Managing Social Connections, Communication, and Persistant Public Chat Rooms
This is something that has been bouncing around in my head for awhile. Please note that I am sharing my experience and knowledge of the client. If I am missing or unaware of features, please enlighten me. I want to start a discussion and see what peoples thoughts are. I apologize the following may read as rabbling thoughts.
**Premise: ** In order to develop strong communication with other players, I have to access a wide variety of platforms and tools - third party voice applications, website forums (like this one), and In-client friend lists. With the new client, I hope that Riot will invest in a more robust and ambitious social management system. As an older player (played the NES when it was first released), it is difficult to find people I 'want' to play with. The current convoluted system for finding and maintaining connections with other players seems ad-hoc.
**Friends and Clubs: ** Currently in the client you have your friends and clubs list. As you play, if you find players that you would like to continue to play additional matches, you add them to your friends list or even join a club if you really get along. I have found over time that my friends list ends up being a list full of people that I rarely play with. I will go through and purge the list from time to time. I have joined clubs as well but it just feels like another version of a friends list. I can edit my friends and put little notes on them to remind myself about that player. Example: Ranked Support. But the notes section is small and has a character limit. The Club pages are not very much better. I find interacting with the Friends and Club to be janky. When clubs were originally released, the legacy client had a section at the top of the club chat that allowed you to post notes to the club. I liked that but I don't see that feature available in the new client. That too had a character limit.
I feel that there is a lot of room to grow with the Clubs. When I started a club I wanted to build a group of players that shared my goals for playing. Improve my play, increase my mastery of champions, and increase my rank while having fun. Being able to post info to the club seems like a great tool for maintaining membership activity, notices of time to play, and organize club activities. But again its is just a single chat window. Nothing can stay at the top. I feel that clubs should have a Notes page so that the club leaders can post things that the entire club can easily see without having to scroll through random chat logs. Maybe separate chat windows that can have specific purpose or only viewable by members. Something more comprehensive.
Non Client Social Communication: I have posted on different boards but my luck as been middling at best. Eventually your post on boards gets buried in time and will not be relevant. Plus it only can be seen by others that are actively searching those boards for other players to communicate with.
Most communication In-Client and In-Game is done with Chat windows. I am not the fastest nor cleanest typist. I have lots of typos. In order to talk I have to use Curse, Skype, or Discord. All nice programs but is kind of a pain to manage and remember who has what, and not everyone has each of those programs. I know that there has been a lot of community discussion about voice chat. Personally I am for it. I have yet to have an experience where anyone was abusive, negative, or flamed in a voice chat. I will note that I have been selective about using voice chat and don't always use it when asked to join in champ select so that may contribute to the lack of bad experiences. But each and every time I have found it useful in-game and typically I perform better individually and on the team (anecdotal evidence, your mileage may vary).
Chat Rooms: The legacy client had public chat rooms. Those too are a thing of the past at this time. But even those chat rooms were hidden. You had to know what to look for to find it. Most of the public chat rooms that I found, or even aware of, were from posts on Reddit. I personally think that there should be at least a minimum of persistent public chat rooms available that are always viewable. Especially Looking for groups by rank: Bronze, Silver, Gold, Etc. These were very useful to me especially during league events that required grouping to participate. Pool Party, Burning Tides, and Bonus IP Weekends.
Additional Thoughts: I do appreciate all of the work that Riot has continued to pour into League. I have been playing since October Season 4. I get a lot of enjoyment out of playing but the game is far more fulfilling to play with others. I know that Riot has really pushed 'playing with friends' for awhile now and I agree with the thought. As I mentioned earlier I am an older player, I don't have any IRL friends that play so this makes it difficult to develop strong relations with other players. I know that it takes time to make such large scale changes to the client. Riot in the past has outlined some of the changes to Friends and Clubs that they have considered for the new client but I have not heard announcements about them recently.
What I would like to see: One of the things that I truly enjoy about this game is the tactics and strategies that can be used. Without voice chat I find it difficult to discuss tactics and strats with teammates. Pings are great tools in game but don't always provide context or nuance to the other players and chat takes too long and can slow or delay play. These limited tools can not replace voice communication. I would love to see voice chat in game but also in the lobby before the game starts and in champ select. I find the time between champ select and once the game finally loads, which can be a long time if someone has a toaster, is wasted. I always feel that could be a great time to interact with teammates, strategize or intro yourself. In the very least, having the chat box for the team during loading would be nice.
For the record: I am a low silver player with no illusions about climbing to diamond or even plat. My Season goal is to reach gold by the end of the year to get the ranked rewards. I take the game fairly seriously, but I can and do laugh at myself, and desire to improve my performance as much as to win games. As an older player I do not have nor will ever have great micro (Mechanics). I do focus primarily on Map Pressure, Macro movements, and objective based play. My champion pool is geared towards team play. Any outplays that I perform are usually at a Macro level. I watch my replays to review my misplays as much as to see cool outplays. I have developed a limited champ pool for each lane (I don't whine if I get Autofilled, I learned the basics for each role when role selection was based on pick order, old Soloque) but primarily play top when solo but can play support and ADC comfortably.
Thank you for reading this, please comment.
Feel free to agree or disagree.
