Ask Riot the Trust Question and Aatrox

Welcome to Ask Riot, where we focus on your questions and give you answers.

This week, we talk about building trust and our current thoughts on Aatrox.

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What thing do you think Riot could improve that would go the furthest to creating a situation where the community trusts Riot again?

Editor’s note: Ghostcrawler recently answered this on his personal Askfm channel and we wanted to share an updated answer with all of you.

I think there are 3 things.

1) We need to talk more and earlier. When we maintain radio silence, players fill in the gaps with their own speculations, which are sometimes correct and many times not. I think we've struggled here to find the right balance, because if we talk about a problem too early with no solution immediately in sight, then it can feel to players like we are ridiculously slow or lack a sense of urgency. We look dishonest if we change our mind in the face of new information (another risk of communicating early). I recently mentioned that we want to update runes, but it's not going to be in the next several months. We will see how that goes over. :)

2) We need to shift our tone a little. The "brand" for Riot (though I kind of hate using that word) for a long time was the scrappy start-up that does things differently. When we were a little sloppy or brash or unconventional, it fit that narrative. But we aren't really that company any longer, and we need to figure out a new way to have a conversation that keeps our company culture intact but evolves to reflect the reality of the current size of Riot and success of LoL.

3) We need to deliver good shit. Talking about our philosophies and future plans can help a lot to fill in dry periods, but if all we ever produce is talk, then players will understandably lose faith. This has been a bit of a slow year from us product-wise, because so much energy has gone into the client update, and we burned some player trust with the loss of solo queue.

Great question and one we discuss a lot.

Ghostcrawler, Game Design Director

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What are your thoughts on Aatrox? He feels like he is in a horrible state and could use some buffs or a rework.

We'd like to do some significant work on Aatrox when we do a class update to diving fighters. Aatrox has a theme with an enormous amount of potential. At present, however, his gameplay is a bit generic, doing a mix of things plenty of other fighters also do. That means, unless he's the best at those things, he's not going to be the best pick gameplay wise. Our goal with an update, as a result, would be to make him more unique, taking advantage of his backstory and letting him bring some distinct tools to a team.

We'd also like to do some work before then, both to help him out slightly (he's a little on the weak side) and at least start to push him in a more focused direction. At a rough guess, sometime around the pre-season is when we'll likely look at that.

Meddler, Lead Game Designer