[Idea] This site could be more than just a redesigned forum

I like the idea of a new site that facilitates interaction between players, but so far this site hasn't succeeded at two major things: improved visual design and innovation. Innovation is important because no one is going to switch to a tool that's just a different version of something they already use. Visual design is important because people have been conditioned to expect pretty things.

Innovation

When I read about the community beta it sounded like a great opportunity to rethink the traditional forum style of community and replace it with something new, something better, something cooler. Awesome. I think everyone is on board for that. Unfortunately, when I arrived here I just saw a slightly rebranded/reorganized forum. I think that in order to be successful the community beta will have to evolve beyond a forum.

Here are a few suggestions of things that would make this place way better. These are in no particular order.

• A profile page for each summoner. This could include match history, MMR, favorite champion (choose one or most-played or both), friends (more on this later), and just about any information they wanted to post. This should definitely not include myspace-style editing of your own profile page. Maybe not even a picture. I know I probably wouldn't upload one. The point of this isn't to compete with Facebook, it's to be a one-stop shop for League life.

• A friend feature. I'd love a way to select people who I want to see more of. This could include their status updates (if there is such a thing), updates on their recent League activity, whether or not they're online, tweets (if they've connected a Twitter account), etc. League has access to a ton of data about each summoner. If used correctly it could be very effective at fostering community.

• A news feed. I'd love a place to get a quick overview of everything that was happening in my League of Legends world. Ideally this would be a combination of many types of stories. My buddy just lost six straight games and is feeling frustrated? Good to know. TSM is playing in the NA LCS this weekend? Obviously. There's a new champ coming out? Sweet. Irelia is getting nerfed? You get the idea.

• Articles. We've been seeing for a while now that people want to write articles about League. There are tons of sites for champion guides, build paths, jungling tutorials, etc. Why not have a way to do all that here, and have players themselves curate the content by voting? Let's steal a bunch of ideas from Medium.com for this part. They do it super well.

• Integration with the League client. This would be hugely useful in catapulting the community beta into general use. Take a tip from Google+ and don't try to make people adopt a site into their lives, just make it ubiquitous and they'll appreciate it.

• Integration with my ignore list. This is a small touch that people will love you for. If I don't want to see someone type in game, chances are I don't want to see them type out of game either.

• League updates. I don't want to be spammed, but this would be a great place to keep summoners up to date on big events in the league community. "Hey, LCS this weekend starts at 1:30pm EST." "Scarra just quit Dignitas." "Phreak made it out of Bronze."

Improved look & feel

Why doesn't the player base seem to like the reddit-style comment layout when it works so well for Reddit? I personally think it has to do with the fact that Reddit's whole design is based around large, open-feeling comment threads. They use 90% of their screen real estate for comments and can thus show a lot more comments per thread by default. It also has to do with the openness of their design. Reddit is mostly white, which makes it feel empty except for the comments. This site has a big header and some background between the page edge and the content container. That makes for a more cramped view, and maybe reddit-style comments aren't the best medium for the template.

Why doesn't this site look and feel fresh and different and better? I think the main problem has to do with mixing design philosophies that don't really go well together. Stuck into the template of a well-done-but-fairly-typical gaming site, the community beta is using subtle shades of grey for backgrounds, with high-contrast typography. That just doesn't fit the design aesthetic set forth by the header (and the rest of the site, which most users will come from).

Conclusion

The community beta could be so much more than it is right now. Let's not be afraid to dream a little bigger.

Also if anyone at Riot is reading this I'd be willing to volunteer some web design/development work.