Hi Folks!

My name is Andy Belford. I joined Riot a few months ago as the North American Player Relations Manager.

The NA Players Relations team has recently been taking a wide look at what makes the NA League Community a great experience, and the NA Boards obviously figure pretty heavily in that picture. During a previous conversation, I mentioned that we’d completed a day-long workshop discussing both the current state of the NA boards and our long-term goals for them. Today, I’d like to take some time to review the results of this meeting, talk about direction and “blue sky,” and open the discussion up to your thoughts. Essentially, I’d like to get your take on our take and hear your ideas on our ideas of how to level up our collective experience as the Boards community.

DISCLAIMER: This isn’t going to be a short post. That said, if you plan on taking part in the discussion, do me a solid and read it in its entirety. Thanks :)!

What’s the point?

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We want to make the NA Boards a more constructive and useful place for players to connect with each other and Rioters. Now, this is a pretty vague and ubiquitous statement, so we spent some time trying to identify questions we wanted to answer, from a Rioter point of view:

• What makes the North American Boards the North American Boards?
• What are our goals when it comes to moderation?
• How can we make Player-to-Rioter (and vice versa) engagement a better experience for both parties?
• What do we think players need and want from the Boards? (something we obviously want your thoughts on as well).
• What do the Boards look like in an “ideal” state?

These questions obviously sparked a lot of conversation, and eventually led to a sort of overarching debate: What exactly is the “point” of the NA Boards, or rather, what do they offer that other League communities don’t? While this might seem an odd question (who cares, it’s got dank memes), it’s actually an important one to consider. The online League ecosystem is pretty robust at this point (which we love!). That being said, we don’t want a community forum that’s just kind of there because we’re supposed to have one. So again, what specifically should the Boards offer?

What do the North American Boards look like now?

/em takes a deep breath…

Seems like a pretty loaded topic, right? Well, it can be, and we had a very real conversation about the current state of the Boards.

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The point of sharing this assessment (and asking for your thoughts) isn’t to dwell on where we’ve been, but rather to focus on what we can accomplish, together, moving forward.

In the course of this conversation we tried to identify some of the key areas of potential improvement for the NA Boards (presented below in no particular order):

• The Boards feel fractured-there’re too many of them, they don’t fit together as well as they could, and too often they’re lacking clear identities.
• The amount of “RITO PLZ” can sometimes smother other interesting conversations. Since these posts often tend to stick out, Rioters then frequently respond to them, and the behavior is reinforced and perpetuated.
• Toxicity. We all know that, at times, the front page can appear to be dominated by angry posts (in other news, the Pope is Catholic, the sky is blue and I’m an overweight Asian man). In all seriousness, the ways in which we express our frustrations can have a profound impact on how we all interact with each other.
• The Boards’ current format doesn’t always make it the easiest place to actually engage in long-lived and fulfilling conversations; in a broader sense, the UX (user experience) of the Boards could use some improvement. Which contributes to…
• The Boards don’t feel like a “sticky” experience. As it currently stands, there aren’t a lot of reasons for players to visit the boards multiple times per day.
• There’s lots of room for improvement in how we surface Rioter interactions. For example, I personally like the way Blizzard surfaces blue posts on the front page of their individual game fora.
• The boards need to be optimized for mobile. End of story. You should be able to read the boards while attending to important business…in the bathroom.
• Players should be able to feel a sense of community ownership over the Boards.
• We’re lacking in social features.
• Moderation can be leveled up.

This list isn’t exhaustive - it’s focused on the most obvious problems as we see them, and you guys doubtless have insight to provide on other things that need be on the to-do list.

What do the NA Boards look like ideally?

Before we dig into this, let’s all acknowledge one inalienable factoid: ideal is an entirely subjective term. Everyone has their own idea of what the Boards should look like. Chances are you have some great ideas for quality of life upgrades addressing pain points with which you have personal experience.

As you read our musings below, remember these are ideals and goals we want to aim towards, not a promise of features / changes to come.

• We want the Boards to feel active, with fresh content each time you visit. This should be tempered with reason, but if you view the Boards once in the morning and once in the evening, you should see somewhat fresh topics each time.
• You should be able to expect regular, consistent content from us aimed specifically at the Boards Community. We’ve already kicked this off with the new “Meanwhile in Top Lane…” feature, but there are more in the works.
• Should we create a RITO PLZ specific board? There are some great examples of player communities where requests / ideas specifically directed at developers are focused in a single forum (Capcom tends to do this, especially with their fighting games).
• Visible Moderation: Building trust and transparency within the community through open conversation about how the boards are managed is important (and part of why we’ve made this post). We’re going to have some focused discussion around the topic of Visible Moderation (what is it, what does it mean), so please stay tuned for that in a future post.
• We want the Boards to be a customizable, social experience. Ideas like showing what your friends are upvoting, the ability to subscribe to different players posts, etc were all thrown around. Basically, we’d like more opportunities for players to connect to each other on Boards as readily as you can connect to Rioters.
• Explore how to better support the global element of NA Boards communication from Rioters. There’s a ton of communication that happens here on the North American Boards that’s applicable to anyone who plays League. Most of us here in the Los Angeles offices are North American players, so naturally we gravitate towards the platform that we consider “home.” There’s nothing inherently wrong with this, but it does contribute to our friends in other regions sometimes asking “where’s the love?” This idea is even more exploratory than those above, and we’d want to accomplish any changes without creating yet another community channel for players to keep track of, so if you have thoughts, please share them.

That’s alot of stuff to cover, and we plan to have follow-up discussions about these topics in the weeks to come, which leads to the obvious question...

What about all the other things we need to talk about?

Well, that’s part of why we’re here - we want your input and thoughts before we define exactly what comes next. You should certainly weigh in here, but as I mentioned we’re also planning some focused discussion in the coming weeks around the following topics:

• Boards Organization
• Visible Moderation
• Revisiting the Universal Rules
• Ongoing Boards Dev

This is the start of a collaborative process, one in which your voice and feedback is an important piece of the puzzle.

For today, some Rioters are on hand to answer your questions and thoughts for the next few hours. Joining the conversation will be:

• ADillonMostDirty
• d’Artagnan
• RiotZwill

Let’s get started!