Boards›Boards Feedback

I'm still not convinced Riot is listening to the people who don't like the Reddit layout.

SlumlordThanatos·10/15/2013, 7:52:30 AM·5 votes·749 views

So far, every time Riot has asked for feedback:

"So, what do you guys think?"

"We don't like the layout, please give us a proper forum with proper features, not a Reddit clone."

Asks louder to find more positive feedback: "SO, WHAT DO YOU GUYS THINK?!"

A bit louder in return: "WE DON'T LIKE IT!"

Drops the thread, starts a new one: "So, what do you guys think?"

The sad part about this? This has even extended to the chatroom, with Pendragon dodging my questions about the Reddit layout. And in all the time they have been trying to push it, they have done almost nothing to convince me that the Community site is anything more than a Reddit clone.

The layout is easily the biggest gripe that the community has about the Beta. And yet, Riot has given no indication that they are willing to change the layout to a more traditional forum, citing non-existant problems about how discussions are difficult to follow or how difficult it is to moderate. Multiple threads stating exactly what the majority of us want are ignored under the pretense that vBulletin is too difficult to work with.

It seems to me Riot is sticking their fingers in their collective ears and yelling "LALALALALALALALALA WE CAN'T HEAR YOU LALALALALALALALALA" every time someone brings up the site's similarities to Reddit.

Nested comments, the upvoting system (which is a problem with the actual forum that needs to go away), and posts sorted by "hottest" by default is not a very good way to have an actual discussion, which is why I frequent the LoL forum. I don't want the Community site to turn into a circle-jerking cesspit, where everything is ruled by upvotes and people with valid observations or complaints fall into oblivion because they are simply trying to start a discussion and aren't whoring for upvotes.

I will admit, the Reddit format is good for announcements, general news, memes, and AMA's, but if LoL already has one of the largest subreddits in the world, why don't you just continue using it, instead of creating a redundant website?

So, I just have one burning TL;DR question for the web designers here: Are you willing to change the layout?

8 Comments

RiotKrylhos10/15/2013, 6:15:20 PM5 votes

To your TL;DR - we're always willing to adapt, and this community experience is far from finished.

I'm really sorry that you feel like we're dodging questions! There are a lot of questions being asked, and it can get a little tough answering them all.

I'm curious though - why do you feel like nested comments are worse for discussions than a single threaded chronological board?

The different sorting strategies are there to provide different ways of discovering content. We're very open to experimenting with more sorting strategies, both on the comments level and the discussion thread level. "Hot" strategy is a great way to mitigate the moving target problem with large communities. Not everyone wants to see every discussion as they come in (or get bumped).

As we progress and evolve this experience, we continue to shape it to be more of a League of Legends community experience, not a "Reddit clone". Each new update we release is defined by you, the community.

Let me ask you this. Aside from a "flat" view - what would you like to see in this community web experience?

Pendragon10/15/2013, 6:27:05 PM4 votes

Well -- more than asking "Do you like it?" We're asking "how can we improve it".

We're pretty sure that the fundamental architecture changes that we've made will result in a higher quality of experience over time. That includes things like changing the default sorting to hot, and nesting comments. We haven't proven that yet, but a huge part of this project is to test whether that's true or not. The path forward to explore that is to pay close attention to what people don't like, why they don't like it, and make lots of improvements to address the feedback.

If the net of all of our work is that more people don't like it than do like it, I don't think it would necessarily make sense for us to continue with it - but we're way too early in the project to make a decision like that.

We've already made tons of changes based on the feedback of people who don't like it including

  • Larger avatars
  • Showing new replies
  • Link color indicators
  • Improved formatting tools
  • Discussion preview
  • Mouseover mini-profiles
  • Font, color and layout improvements

Probably 85% of the backlog for the product right now is made up of changes specifically addressing gripes, concerns, and opportunities that players have brought up. I think it's incredibly unfair to say we're not listening, or that we don't want your feedback. we're going to continue to put an incredible amount of time and diligence into understanding what works for people and what doesn't work and we're pretty flexible here.

The two sticking points you have are bumping/sort by most recent reply, and threaded/vs linear display. We think that this model dramatically improves the signal to noise ratio in a high traffic environment - and we're doing a bunch of highly specialized work to make that feature-set as strong and effective as possible. So I'd rather not revert on that decision until we've put forth all of the effort to optimize it.

In the meantime - we definitely want to understand the things you don't like, but more importantly why you don't like them. I think the tools to show changes to a discussion that we've just released go a long way towards making a conversation sticky and allowing it to live for a long time.

Oakjoven10/15/2013, 9:54:49 AM3 votes

NO, BUT REALLY....
WHAT DO YOU GUYS THINK??

Cypherous10/15/2013, 1:35:14 PM3 votes

The thing is they want feedback on the current system, at this stage its pretty much going to happen like it or not, i'm in the "not" group myself OP so we're on the same page, but riot in their infinite wisdom spent money on this so they will use it :(

Solan Stonewhip10/15/2013, 5:31:15 PM3 votes

i much prefer this system to the old one. much easier to read through. so maybe what you think is a clear message is not as clear cut as you thought?