Goosechase of feedback

How many AMAs and other things has Riot hosted on Reddit? A site that large chunks of the community viscerally hate?

You don't have to say "Go join in a discussion HERE instead of the boards!" for that to be the obvious implication.

and I don't have a problem with that. I want riot to talk to the players. Where should be irrelevant. What I -do- have a problem with is not being up-to-date on these "discussions" despite me constantly checking the dev tracker numerous times a day.

So what I'd really -love- to see from riot is a SUPER dev tracker that collects all the red posts from all the multimedia you use and deposits it all in one easy to access area. That way, I can keep up-to-date on all the conversations and news that I would otherwise miss because I don't use such and such social media site. (also, the red posts from the pbe MUST be made available in the dev tracker at the bare minimum, as that is still part of the league of legends website/forums despite it being slightly separate)

Also, as a suggestion for this super dev tracker, you could add filters so that players can filter out certain sites or forum sections (like memes and games) so that they can quickly find the type of dev discussion they are looking to stay up-to-date with.

Okay, but why don't Reds say things like "stepping out now" or "will be back later" before leaving a thread? A few do, but it's extremely rare, and having a discussion suddenly get ditched while other discussions might-or-might-not be happening elsewhere just feels awful.

Having two boards certainly makes this situation worse, although I do understand you are testing a new format.

Your players are everywhere, should you simply go everywhere they are and forgo a board completely? I illustrate this as an example to show how this is poor logic taken too far, IMHO.

Maybe use one site for announcements, news (twitter). I don't know man, this is Riot's job to figure out. Could be the format, could be the sorting, could be a problem due to voting. No clue, dude.

As for "Talk to us here instead of the boards" ..first of all, I can't recall where this was said, but I don't think its implicitness or explicitness matters in the end if the result is the same: having x number of sites which I as the player, have to keep track of them ALL, if I am intent on following up my feedback.

(Generally, people who give feedback want to know their concerns are addressed, so they will also tend to followup on said feedback.)

"Let's see, I made THIS point in the forums, do I need to repeat it on twitter, or did they already talk about this on the Dev blog?"

It should be streamlined. I feel like I should be able to say "I've already made my point, I can talk about this aspect of something now." Instead of keeping a journal of what was said where, who responded to it... etc. If the boards aren't the best way of reaching Riot, having a discussion, etc... then I, as a player, should not be the one to shoulder that burden. Look, I get you respond to players where they ask questions. I get you are passionate about the game. I don't know what the solution is, sorry man.

TLDR: I'm not like attacking anyone or what-have-you, I'm merely trying to convey how much of an inconvenience giving feedback can feel like.

The one flip-side of the argument is that we generally have a "we should be where players are" philosophy - which means that we think it's good that if a player wants to tweet at us or post in reddit or whatever we'll frequently see it and respond, so it's kind of a double-edged sword.

Isn't that a rather impossible to know thing? So Reddit is a user based discussion. You have alot of people who are there to discuss, the users are moire active. The LoL-Boards are a game community, with many players looking for information but not activly taking part into them. So couldn't it be that sometimes a reddit discussion appears to be more effective in terms of player involvment than one that is posted on the boards where only a few answer.

For me, when I was a new player, I did tend to check the boards first, than google for information. And than go and have a look on 3rd party sites.

Also, considering that reddit is basically world wide and by that free for all to take part in, while Riot is split in many languages, where it can get hard to discuss on every topic. Before this board came online we EUW guys had to smurf a lvl 5 account on a 100ping which is quite annoying. Same for all the other regions. And let's face it most Rioter are located in the US and by that write on the NA boards. All in all by splitting the boards and using the lvl 5 boarder Riot is in parts preventing people from taking part and by that forcing them to use Reddit and such to discuss.

So while Riot is trying to be where players are, it is troublesome for players to be where the Rioters are, that led to the situation we have riot now, player bing on 3rd party sites, Rioters following them, creating a vicious circle, where players have to again use third party sites because all the Rioters are active there.

Me as a player, I would expect Riot to enforce a police of "our sites first" so everybody who is not as active on the webs still can take part in all the stuff around the game, even though they are not familiar with sites such as: Reddit, surrender@20, ongamers etc.