I’ve written about this in the past, but recent events have once again brought to light the fact that Riot desperately needs a new way to communicate important information to players. The forums just aren’t cutting it anymore. Important threads are getting buried, relevant threads are getting downvote-locked, and announcement threads are being relegated to obscure forums because of the giant LoL troll population.

Community Involvement vs. Communication of Important Information
Riot has always excelled at community involvement but failed at communicating important information to the community at large. That sounds contradictory, but there’s a big difference between community involvement and the communication of important issues.

Community involvement includes responses to threads like “Break the game in one sentence,” or “@Riot my 1000th win.” Don’t get me wrong – Riot responses to these threads are valuable, but on a different level than the important information. Riot responses to these threads build community relationship and strengthen the tie players feel to the developer. Involvement makes us feel like a part of the Riot family, like we’re in on the joke.

Communication of important information relates to things like the Riven patch delay, the delay of the end of Season One, the Mac Client shutdown, ELO decay, the AoE bug (sorry, official forum post has been deleted), Dominion, champion changes, customer loyalty issues, feature teases, and so on. You see what I’m doing there?

There are countless issues that are important to some or all of the playerbase, but they’re scattered all over the forums, buried in the middle of long threads, written as secondary red responses and just generally difficult to locate. When handled improperly, these issues make the playerbase feel ignored, unappreciated, and give the impression that Riot is out of touch.

A Place for Everything
The solution is pretty simple – each communication channel should have a clearly defined purpose. The forums are a great place for Rioters to interact with the community. This is where we should see the comments about the new Kennen plushie, the requests for games with Rioters, the Songs of the Summoned, the contests, the podcasts, the new databases, the in-house leagues. All of these things add value to the community, but they need to be separate from the communication of important information.

The new communication channel is the place for important, design/balance/timeline-related Riot posts. You could send me to the DevTracker, but the DevTracker is totally polluted with the Involvement posts I just mentioned. It can take hours to find the red post I’m looking for. We also have the Riot logo next to threads to which a Rioter responded, but that only shows the first response. Even third-party DevTrackers, like the one at CLGaming.net, don’t quite cut it. They’re definitely an improvement on Riot’s own, but they still don’t get the job done. We need one location for all the important, game-relevant information.

Riot Should Consider a Blog
My personal recommendation for the new channel is a blog. It’s what I know. It’s what I’m familiar with. It also has several technical advantages. First, the links provide information about the post. URLs to my LoL blog all contain the month, day, and year the post was published. In most cases they contain the title. For community sites, this is great. No longer will I be sending readers to “http://na.leagueoflegends.com/board/showthread.php?t=1185192” to read up on the Mac Client news. I could send them instead to “http://blog.leagueoflegends.com/2011/09/02/mac-client-closing-september-6th.” It’s a slightly longer URL but contains a nice preview of what they’re about to see.

Blogs also focus discussion. I don’t want to dig through 400 pages of comments about upcoming Orianna nerfs, the majority of which (the comments) are three words or less. All of that discussion now appears in one location and, with a robust comment system, the quality responses can be voted to the top, where they will be most prominent. Yes, some things will still get buried – no system is perfect – but it’s far better than the current system, in which not just the comments are buried; the thread itself disappears.

Most importantly, though, a blog centralizes information about this game. Someone requests design change information? Send them to the blog. How do I tell my friends about the latest Dominion update? Send them to the blog. Tribunal changes? Blog. Patch delay? You get the picture.

Conclusion
Forums aren’t the only way to give your playerbase information. They are one way, and they have a best use. Be clear about the purpose for each channel of information, Riot. It makes your intentions, designs, and struggles more transparent to the player base. We aren’t asking you to rush deadlines or put out underwhelming products just so we can have them. We just want easy access to information. We just want to know what’s going on.