Riot, please read this

Recently, the people of Riot Games have been more involved and have been communicating more with the community. While this is a great thing for a game company to do on some degree, you guys are starting the swim in very dangerous waters. There is a TL;DR at the bottom for those who don't like long pages of text.

I feel that my point can be made with an example of another game: Goal Line Blitz. This game was somewhat popular among the sport fan community as it allowed for people to create fantasy leagues and teams with characters that they make and name and follow. It's a bit like an RPG for football, if you will. The game was incredibly successful until the company started to listen to the feedback from the community. There were "balance issues" that the community was complaining about for a long time, but to the veteran players or the players with a higher knowledge of numbers, statistics, and those with higher levels of problem solving skills, there were no problems that needed to be addressed. However, to please the community and to try to satisfy everyone and make the game "better", Goal Line Blitz started using ideas from the players. The end result was a game that declined severely in quality over the course of the next few months.

I fear for this game. I fear that the overall quality will severely decline if the community ideas towards balance get implemented. Fumbbl, another company that hosts the game Blood Bowl, also started down this path, but quickly changed back to their original design philosophies and ideas when the game started to take a nose dive. This game WILL take a nose dive if balance is influenced by the community. It will, I promise. What Riot has been doing since day one, the growth that they have made as a company over the last 6 years, has been OUTSTANDING. It has been fabulous. This game has very few, if any at all, balance issues. Riot has the game designers, the data collectors, and all of them are gamers at heart.

I have seen comments such as "What changes would you like to see?" and "How could we fix that so it's better overall?" from Riot to the community. This is a good way to understand how the community feels about the game, but this is NOT a place to get balance ideas, because a majority of the community has no idea how to balance the game at all, because they aren't game designers, and a lot of them are stubborn and/or they refuse to accept that something might take work to solve or overcome (because games should be fun, and not have to require a few hours of practice to overcome one aspect, because that isn't a good game amirite?).

TL;DR: Please, Riot, don't use the ideas from the community. Please continue what you have done for the past 6 years. Don't take the players' empty complaints about the balance of the game into your decision making. Please. I want this game to be successful just as much as you guys, and what you have done in the past has been perfect.