Welcome to the Community Beta - 01/31/14 Update

------------------------------------------------------------------- Update - 01/31/14 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Hey Everyone,

Thanks for all the feedback you've been providing for the Community Beta, every bit helps and we're excited to continue to develop the new system in collaboration with all of you. We’ve just rolled out some changes and want to let you know what’s up.

Changes

• Existing Sub-Communities will be reduced from 10 to 7 topics. These will include, Gameplay and Strategy, Esports, Live Blance, Fan Creations, Memes and Games, New Community Feedback and a Miscellaneous Sub-Community.

• Content from the communities that are being temporarily spun down will be relocated to the Miscellaneous category. This Sub-Community is intended to temporarily provide an "other" place for things that don't fit anywhere else. We do not expect this to be permanent.

• European players can now participate in the Community Beta

Once again, thank you so much for the feedback thus far and keep an eye out for future change announcements over the course of the next few weeks.

--------------------------------------------------------------------^^Update - 01/31/14^^----------------------------------------------------------------------------

Hey folks,

For the last little while a small team of Rioters have been thinking about how League of Legends players interact online outside of the game itself. Players have conversations, they share awesome content, and they form communities.

A lot of that interaction happens back on our official forums. Traditional forums are pretty great at fostering discussion, but with a community as large and talkative as ours it can be truly overwhelming to find the content you want or the conversations you want to add your voice to. We’ve also heard a ton of feedback from you guys with ideas on how to improve the official forums.

So we took a step back and thought about how we could best serve the community’s needs. We looked at other thriving community and social platforms, we talked to players about what they want, we drank a lot of coffee, and we started building a new community platform with this goal in mind: We want to create a player-driven platform that brings the community together around awesome content and discussions relevant to your interests.

• You should be able to find awesome content that you care about
• It should be easy to have great conversations with other players and Rioters
• Your actions should influence the community
• You should be able to form friendships and build communities with like-minded players
• Your feedback should shape the future of the platform

So we’ve been working on this for a little while now – but we can only get so far on our research and assumptions. We need you to participate – post, upvote, downvote, discuss, debate, and test what we built (read: break stuff). What we really need the most is for you to tell us what you think so we can move forward and work with you to build something great for the community. We’re excited to share what we’ve got today, but it’s important for you to know that this is an early look – it’s gonna change and grow and evolve based on the community’s direction. So, welcome – help us test this and make it better. Community pls! Oh, and go here to ask us anything about the project: http://community.na.leagueoflegends.com/c/beta-feedback/f1Fsz53Q-were-the-team-behind-the-community-beta-ask-us-anything

FAQ:

Will this replace the forums? Maybe one day. I can’t state this strongly enough, though: this is at a super early stage. We’re asking YOU to shape the direction of this platform to be the best possible place for League of Legends content and discussion.

Is this available globally? For our first round of testing, to keep things focused, we’re just launching this for the NA region, but anyone with an NA account can participate. Based on community feedback, we’ll think about the right time to bring this to other regions and languages.

Will posts from the current forums appear here? Nope. It’s a brand new platform and the way discussions work is fundamentally different so it’d be pretty messy to try to copy and paste things over.

Can I give feedback? YES! GIVE FEEDBACK! Go here and tell us your thoughts:http://community.na.leagueoflegends.com/c/beta-feedback When will it be done? Short answer: never. Just like with League of Legends, we’re committed to constantly improving this based on your feedback.

Is this inspired by Reddit? We took inspiration from a variety of community and social platforms that have been extremely successful at serving community needs. Reddit’s a big one, for sure, but we’re also looking at Facebook, Disqus, and a dozen other discussion and social sites. That got us to where we are today – now it’s your opportunity to help shape this.

Why couldn’t you make improvements to the existing forums? The current forums use off-the-shelf forums software (vBulletin) that’s really great at what it does. However, the changes necessary to accomplish our goals would basically mean rewriting the whole platform anyway, so we decided to build something new ourselves.

Where will you keep us up to date on changes? We’ll have constant update threads in the Site Feedback subcommunity with the latest updates.