An Analysis of the "Majority" Opinion About CB

First let me open by saying that this post is likely to be offensive and disliked by a large number of people here on Community Beta (CB), but that I am going to back up my claims with facts. This will be unarguably the truth as best can be interpreted from the facts available to me at this time.

Furthermore this is not a personal attack. This is to clear up misconceptions that people have. Later in the post you'll find that things take a much more narrative turn, this is for effect and a small bit for humor. And lastly: You can downvote the truth if you don't like it, but that wont make it change.

Now, the discussion topic: The “Majority” hatred of the CB.

There seems to be a misconception going around that if you prefer GD to CB then you are in the majority. What people fail to realize is that there is such thing as a Vocal Minority (VM), and that that is exactly what these people are.

Warning, Incoming Numbers

As of this moment the top rated post on CB is titled “It’s Time -You- Listen Riot:” and it sits with a positive score of 333. What this means is that no matter how many up-votes or down votes this has, this thread has a majority of support from CB by 333 points. We don’t have up and down vote totals, only the end result, which shows that there are 333 more people who generally agree with the post than people who don’t. However, it is fairly safe to assume (based upon the average score of posts, and the general activity of the site) that it is a low vote total.

According to Worthofweb.com the LeagueOfLegends website gtes 3,743,000 page views every day. That is leagueoflegends.com gets that many views. Alexa.com tracks sub-domain traffic (by pageview, not by user,) and keeps track of the top 18 subdomains for league of legends and openly offers that information. The lowest scoring subdomain is joj.leagueoflegends.com, sitting at 0.1%. forums.leagueoflegends.com isn’t even on that list. That means that forums.leagueoflegends.com doesn’t even account for one tenth of one percent of the the total pageviews that the website gets. That means that forums.leagueoflegends.com gets less than 3743 daily page views. However, we’re going to be generous in our assumptions and say that instead of less than that, forums.leagueoflegends.com gets exactly that. Now, before you go dismissing these numbers, realize that we are only talking about NA here for the forum count (the total pageviews includes other servers because they are subdomains, however forums.leagueoflegends.com is actually forums.na.leagueoflegends.com).

According to Alexa.com the average daily pageview per unique user hovers between 3 and 4. Understand that for there to be more users on the forums in our estimates it is better to have less pageviews per user, because we have a finite number of pageviews. If you browse more than 3 or 4 pages when you browse the forums you are still contributing to the page view count, and thus reducing the number of people that could actually be on there. We’re once again going to be generous and assume that each user of the forum browses 3 pages per day. They quickly post, and get off, browsing only three pages. This means that there are daily only 1247 NA Forum browsers on average.

In 2011 Riot boasted with an infographic that they had 32,000,000 accounts active on a monthly basis. According to Forbes.com in 2012 Riot games broke the world record for concurrent users (people online on the game at the same time) at 1,300,000 users completely obliterating the previous world record of 280,000 users on steam playing Skyrim.

If you browse the General Discussion forum (GD) you are a tiny, tiny minority. That’s just if you browse. That is not if you comment or post, or hold the opinion that CB sucks, this is just if you browse GD.

Even making the most generous of reasonable assumptions, at a positive score of 333 you could not possibly be the majority of anything. You are the VM. A terribly small Vocal Minority.

Why does all this matter though? Why does it matter how small you are if Riot is designing the CB for you, the people who browse GD, not everyone who plays the game provides feedback clearly, so why do those people matter? Basically because Riot wants them to provide feedback. In the ideal situation Riot would create the perfect community forum where all of their users would actively provide feedback. They cannot design the forums for just you, they have to design it for everyone.

Who does everyone include though? In a more reasonable situation Riot would be seeking to get the majority of people who already provide feedback to use their forums. The biggest community like that is reddit users who browse /r/leagueoflegends. What is 51% of the people on /r/leagueoflegends? 222,470. Just over half of those who are actively subscribed to /r/leagueoflegends is 178 times more people than the number of people who browse GD daily.

You might claim its unfair to compare daily GD views to subscribers of /r/leagueoflegends but truthfully it is a perfectly legitimate thing to compare because at this very moment there are 14,718 of those people on reddit. /r/leagueoflegends actively sees its posts reach people’s personal front pages even when those people are subscribed to much more popular default subreddits because the numbers of upvotes on league of legends posts are so high.

GD’s daily pageviews do not even scratch the surface of what /r/leagueoflegends has seen in the last four hours. Its no wonder that a large number of Rioters actively participate there. It reaches far more people.

So to assume that the majority hates the reddit style formatting, and nested comments, is not only grossly misinformed, it is flat out wrong. You are the Vocal Minority. Given the number of active accounts monthly, everyone who browsed CB in the last 24 hours could quit the game permanently, and never buy another thing and Riot wouldn’t even notice.

Do not assume that you are important, or special. Riot is not some mom ‘n pops shop that depends on every customer. Riot is the Mcdonalds of video games in terms of size. You are that one asshole customer who is self important. Your business only matters to Riot, your opinions only matter to Riot because they want to improve. Not because they need to. Riot could survive just fine without their forums at all. It is a privilege that you get to communicate with Riot, not a right. Stop being little douche canoes, and realize that you’re trying to impose the tyranny of the minority.

Riot will eventually change their forum for interacting with the community because the old one is technologically limited, and impractical for what they want to accomplish. You are getting a community beta because Riot is hoping to create the best system possible. It probably won’t look so much like reddit when everything is done, and that is probably a good thing. Reddit isn’t perfect by any means, but a whole hell of a lot more people prefer it than people who prefer GD. If you don’t want “leddit” then you need to not only express your concerns, you need to do them in a constructive manner, where you are polite, and you not only say what you don’t like, but why you don’t like it - ‘cause it’s dumb’ is not an answer - and how you think it could be improved.

That is the ONLY way you’re going to get what you want. Otherwise Riot will keep doing things their way until they are happy, and you are moderately less upset, in the end if you don’t start improving your feedback, you’ll have only yourself to blame when the end product turns out to be nothing like what you want.

CB is not “Let’s redesign GD” CB is “Let’s redesign how the community as a whole interacts with Riot.”

Thanks for taking the time to read through my wall of text. Enjoy your time in CB, and lets make it a better place for everyone.