth.

Preliminary edit: I just read through my response again, and it's super rambly. Oops. Take it with a grain of salt.

if you're really sitting there questioning not just our actions - but the integrity of our intentions, then the relationship that we have with you I'm not sure can be salvaged.

This is a really important distinction. I actually hear things about Riot being greedy or not caring or whatever all the time. Constantly. From my interactions with RIoters and the amount of time I have spent learning about the company, it's just blatantly false. Rioters are some of the most passionate people I have ever seen, and it's really tough to find anything from Riot that even remotely points to greed as the primary factor.

That being said: When there are a lot of players with this mentality of Riot being evil and they aren't getting drowned out by people just downvoting them or ignoring their stupidity, it becomes possible that maybe there's a kernel of validity there. I know the community is huge and that a minority could be hundreds of thousands of people, but there's something to this. When you have all these people on a forum together and, overall, some of these hypernegative stances aren't being totally eradicated, it's possibly attributable to any combination of a few factors:

• The Boards caters to a particular subset of the community, thus it's not a representative sample.
• What type of person uses the Boards, and does the platform's design discourage certain "interest groups" so to speak? Does it encourage negativity or other types of behavior?
• The community tends not to entirely disagree with some of these claims.
• To an extent, do a significant number of people feel this way? What's the root of that feeling?
• Boards mechanics don't allow users to get rid of comments they think aren't constructive as efficiently as one might like.
• I doubt this is a significant factor, to be honest. Say what you will about "reddit-esque" vote sorting, but it really does work for filtering content. I'm not saying it doesn't have issues, but overall it's been pretty successful.

As a disclaimer, I'm not saying that total raging is something we should heavily consider. I'm referring to threads like Boards Mega Discussion, most of the interaction immediately following the closure of the old forums, etc. There have been quite a few of distinctly popular threads regarding the topics of communication, community initiatives, etc. that have bordered on "Riot flaming".

Why do these threads do well when they are created logically? They tend to be pretty pointed, and if people didn't consistently agree with the mentality the threads wouldn't be popular. Is it because a representative sample of the population feels a certain way? Is it because the Boards stifles certain goals and ideas? Is it because players encourage negativity rather than positivity?

It's really important to consider what the target population is. From what I've gathered, places like Boards Feedback are primarily composed of players that really care about Riot and really care about the community. Should they be discounted as a tiny, nonrepresentative portion of the community? Consistent posters in Boards Feedback might be 0.00000001% of the community, but they are the people that are the most passionate about how the platform functions. Even though they are a tiny minority, their thoughts and feelings can be (in theory) far more valuable than any other feedback received from focus groups and surveys.

I can safely say that I have never been invited to participate in a survey or group involved in assisting with decisions made for community interaction. If you have run surveys about the Boards within the client, I certainly haven't seen them. It seems important to really focus on your core feature audience, rather than the overall opinion of a community that might not even really care about a particular piece of content.

There's no flip side to a lie. You have a bunch of people who want them re-released, and you always said, "They're discontinued, we aren't going back on that." Then it became, "They were discontinued, and we weren't going back on that, until we changed our minds."

That's a lie. And your attempt to spin it otherwise only makes that worse.

We can, as players, still enjoy a game even if, as a corporation, you don't respond to the players. Your convoluted non sequitor aside, his point can be easily shown in how you do not respond to the desires of a minority of players, even when the majority isn't against them. Of course, you respond when it is clear to you that an overwhelming number of players would feel strongly about a certain change. Take, however, the example of lore. The simple fact is that the majority do not care; plenty of them will read and enjoy whatever you put out, not really caring if it suddenly disappeared. The minority that actually care about the lore, as CupcakeTrap points out, do not even see a real attempt at communication or any evidence that you value player input. There are not enough of them to drastically affect your bottom line, so they are simply not important. Unfortunately for you, there is no counter-example to that argument. There are many examples where you bent to the will of an overwhelming number of players, but deciding, out of the goodness of your hearts, to do something for even an unopposed minority is not something I have ever seen. Furthermore, due to the utter lack of transparency from the company, even if there existed an example, we have no reason to believe it wasn't based on some other reason for change.

My time is an investment I make in something I consider fun, which the game still largely is for me. My money, however, is something to which you no longer hold any claim. You have made numerous poor decisions about parts of the game I care a lot about, so despite the fact that there are several skins that have come out that I like, I refuse to give my money to a company that clearly does not care about the kind of player I am. It is possible to earn my money back, but there is no indication you are going to do what it takes to do that.

The integrity of your intentions is just laughable. You're a corporation; your raison d'etre is to make money. On a personal level, YOU may care about the players because you are one. (I don't even know that you are one, though. Fortunately, that is irrelevant because...) As someone with a JOB, you have a responsibility ONLY to your investors to make money. Period. Pretending to care about the players in that context is just another lie in a long list of the lies the company has told when you didn't feel like it would hurt your bottom line.

true true, I'll backpedal and say "sorry, I could have probably shortened this" XD

I have an issue with over-explanation that I'm readily aware of. And as my time on the Boards has become harder to come by (college and all) I've been working to shorten my responses without losing comprehension.

Sorry, but this comment bugs me...what money? Time I get, but money? Required?

I should change the "and" to a "/", since investing money is the way to cut down on a time investment. I'd used that construction earlier, and just got a bit lazy. My bad. (Edit: Turns out I can't actually change things in that post anymore, because Boards. I'unno.)

The game is free, IP is earned by playing the game (that is free, btw)

I'm not sure why you're choosing to condescend, here.

and can be used to purchase every ESSENTIAL element in the game. The only money one can spend is entirely optional, such as skins or an alternative to grinding IP. Usually, grinding would be a problem, but playing the game is what you're there to do and it's fun.

That is ideally true, and was the case for a while, but at this point most of the game requires large amounts of IP to unlock. This means that many players simply can't get much actual satisfaction from the game for a while, usually that time between "okay this looks cool what am I doing" and "I wonder if ranked is any fun". My point is easier to make if we look at the whole Timmy/Johnny/Spike idea.

Timmy: I want to have BIG NUMBERS and DESTROY THE OPPOSITION. Cheaply, this player can snag Annie early on, flash-tibbers people to death, and get some early satisfaction... until he wants to explore the other champs with big numbers, or make some rune pages that min/max for a stat. That initial enjoyment was fairly cheap in terms of necessary IP, but after that it quickly climbs, especially because of runes. Even so, it's fair to say that many Timmy players will be alright playing this.

Jonny: This guy gets hit the hardest. How do you explore and learn and get creative in this game without putting in ridiculous amounts of IP/RP? Quints often cost more than a champion each, and actually buying more rune pages is atrociously expensive. With every new champ being 6300 (after a week), and many of the more complex/involved champs being new enough to carry that price, this game really isn't actually F2P for Jonny. Maybe as a technicality, sure, but that's being disingenuous, since most of his time playing the game is just him waiting until he can actually play in a satisfying way.

Spike: Spike fluctuates with the meta, but ultimately needs to put in an investment comparable to Jonny. While Jonny is spending a lot of time grinding IP to get the new champ with the cool new mechanic (Yasuo, Azir, Kalista), Spike is putting a lot of IP into optimized rune pages for currently-strong champions, some of whom are cheap (Trist) and some of whom are expensive (Braum). Ultimately, this requires a pretty big investment of time, during which Spike doesn't have what he wants.

tl;dr: I don't see how money is even a factor in playing this game, no one's holding a gun to your head and any money you spend is up to you.

Again, that's condescending, and I suspect that you didn't really think this one through or look at the numbers. I encourage you to do so, even if it's in a very rough way, because the results are highly edifying.

We're having some live issues with the boards that we're working on

You can't say "not to nitpick" and then nitpick really deeply lol.

Again - not that we can't get better, but how about some credit for the couple of dozen community topics we've done on here in the past couple of months. We've had discussions about impending changes to the clients, there's a HUGE amount of communication about the boards - it's just highly decentralized.