@Riot: How will you ensure that dissenting voices can be heard on these forums?

mi ramfan·Nov 21, 2013·18 votes·1,688 views

I mean, as cool as the idea of "most upvoted posts get seen first is", it's not very conducive to hearing multiple points of view. That kind of system works well when everyone uses upvotes and downvotes the right way i.e. upvoting good posts regardless of whether or not they agree with them and downvoting troll posts/mindless raging/porn/etc.

However, we know that that's not really the case on Reddit nor on GD as it is right now. People are upvoting posts they agree with and downvoting posts they don't agree with, regardless of the actual quality of the post. And the worst voters out there just read the upvote/downvote count and follow the herd.

Being an opinionated person, I don't always agree with the majority of the population on General Discussion (although I do sometimes). What will your system do to protect my right to speak my mind and have my voice heard? How will your system differ from reddit (where anyone who disagrees with popular opinion quickly has their post sink to the bottom with downvotes and vanish) in order to accomplish this? And moreover, until you can guarantee that people like me will be able to make our voices heard, why even come to the new forum?

33 Comments

PendragonNov 21, 20138 votes

I think the trick here is to consider context. People should always see what's relevant and interesting to them - which means that if someone wants to see a logical well-rounded back and forth debate from two sides - that experience should exist. If someone wants to see a one-liner funny circle-jerk then that experience should also exist.

We can use reddit as a comparable since you brought it up

However, we know that that's not really the case on Reddit nor on GD as it is right now. People are upvoting posts they agree with and downvoting posts they don't agree with, regardless of the actual quality of the post. And the worst voters out there just read the upvote/downvote count and follow the herd.

This is true on some parts of reddit, and not true on others. take for example this discussion on /r/AskHistorians about trying to uncover some history about a sword.

http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/13ri0u/this_is_short_sword_found_by_my_family_member_at/

Compared to this post on /r/AdviceAnimals about a guy saying something awkward to a hairdresser

http://www.reddit.com/r/AdviceAnimals/comments/1r4uum/oh_dear/

Both of the subsequent conversations are relevant to the context in which the discussion was started and neither would be the same in the other context - because each of the communities has their own guidelines and unique cultures. One of the really cool things we can do with this platform is create lots and lots of appropriate contexts where different things will appeal to different people.

For example - we could create a sub-community where you have to be Platinum or higher to post specifically dedicated to strategy discussion with heavy on-topic enforcement.

Being an opinionated person, I don't always agree with the majority of the population on General Discussion (although I do sometimes). What will your system do to protect my right to speak my mind and have my voice heard? How will your system differ from reddit (where anyone who disagrees with popular opinion quickly has their post sink to the bottom with downvotes and vanish) in order to accomplish this? And moreover, until you can guarantee that people like me will be able to make our voices heard, why even come to the new forum?

You have the freedom to speak, but you don't have the right to be heard by people who don't want to hear you. There should be a place where you can say what you want to say, and people who it's relevant to are going to engage with what you say.

Would we make a chat bar where anyone who wants to say something could blast a message to all players who are currently playing LoL? Of course not - that's ridiculous. Any forum or conversation platform is a discussion and content tool, not a broadcast platform. People treating it like a broadcast platform is one of the biggest reasons we're making many of these changes.

HellioningNov 21, 20132 votes

I think you overestimate GDers. I distinctly remember a thread in which the OP made a joke along the lines of 'Rework Pantheon because he is an idealized standard that I, as a male, cannot stand up to.' The OP was mocking the complaints that some females have about the number of sexualized female champions. This is not a terrible idea, but every post that was supporting the OP and mocking the same people he was were upvoted heavily, while anyone that attempted to go against the grain and defend themselves or other people who have complained about female champion sexualized were downvoted so hard you had to click to see their comment, regardless of how intelligent and well put-together their post was.

People on GD will just take 'upvote' to mean 'I agree' and 'downvote' to mean 'I disagree'. And that's fine, expect it means that people who have dissenting opinions are not going to be heard.

PendragonNov 21, 20131 votes

Again - it's all about context. There will probably be large-scale global contexts on this platform that will end up very circle-jerky. There will also probably be more narrow, focused and controlled sub-communities with a stricter and insular culture that doesn't welcome those types of discussions

HellioningNov 21, 20133 votes

And what's preventing those insular sub communities from being as circle-jerky as the large ones? If anything, they should be more circle-jerky, given how there would be less people to communicate with.

DaenNov 21, 20132 votes

In theory the insular communities will be more heavily moderated and have dedicated players working together to create exactly the situation they desire.

Something that's pretty cool about what's currently being done with the platform, the goal is to give each subcommunity the ability to 'create their own laws' so to speak. The members of each subcommunity will be able to have a distinct impact in shaping things to be what the players want, rather than what Riot wants to give the players.

PendragonNov 21, 20134 votes

Some will be more, and some will be less. The idea is not to prevent circle jerks, it's to have many experiences that you can opt into.

TortferngatrNov 29, 20131 votes

They can, at the very least, be different circlejerks with a greater degree of relevance to that subcommunity that ultimately allow many views to be represented. This is a phenomenon I observe on the forums as well.

Compare Dominion forum (admitting openly it's insular as all hell there) to GD. Some echoed concepts are shared (penetration stats OP, "why switch to Reddit style" [although in Dominion's case it's a fear of being washed away by the tide]), but in general the two cultures are very different. Some things echo into the Dominion forum jokingly (there's one Riven thread, I think), but in general things are somewhat different.

ratcharmerFeb 22, 20141 votes

You are aware that "circle-jerk" is a crude & demeaning sexual reference, yes?

I know you need a way to refer to one-sided, self-congratulatory discussions, but seeing Riot staff casually toss around gross sex references when the forums filter out words like "tits" (can mean a woman's mammary glands, or a type of small bird) feels very hypocritical and like you're badmouthing your own community.

Sneak DogFeb 26, 20141 votes

But where would a Rioter post? Would they post in the insulated community, which would likely cause an influx of people from the red tracker, ruining the integrity/atmosphere? Would they ignore all insulated communities? Would Riot create a system where such communities get their own mods to prevent an influx of new people taking over? Or would there simply be subcommunities favored over others?

I come from EUW, I love talking about balance, but I never got any hope of a Rioter even looking at the feedback forums. I love these forums because here I can log in and have an equal chance as an NA poster, but I'm worried by the upvote system not allowing for varied topics or not providing well for discussion within a topic.

mi ramfanNov 22, 20136 votes

Well, the thing about discussion is that in a discussion both sides get to have a voice. In a debate about, say, Riven being OP (not going to give my opinion one way or the other but it's a recent debate I can use as an example), on the vBulletin type forum people who thought Riven was balanced could still make threads defending Riven and have them seen by at least a few people. Who then proceeded to downvote them into oblivion, but at least they did get to speak their mind a little.

On the other hand, arguments about champions being overpowered tend to turn into circlejerks quickly, even though it's one of the situations where you really want to hear both sides of the argument. And on the old forums, at least one downvote would not sink a thread. On the new forums, all it takes is one downvote to the OP and suddenly your post is buried, unable to be seen by anybody.

I am not so much worried about the ability to broadcast stuff to the community without filtering. If I wanted that I would make a stream or a youtube channel and spam video links everywhere. What I am worried about is that some LoL related, on topic issue will come up, one that I care about and want to voice an unpopular opinion on, and I won't be able to because the first person to open my discussion will downvote it, immediately killing it in the reddit system where it would have been alive in the vBulletin system.

I just don't want single downvotes from people who didn't read the post or simply disagree/have a beef with the author to bury legitimate content, which I know for a fact is a problem on the League of Legends subreddit.

PendragonNov 22, 20133 votes

We're working on improving the sorting algorithms quite a bit. I would expect that as we evolve it - one downvote will not be able to kill a post or a discussion.

We're also going to be conducting some research about usage on this site that will tell us how people are finding and consuming content - and my expectation is that the lowest view post here will get about the same amount of traffic as it would on the forums.

SkyhawkeNov 22, 20133 votes

Wait.. so you buy into the idea that only high-elo players can talk about game strategy? I thought that was only the elitists and trolls spreading that idea on GD, and now it sounds like Riot supports that idea? Sigh.

PendragonNov 23, 20133 votes

No... I hypothesized that there are high elo players who would like to talk about strategy exclusively with other high elo players. I personally am not interested in strategy conversations so I wouldn't want to talk about strategy with anyone.

I can't (and shouldn't) really say who can talk about what. I just want people to have mutually interesting conversations with one another.

ratcharmerFeb 26, 20143 votes

Part of the concern I have with this setup is that even from just skimming your last few posts Rioters would invariably end up "playing favorites" between the different groups, or at least there would be a community perception of such. This WILL end up alienating some players.

For a more concrete example:

Suppose there were sub-forums for champion balance in each of the five roles (Top, Mid, Jungle, ADC, Support). Each of these sub-forums has concerns they want the Live Balance Team to address. Whichever sub-forum the team gets to last will invariably feel slighted ("why was everyone else higher priority than us?") and thus it's likely the Red who posts there won't get a very friendly reception.

Since the reception in that sub-forum wasn't friendly, the Red will then likely keep his/her comments to a minimum and not return as soon as he/she otherwise would have. Thus the perception of being neglected leads to actual neglect.

PendragonFeb 26, 20142 votes

The relationship has to be healthy. The only time we consider real-deep posting on controversial issues to be part of someone's job here is if the conversation is one of the most important conversations we can have with players, (deeply controversial decisions, service outages, wide-scale bugs or player-complaints, etc). Any other communication Rioters do entirely on their own at the own discretion already.

There are Rioters who refuse to post anymore because of the cold reaction they've gotten. We're not going to make those people miserable and force them to post. We'll constantly stay committed to making sure we have some people whose entire job it is to keep you guys informed about the most important things, but anything further than that is going to require a healthy relationship and mutual respect.

Luner HunterFeb 28, 20142 votes

there is no "healthy relationship" if there is no communication! the relationship can only be healthy when the people at riot at least give a response that the poster's post has AT THE LEAST been seen so that people don't feel ignored! i personally have forum post that are 12+ days old that i seriously doubt that a single rioter has even given a passing glance let alone any real thought to... (yeah them 4.3 nerfs really says it got any attention >.>) i have seen older posts about serious topics that have had well thought out and laid out arguments about why this or that wasn't satisfactory to a certain group of the community that has, as it has seemed, been blatantly ignored due to the fact that some LCS player can do XYZ with LMNOP champ and is in the top less than 1% of your community in skill! However, YOU GUYS AT RIOT seem to think just because a few people can do extraordinary things with a champ it must be broken and so you guys break it making it unusable and not viable anymore, then when someone posts a forum thread about it, the thread is ignored or downvoted into oblivion because the vocal few/riot don't like what was posted. LCS =/= EVERYONE! I am personally on the brink of uninstalling League Of Legends due to Riots blatant disregard for all the Support Mains out there... you guys have constantly ignored most of the post out there and the few YOU DO post on give empty promises and have yet to deliver even half-assed on! There was a promise made by Morello 4 months ago about balancing supports... its now patch 4.3 there hasnt be a buff to any supports yet! (oh no you "buff" jana's heal on her ult that no one even uses for the heals) you've instead nerf'd the supports items that was all SOOO IMPORTANT TO GUT THEIR DMG FOR and now they are left with crummy support items, no damage, and no utility... but where is that promised re-balancing of the support champions? why doesn't riot just remove them then if riot hates what they have created? riot seems to constantly do things that make a lot of people unhappy and doesn't seem to care... or they have a very poor way of showing that they do >.> answering some of these questions would facilitate that "healthy relationship" and remove some of the hostilities that certain rioters that make certain promises get aimed at them! >.> ANY response is BETTER THAN no response...

PendragonFeb 28, 20141 votes

i personally have forum post that are 12+ days old that i seriously doubt that a single rioter has even given a passing glance let alone any real thought to... (yeah them 4.3 nerfs really says it got any attention >.>)

I think expectation management here is critical. We do do our best to read and reply to many posts, but throughout the world there are lots of LoL players making hundreds of thousands of forum posts in dozens of languages every day. Game design and balance are tricky balances and the game design team considers the well-thought posted arguments, but also the massive amounts of data we have to support our understanding of the game's health.

LCS has to be taken into consideration, but so do the play-habits of bronze ranked 5's players in EUNE and diamond players in Taiwan, and people who play nothing but TT, and lots of other perspectives.

riot seems to constantly do things that make a lot of people unhappy and doesn't seem to care...

Of course we care - we care a lot. You just have to realize there are a lot more of you guys than there are of us, especially the folks who can speak to/work on balance. Every decision we ever make is going to make lots of people unhappy. With any large enough group of people some are always going to have varying thoughts. If we have 67 million monthly active players and 90% of them are happy about a change we've made, it still means that 7 million people aren't.

Let me pose a hypothetical - let's say that we could officially respond 1% of all balance/gameplay related feedback and discussions that were posted online globally, what factors should we use to determine which ones those are?

Luner HunterFeb 28, 20141 votes

the issue here is that 90% of the support mains AREN'T happy and no matter how the guttings of the supports and now their all important gp/5 items are justified they were applied knowing full well that it was going to upset 90% of the support mains and was done anyways! i'm sure if you asked any of the traditional support mains if they are happy about how they were nerfed into the ground then overran by AP midlaners and tanks im almost a 100% sure not one of them would say they were happy about it

Mirage NightMar 1, 20142 votes

I have a post on both GD and here regarding Evelynn's Thematic Relaunch. Initially both received little response. On the GD one, I simply bumped it twice over the course of 48 hours. At which point we have a meaningful and continual discussion on our hands. Really once a post is buried here, it is dead. There is a chance for life on GD if the post has meaningful content.

ratcharmerMar 1, 20141 votes

I'm afraid this post actually made my concerns WORSE rather than alleviating them . . .

While I'd prefer not to jump to conclusions, I confess I'm having a really hard time reading your post as anything other than "Yes, we want to switch to this new medium so we can more easily play favorites and ignore the sections of our community we don't like."

As Luner Hunter pointed out, a complete lack of communication is pretty much the least healthy relationship imaginable.

I know interacting with an angry group of players sucks, but you have to keep in mind that players don't become that upset just randomly; they're upset because they feel they have a grievance to discuss. Irregardless of whether the grievance is legitimate or not, being dismissive or ignoring them is pretty much the worst thing you could possibly do.

Mirage NightMar 1, 20141 votes

DaenNov 21, 20135 votes

To my knowledge it's noted that zeroed or negative threads are overly punished, as currently a single downvote can potentially completely eradicate a thread.

Honestly, to an extent I agree. Without a bumping mechanic it's difficult for threads that're written well but not necessarily agreed with to move properly, and I propose a solution!

If comment volume (excluding the OP's replies) were factored into the Hot equation, this problem would be less of an issue. A thread with a decent amount of negativity around it could still be relatively high in the Hot listings if there's a lot of conversation around it, and in my opinion Hot really needs to be about the conversation not about the popularity.

eKatSSNov 21, 20132 votes

Problem with that is that most people just downvote without leaving a comment if they don't agree.

ratcharmerFeb 26, 20141 votes

I think that's mostly a carry-over habit from the old forums (don't want to bump a post you disagree with), and may start diminishing once people get used to the new discussion board.

djumpNov 21, 20134 votes

Yeah, this is a tough issue. I agree that the simple up/down voting system is lacking. In my mind an ideal solution would be having a couple different categories of rating. Things to the effect of "agree/disagree" "thoughtful/mindless" and "amusing/boring". I would certainly love to be able to browse posts with that kind of specificity.

But realistically, I think that's a little too complex and would be too visually cluttered to work in practice. I'm not sure if there is anything you can really do other than try to promote a mature culture in the community.

An interesting test in my mind - but one that would be difficult technically and only effective over time - would be to weight the up/down votes you see on a post according to who voted. And give more weight to votes from people that you have upvoted and less weight to votes from people who you have downvoted (neutral if you have not voted on them before). If you stuck around on the forum long enough, that could be really effective I think....if they could pull that off at all technically.

agent tonyNov 22, 20132 votes

Amumu WOULNT U GUYS AGREE THAT EVERYONE HAVING FREE TRINKETS RENDERS GANKS FROM JUNGLING EVEN THO THEY CAN SWEEP FOR WARDS? THEY CAN STILL SEE U SO ITS NOT REALLY A GANK IF THEY SEE U COMING

Aeolian MelodiesDec 11, 20132 votes

Irrelavant
Stop using all caps, it's aggressive - it's like you're yelling at us IRL
If you sweep (without killing) you disable the ward so you can pass through it unoticed.

March of DimesNov 24, 20132 votes

You expressed my concern with the new forums perfectly. Yea, I'd like to know what stops such a system from degenerating into a popularity contest where we'll need to cater to the mainstream in order for our posts to have visibility. For instance, any sort of mathcrafting that contests what's widely accepted is usually downvoted instinctively by GD as something that makes them feel uncomfortable. Doesn't matter if they have a rational counterargument or not, it's downvoted because they don't like coming to terms with a previously-accepted fact being possibly being wrong.

Anything to keep such posts from getting scuttled to the bottom of the new forums?

eKatSSNov 21, 20131 votes

I too do not like the voting system's effect on thread order. So I only browse the forum with "Recent" ordering. The simple fact of starting a seemingly uninteresting thread makes even less people read it, since it's buried at the bottom with a rating of "1" at the beginning.

VexingRavenNov 25, 20131 votes

The simple solution is scrap the whole reddit-style nonsense and return to a chronological threading style like every other sane discussion forum on the planet. I don't come to the forums to look at what's the most upvoted, I come here to see what other people have to say and give my own opinion. I don't care what the mindless GD swarm thinks is the best post, I commonly disagree with it in fact. I'd rather see it in chronological order, as people reading through a thread tend to be influenced by it, and posts at the beginning will be vastly different from those at the end.

I think I understand why you want to do it this way: It makes longer threads more feasible, to a certain extent. But very rarely do threads actually get to be over 10 pages. By that point everything that needs to be said has probably been said. I don't think it's worth the tradeoff of turning discussion into a popularity contest.