Changing of the Boards
First of all, we would like to thank Riot for their introduction of a Team Recruitment Board. This made a lot more sense than advertising in Misc. However the majority of the communities agree that the new boards are not very good for advertising communities. We have several changes to the Team Recruitment Board we would like to propose to Riot.
An overview of the changes we wish Riot to consider:
- Change the name of the Team Recruitment Board to “Clan & Team Recruitment”.
- Changing the Team Recruitment Board to use a chronological ordering of posts, not the reddit style seen currently.
- Remove downvoting (and upvoting) from the Team Recruitment Board.
- No thread from Team Recruitment can appear on the general overview of boards.
Change the name of the Team Recruitment Board to “Clan & Team Recruitment” - Currently, there is no clear cut place for communities to advertise, and no clear cut place where people can look to find communities. “Team Recruitment” is indicative of the advertisement of ranked teams and not of communities. Adding “Clan” or even “Community” to the name of the board gives an obvious place for players to look for communities.
Changing the Team Recruitment Board to use a chronological ordering of posts, not the reddit style seen currently - Hot & Best are not good orderings for an advertising board. Best simply lists the highest rated threads (which is bad for reasons listed below). Hot is not that useful because it shows the most relevant discussions based on their karma and age. A community can be active and looking for members and not even be visible on hot, just because their thread is old.
For those of you who don’t know what a chronological ordering is, it’s like a standard forum. The most recently created or replied to discussions are shown first. The current GD on Boards already uses this ordering. A chronological ordering gives a fair way for communities and teams to advertise, by allowing them to bump their threads to keep them active and visible on the page, instead of relying on karma to be relevant.
Remove downvoting (and upvoting) from the Team Recruitment Board - The upvote/downvote system does not work the same way it does for any other Board. In a normal Board, a highly upvoted discussion means the discussion is of a high quality. On Team Recruitment, a highly upvoted community advertisement discussion does not tell you the quality of the community. It simply tells you the relative size of the community. The most highly rated community discussion is the community with the most members. In that way, upvotes are simply not relevant in the same way upvotes are relevant on other Boards.
Another problem with the upvote/downvote system on the Team Recruitment Board is potential censorship. There have already been situations of “downvote wars”, where one or more communities try to downvote other communities’ threads into the negatives, meaning their thread is no longer visible under hot or best. This is not fair on the smaller communities, who could be quite easily bullied off the boards by larger communities. If a few of the larger communities banded together, they could easily downvote every other community off of the Board.
No thread from Team Recruitment can appear on the general overview of boards - In the interests of fairness, no discussion from the Team Recruitment Board should be shown on the front page of Boards. I’ve seen several threads already within Boards Feedback complaining about how many discussions from Team Recruitment are making it to the front page. There is no reason why a community should be featured on the front page just because it has a high karma (for the reasons stated above).
In conclusion, these changes should make a more fair environment for communities to advertise in. Every community should have an equal opportunity to advertise their community. The player should be the one to choose which community they wish to join, not the communities themselves. Whatever Riot can do to help with this would be greatly appreciated.
