Title. This kind of setting is seriously needed, as in each comment I posted, I always itches on whether OP actually went back to his thread to read it, since most of my comments were never quoted back :p
Aww man, its like when you text a girl, only to find out.. yeh she read it but she still has nothing to say to you -cries- we dont need that kinda knowledge! Q. Q
It seems rather useless and superficial.
Let's be honest, when you propose a change to the games balance, you don't really care if IronStylus or KateyKhaos looked at it, you want to know if someone like Morello looked at it. And while it might be interesting to see these indicators for the first week, they'd quickly lose all meaning as you realized that Joe the Intern is also making everything as "Seen by Riot".
The OP one is slightly more useful, but often times if you don't get a reply it's because there was nothing worth saying. Either your comment was too neutral for anyone to care to reply, summed up things perfectly and got up voted a lot, or was seen as complete and utter nonsense and was down voted a lot.
The other flaw with the idea is that they only work if the person is logged in. Riot has stated many times that often they like to sit back and watch discussions, taking notes, rather than jump in on a great discussion and hijack it with comments like "Look at my post!", "East Coast server when?!", and " U.R.F. now!!! ". If a Riot viewed tracker was implemented, many at Riot would probably view the forums while logged out.
Some great ideas here - we've discussed a "read by a Rioter" feature internally before.
There might be some drawbacks, though - simply acknowledging that we read something might not always a great experience for players. I worry it might feel almost dismissive, depending on the context. Acknowledging a bug report on the PBE forums? Definitely a good idea. But if a player has put a lot of effort into a really deep proposal or critique, I'm not sure simply knowing a Rioter acknowledged it is necessarily any better than receiving no response at all. It might feel like, "okay, Riot, but what do you think? What are you gonna do about it?"
I've also thought about letting Rioters opt out from the red tracker, or finding some way to convey that their post is "unofficial." Unfortunately this is pretty hard to convey, and the reality is, if you've got a Riot logo next to your name, you're representing the company. Putting "opinions here don't represent Riot Games" in your Twitter bio doesn't really mean shit, really. ;)
Once you're at the scale and complexity of a community like League (and a company like Riot), the forums (and any social media channel, really) can become a pretty scary place. The crowd is very smart, and they WILL tear you apart if your message isn't airtight. You can't possibly consider every player perspective out there, and you certainly can't respond to every single message. It's a tough proposition for a game developer - do I spend my time working on my craft, or do I take time out to give a lot of really careful thought to a player-facing message?
