Thanks for the reply. My answer here is kinda long, but I'm unsure of how to TLDR it.
The main difficulty with arbitrary answers is they don’t usually add much to the conversation and to some players may come across as dismissive rather than informative.
This is absolutely true, though ideally there should always be a kernel of truth somewhere. Something interesting about communities is that many people don't naturally assume a positive result from silence. It becomes a learned trait, from a psychological standpoint; if the focal point (communication) is generally positive, neutral action (soonTM) is generally assumed to be positive. If the focal point is generally negative, however, everything becomes colored by expectations and hopes.
SOE (Landmark Beta) does a really amazing job with this. They do weekly live broadcasts where they describe a lot of what the community has been doing, features that have been recently implemented, pain points the community has been discussing, progress of new/upcoming features, etc. I very rarely see negative reactions to this openness, even when they run into projects that take forever or hit a lot of roadblocks (caves, for example). The community trusts them to be up-front with what's happening internally, and trusts them to eventually deliver on these features when they are ready.
we’re trying to get better at providing something meaningful for you when we post – we don’t want a bunch of our interactions with you to be “soon” or “I can’t answer that yet.” On the other hand, there’s a point at which a conversation gets big enough that we definitely need to jump in and provide whatever context we can
To me, it's more a balance of realism vs community perception of what's important. Is it realistic for east coast servers to be ready yet? Hell no. Do a lot of players care deeply about this? Absolutely. That, to me, comes down to a discussion of what progress has been made and why other things seem to have higher priority.
If Riot is unable to explain priorities convincingly, in a way players are able to understand and accept, it's possible the priorities aren't right. A lot of people are willing to deal with something like "I'm sorry but X is something that's lower priority at the moment. We really need to fix Y, and these teams conflict with each other. We're happy to talk with you about X and address concerns, however.". As long as the priorities make logical sense and are presented well, a lot of people will be OK with it.
There will always be a minority (tons of people due to the size of LoL's community, unfortunately) that will disagree with everything. I know it's tough to see so many people being negative, but there are so many others that just want the clarity and openness.
Another part of the equation is subject matter expertise.
Definitely. I presume it gets a little difficult when, for example, there is a ton of discussion on x champion but the designer is extremely busy. I totally get that, and I'd be uncomfortable in either the situation of the non-expert talking to the community or the player listening to the non-expert.
That being said, has the possibility of having Rioters whose primary job is to assist with this burden been considered? Essentially, Rioters specifically hired to set up/run community projects (e.g. forum events, tournaments, maintaining volunteer groups like Wrenchmen) over the long term and help streamline communication. Many Rioters do this occasionally (KateyKhaos, for example, takes a lot of time to interact with us), but it doesn't seem there are Rioters where this is specifically their job and what they intend to spend their time doing.
I know your job title is Community Program Designer; does that mean you design and someone else maintains? Are the projects you work on intended for the global community or for specific communities like colleges or third-party sites?
