Hi everyone,
This has been discussed a bit by Riot, but I'm curious as to the community's opinions on this concept.
What are your thoughts on custom board creation? Would the additional customization result in a more diverse and deeply meaningful community, or segment it past usefulness? Or something else? I'd love to hear it!
It all depends on how it's implemented to be honest. I doubt it will be easy to do for everyone, or else you would run into thousands of sub-boards flooding the area. But that of course begs the question of how these Boards will be created in the first place.
One guess is that players will not directly make sub-boards, but instead have it be somewhat automated. An interesting thought I had (looking over all the idea thrown out over the year) is creating Boards based off of tags. You create a post with a certain keyword as a tag. If that tag becomes popular enough (above a certain discussion/post rate threshold) a Board will be automatically created with that keyword.
Another (and probably more likely) guess takes Tamat's hint at a form of player moderation. Certain users that are active enough in certain Boards will have the power to create Boards as they see fit (maybe within a limit), and they have primary moderation and governing over said Board (of course red mods will probably check in now and again). If the Board remains popular and well-discussed then it'll stay, but if it becomes inactive due to lack of appropriate moderation or simply lack of discussion it'll time out. Of course the largest problem with this idea is it it's sitting right next to the idea behind sub-reddits and the massive GD lash-back will be.....ah, what's a good word....interesting.
And then there's the simple idea of votes. Someone could introduce an [New Board] Post with a unique voting option and if enough votes are reached the post will be created. This [New Board] idea could even be a Board in of itself, kind of like a Kickstarter for categories.
BUT this is all speculation with absolutely zero concrete information, I don't want to start any rumors now.
What do you mean by "customization"?
Generally I'm a fan of the idea players creating and owning their own boards
What's the benefit to community-created boards?
If there's enough support for the creation of a given board, why not just have it created officially?
I'm interested in seeing how they'll go about it. Personally, I do believe it'll turn into a pretty chaotic experience, and I understand why they wanted roughly 100k daily users. It won't take long that like 25% of the players won't even look at the front page anymore. Also, it'll end up with a "PlayWithRiot", "IPlayedWithRiot", "LetsPlayWithRiot", "PlayWithReds", "PlayWithRioters"... you get the point. I seriously believe that the community splitting up so harshly would seriously harm the forum (which all boils down to the requirement of opening up a board. One way to do it would be that you can create them at will, but it needs ## subs to be able to post in it, then you add a "New Boards" sub boards to be able to publicize it).
The positive side would be things like "SurrenderAt20"/"UnbannedOnGamers" subboards that allwos for an easy aggregator or "Support"/"Renekton" where you can easily find the information you're looking for.
I'd be interested in a C9 boards for people who have bought a C9 summoner icon...
So...I had to vote on my own poll to actually see the poll results. That's why I voted Other, and as required I'm making a comment on it. Woo!
Possibly something to look into, @Riot.
I think if we're going to be allowed to create our own boards, these new boards must have one of the pre-existing boards assigned as their 'mother board' if you will.
That way you could have - Champions & Gameplay > Garen OR Maps & Modes > Suggestions - but it doesn't separate posts into even more pages; all posts from all sub boards are displayed based on your sorting when you enter the main board.
The way you would then find specific sub-board posts would be via a search sort. That way someone could have the sort filter "Catch the Teemo" and be presented with posts only from - Maps & Modes > Custom Gamemodes > Catch the Teemo.
Good compromise?
Interesting idea, but something to treat carefully. Endless creation of sub-boards can become chaotic. So some sort of managing system has to be in place. Moreover, you want to encourage people to make use of the sub-boards without being concerned about the visibility of their post. So you'd have to combine this concept with a complete pool of posts that's visible to everyone, regardless of the sub-board it was posted on. Only when people go to a sub-board, other posts are filtered out (which is already the case, I think?)
Visibility is important though, but the Reddit format does not always work well for that.
