Riot, Please Communicate! (Re: Flex Queue)
Riot, I know you've been working on communication and transparency for a while (been a longstanding problem and all...). But with something as major and jarring as what's gone on with flex queue, visible communication is a must.
There was a post in the Dev Corner acknowledging an issue with Flex Queue placements three days ago. That's great, for those who happened to check the Red Tracker before the post got buried from the first page of it by posts from Player Support. It basically got hidden quickly, and few people saw it. It should have at least been pinned to the main boards page so more people might have seen it (more on this later).
Then, there were notices on the site and in the client saying ranked was disabled and that there would be maintenance last night. Also great! These notices are a terrific way to get word out. The problem? There's not nearly enough detail there for people to understand what that was all going to mean regarding their experience the next day after they played their first game.
Now, since the maintenance, you DO have a notice up indicating that there's a fix for matchmaking issues, and one more game is needed. Also good! But there really needs to be more context there. People need to understand what happened, and that there's a good chance they'll see their rank drop (or raise in some cases) suddenly after that one game.
What I find interesting is that those details that could have helped some were posted. But only on one of the European boards. They weren't cross-posted here. They were pinned here. The only reason I knew that thread existed is because Google's StalkerFeed threw it up as a suggested article for me yesterday. But it had, by far, the best information about the issue, as well as information to explain to players what to expect regarding their placement change after that next ranked match.
As a result of all this, people have gotten a pretty awful first impression of the Flex Queue (it was bad enough just based on the drop people see from the soft reset, but now they're dropping further after a single extra game). A better explanation upfront could have at least given people a better idea of what to expect with the extra placement game, so maybe they wouldn't feel quite so blindsided afterwards.
