@Boards Team/Community: Moderator Kane

Daen·10/8/2014, 5:23:26 PM·10 votes·892 views

Hi there,

(TL;DR at the bottom for lazy people)

As many are probably aware, an account named Moderator Kane emerged yesterday (to my knowledge) with a shiny green name and a Moderator title. The account activity has been limited to a copy-pasted response on many threads guiding them to the Boards Feedback Mega Discussion. I won't get into my thoughts on that, but I wanted to talk with you guys a little bit about Moderator Kane.

I think we can all agree that moderation (especially player moderation) has been one of the hottest issues in the history of the Boards/Community Beta. It's a topic that constantly rears its head, and with the transition from the forums it has remained at the top of many people's lists.

With this in mind, why was this feature/account shown to the community in such a limited way and not explained? An actual moderator account is pretty far from Riot's "traditional" stance on moderation (should be hidden), and we have no idea what the plan is moving forward. Is this account a bot? A Rioter? A player? Are there plans to increase the number of them? Will players be involved? Are players already involved? Will moderation rules change? Will the moderation style change? Who maintains the moderators? Why does it suddenly exist?

There are so many questions that are unanswered, and it's a bit strange when considering how important this topic tends to be for the community. It's fine if you don't know what the direction will be yet, that totally makes sense in game development. The main thing I'm getting at here is that you have essentially teased a heavily debated feature in a really hidden way without explaining the reasoning behind doing so. I'm aware this could be considered relatively minor, but I'm just curious as to why it hasn't been communicated.

To be clear, I'm not saying that teasers are a bad thing (if that is the intent). I think teasers are fantastic for building hype and informing the community in a unique way, but this feels a lot more like an accidental reveal or a hidden feature.

TL;DR: Moderator account has been sighted, communication, lots of questions, odd lack of explanation, etc. It's not that long, ya'll.

6 Comments

ninjadunks10/8/2014, 7:18:09 PM2 votes

i wish riot would just be like the billions of other forums/boards out there, have a 'this is a bad post section' that has a stickied comment with a moderator explaining whats wrong with it. explicit parts can be edited, for the children yo.

how hard is that? does that model really have that many problems? is it hard to ask for transparency from authority?

EMOFRATPARTY10/8/2014, 5:58:32 PM1 votes

I care, but it doesn't bother me to have open moderation. To be fair to Riot, they do try to hash out a lot of features in the background while the Boards are still running under their normal activity -- this could just be another one of those features.

I'm actually in the process of creating a post that encourages further discussion of Board moderation in general sometime today, I'll link it here when I'm finished.

BabySledge10/9/2014, 12:01:50 AM1 votes

I'm actually quite interested to see where this is going. Is it a bot? A new rioter? Or a teaser at a volunteer mod position? Hopefully some light can be shed on this soon