The reddit style message board makes it very hard for latecomers to join a dicussion.

Boku Girl·9/18/2013, 1:23:26 AM·121 votes·12,321 views

For lack of a better way of phrasing it, the new style of the forums is really going to make it hard for people who join a discussion late. With a traditional forum layout, it's common to check both the first few pages and the last few pages, giving everyone some visibility. As it currently is (and is on reddit, who uses this style of board) if you do not make one of the first few posts on the topic, no one will see your input as the top few "upvoted" posts are already in the top position of the thread, pushing late-comers to the bottom. The sort function helps a tad but in reality, is rarely used.

55 Comments

RiotKrylhos9/18/2013, 3:14:51 AM17 votes

I agree that conversations shouldn't just die off, and quality conversations should be easy to discovery. With that, we're exploring different solutions.

Did you have any ideas or suggestions on how this could be improved?

Valenten9/18/2013, 2:27:09 AM9 votes

I completely agree with this I dislike the Reddit style for that reason... i dont look at the forums to see who can make the most widely liked post i look to see what people think despite how popular their idea is.

Sp1n Kuro9/18/2013, 6:00:11 AM7 votes

Imo, I'm a user of both reddit and sometimes league forums.

Reddit style is good for reddit, not for league forums.

What would be good is have a traditional forum that allows us to make our own signatures and have avatars whether they be summoner icons or just whatever we choose from images.

And, then just heavily moderate it to remove pointless posts in discussion threads. A lot of the problem with the league forums is the lack of good moderation. Look at things like TL or Elitist Jerks for a good representation of a forum.

Obviously you could have a dedicated forum section for people to talk about off topic things, but the main discussion threads like champion, item builds, game modes and suggestions should be serious boards.

None of the "roit pls" stuff in those boards.

Exacerberus9/18/2013, 5:42:19 AM6 votes

Reddit style is just about hyping and giving more visibility to the most upvoted (usually the older) posts and it's not healthy for any in-depth forum discussion. I really hate it and how much Riot is trying to jump on that bandwagon: this is not going to be an improvement at all.

Crunk9/18/2013, 10:08:04 PM6 votes

plus reddit already exists

AwesomeBathtub9/18/2013, 1:24:32 PM5 votes

The way I see it, the old system was clunky in its own right, but it did lead to more interesting discussion due to its organization format. It lacked a few key features like seeing replies to a post, or sorting by the post score. But the way to go, in my opinion, is to add those features to the standard forum format. We already have the LoL subreddit if we want this style of discussion, and while it might provide more focused categorization of threads, there are also plenty of subreddits (r/leagueoflegendsmeta, r/summoners, etc.) that cover most of the existing forum categories here.

If Riot wants to have a community like that under their control, they should make an official League subreddit or somehow get an employee as a mod of r/leagueoflegends (though that probably wouldn't fly due to conflict of interest). The League forums should, in my opinion, be a place where popularity of opinion matters little. Every voice should be heard, and that is simply not how this format works. If this is to go live, at least include an option to view it more in the style of a traditional forum.

KCIV49/18/2013, 4:45:05 AM4 votes

why not make a top comments and then a recently added comments or something along those lines. or just have nested convos.

Hellsaw9/19/2013, 12:14:57 AM3 votes

I'm honestly going to wear out my mouse wheel having to scroll down so much on my wide screen. . . My biggest pain of this style is that I like having a start and a end. A flow of events or ideas that follows when it was posted not trying to piece together if a post relates to another post in a sub thread. And scrolling down through the forum skipping post to see what was replied to original thought should have a better mechanic

Kajika919/18/2013, 3:04:53 AM3 votes

Things could be mixed, have the 3-5 first posts as newest ones then all the best following...

jinxedchef10/20/2014, 1:28:47 AM2 votes

I don't understand why they went this way. If I wanted to go to a LOL redit there already was one. Plus the ugly blue is impossible to read. Anyone with a brain will tell you to put a light background with dark letters, not vice versa. New Coke was a better idea than these boards. They have no upside at all.

Freezman9/18/2013, 2:55:33 AM2 votes

It's not like posts that are not upvoted get deleted or. Hidden you can sort comments by "best" and "recent".

bahamutkaiser11/7/2013, 9:27:39 AM1 votes

Forwarding one more to the bottom of the conversation, yeah, this method is really bad at documenting subject progression and only allows for popular remarks and snippets to be singled out.

Personally, I'd rather have a much more detailed forum, one where you can click on a post and draw up all the replies to that post or reply chain, or draw up all of the top voted remarks is nice, but circumventing conversation with an emphasis on replies is entirely destructive to ongoing discussion.

Ad Astra per Asp10/8/2014, 2:32:16 PM1 votes

I agree with all your points OP, just saying, good posting!

Lindsey Bot10/26/2013, 12:33:48 AM1 votes

I think this problem could partially be fixed by having the option to change the default setting of how comments are sorted.

If the default setting for comment viewing was "comments sorted by RECENT" or even implement an "OLD" setting, it would be more like a normal forum instead of a popularity contest.