Riot didn’t make much of a stink about the League of Legends birthday last year, but it seems this year there’s going to be something of a celebration. As part of the festivities, Riot put together a timeline that follows the development of the game since October of 2009.

I think this is a pretty cool tribute to the development of the game, but I hope Riot sees the timeline like I do: a reminder that they can do better. When I look down the list of developments I see several things that I never use, a couple things that were hyped up and underwhelmed, and one real thing that has the potential to extend the life of the platform for a player.

Twisted Treeline

Twisted Treeline started out strong but quickly dried up when players realized that only so many champs are actually viable on the map. With the rise of Tanky DPS I’ve been playing Treeline again, mostly because there’s more variety there, but Riot stopped worrying about balance for that map a long time ago. This one doesn’t add any life to League of Legends. It’s an occasional diversion from the big show.

Season One

Season One also looked pretty cool at the beginning. Ranked play brought us draft mode, a feature that I had really been missing prior to its release. But Season One went on so long I forgot it was even happening. In that time the game remained relatively unchanged, seeing just a few meta-shifts along the way.

Riot did start to develop a spectator mode for the game, which helped the visibility of the larger tournaments. This would be a nice injection of life for the platform, giving each player more ways to learn how to improve at the game. On the whole, though, Season One doesn’t add much to the platform for the average player.

Battle Training & Co-Op vs. AI

I have never used Battle Training and never will. I’d also say chances are good that once a player has seen the mode a couple times, they won’t be going back either.

As for Co-Op vs. AI, my experience with the mode was poor enough that I haven’t gone back. My allies constantly flamed me for any and every decision I made. I’d rather have the ragers from ranked than the trolls from this game mode. That said, I know some players enjoy it and it’s certainly kid friendly. This one seems okay for a very small subset of the player base. I would love to see more data on who is playing Co-Op vs. AI.

The Tribunal

I’m still surprised the Tribunal made it to the live feature list before things like achievements or spectator mode. I realize Riot must have been swamped in complaints about player behavior, but for me, the Tribunal just isn’t worth the time. I can’t even imagine the amount of management it takes on the back end. And frankly, my games haven’t improved dramatically since the Tribunal released. People are still rude. People still afk. There are just too many players for this kind of system to effect dramatic change that we can see on a player by player basis.

Dominion

This is the big, shiny pot of gold at the end of Riot’s timeline. When Dominion launched I played it like a fiend. I haven’t played a ton in the past couple weeks, but a few games here and there have still been fun. It’s obvious that Riot is committed to keeping this game mode balanced, which puts it ahead of Twisted Treeline as far as diversions are concerned. I don’t think Dominion is perfect, but it’s something new with totally new gameplay and I think a lot of players are enjoying it.

None of this is to say that I don’t like League of Legends. I love it. I’ve spent hundreds of hours on it, both in playing and in writing for this blog. The day is coming, though, when some shiny new toy will steal me away from LoL. When I look at this list, I don’t see much that will pull me back should my new toy grow stale. I hope Riot has a few tricks up its sleeve.

When Co-op vs. AI launched at the end of the week, I took a couple hours to test things out. Though I wasn’t particularly impressed with the bots, I was shocked to see just how rude players were to one another when playing against a computer.

To break in the new bots, I played champions like Gangplank, Veigar, and Kassadin – champions that can kill an underfarmed player very quickly if they streak out ahead. It was a lot of fun, despite nearly constant cries from my teammates to “stop ks noob.” I sort of understand the anti-KS mentality in PvP. There’s reputation at stake for a lot of people, and everyone likes to have a nice K/D/A ratio. Against computers, though, who cares?

In my last Co-op vs. AI game (Kassadin), I had a player calling me a noob the whole game because I died a few times. After the game he went on and on about my win count, how he hoped to meet me in ranked, etc. He went on like that for two full pages of lobby text with no response from me other than, “yeah, I was trying my hardest.”

It’s a strange thing to join a Co-op game mode if the only goal is to berate your teammates. Have you had a similar experience?

On the heels of this morning’s “Why, oh god, WHY does the EU have Co-Op vs. AI first?!?” on the forums, Riot has set the new feature live on the US servers. Players can now queue up as a premade team or solo and be paired with teammates to play against bots. The bots might be better than the standard Custom Game fare, but they certainly aren’t good.

Part of the problem is that they don’t jungle, and the bots seem to make bad decisions in 2v1 situations. If you stick to the lanes, chances are you’re going to win and win easily. When you start to get near brush, that’s where the bots actually seem okay, but mostly because their reaction times are instant. I blinked over a wall as Kassadin in one game, only to have the Annie on the other side instantly hit me with three skills. No joke, the combo landed before fog of war cleared, but I still managed to get the kill.

I did have one instance over my three games that I actually thought the bots played well. Trundle Bot and Ashe Bot were both top, both underleveled. They slipped into fog of war near our outer turret as my team made our way through the jungle to gank. As we approached from river, I got exhausted, ignited, silenced and Ruptured by the Cho’gath we hadn’t known was up there. It was a damn good bait, and like I said before, the timing was instant.

As much as the bots benefit from being run by a computer, they’re also hurt by it. You can kite the bots just by getting close to them with low health. They instantly run toward you and will often chase just up to tower range. I’ve also seen bots trying to take jungle minions get stuck walking in circles when a champion approaches them.

All of that said, it’s definitely more interesting to get ignited by an Ashe after she arrows you from outside the screen than it was to watch Yi bot two-step his way back to a turret while you killed him in Custom Games. What do you guys think?

UPDATE: Since writing this post, Riot hotfixed to make Co-Op vs. AI live. While cool, it doesn’t have an effect on these suggestions.

The forums were again ablaze with outrage this morning, this time because Riot released the Co-Op vs. AI game mode to European servers before those in North America. Adding insult to injury, Phreak posted a video recap of an Olaf vs. Soraka fight from the Co-OP vs. AI preview Riot held a full month ago. As I’m sure you recall, we were also told the new bot matches would go live in the “coming days” after the patch that implemented the feature clientside. Well, it still isn’t here, and this is far from the first time Riot has mismanaged a feature launch or leaked an update far too early. Frankly, Riot desperately needs to improve its customer relations across the board, and it wouldn’t take much. I’ve come up with three simple, low-cost steps Riot can take to repair customer relationships and restore the good faith of its playerbase.

1. Stop Overpromising/Underdelivering

Riot knows this. The company knows it botched the Magma Chamber announcement in a big way. CEO Mark Merrill had this to say in a recent interview:

“We feel terrible about the whole experience there, where we learned a valuable lesson. We do a lot of iteration, we have a lot of cool design, where we’re innovating on lots of features and maps, modes, and all sorts of these things. And until we nail it and get it right, because our core experience is really fun, because there’s built-in expectations that users have on quality, we don’t want to screw anything up. And so we’re willing to take the time — and sometimes it’s a painful amount of time obviously — and it’s our fault for setting expectations the way we did.”

That’s actually a fantastic apology, but why are we still seeing this mistake being made? Where’s the Tribunal? Where is Co-Op vs. AI? The Magma Chamber mistake has been made several more times, and its breeding bad blood in the playerbase. This issue is compounded when the features that are leaked too early would add great value to the game. This week’s bans highlight just how much good Tribunal could do. I realize it’s being delayed so that it can be implemented properly, but the fact that I know of its existence and know that it is overdue makes the glacial pace of bans/suspensions all the more frustrating.

2. Implied Expectations Still Have to be Met

As Tuesday, February 15th rolled around I was getting geared up to play the newest champion in the league, Maokai. I fired up the client that morning and much to my surprise, servers were up. Awesome! Unfortunately, they had never gone down. The Maokai patch was delayed by a day.

Several players made forum threads about the delay and received responses like the following, from Phreak:

This week most likely. No promises on patch date.

Actually, guys, when you released the previous dozen-or-so patches on a Tuesday, Tuesday became patch day to your customers. Similarly, when you release a Champion Spotlight showcasing a champion’s skills accurately for several weeks, we assume those spotlights will be accurate on launch day. When Renekton launched, he was very different than he looked in the Spotlight. I realize both of these situations involved last minute changes, but those changes need to be foreseen and dealt with accordingly. Remember, you set the two week patch cycle, not the players. If it’s too tight to accurately represent and release a product, maybe you need to reconsider the patch cycle. Repetitive action on your part implies expectations from the consumer. When your action changes, you’ve failed to meet expectations you set, explicitly or otherwise, and that creates a bad customer experience.

3. Revive the Blog

The last official League of Legends blog post went live on June 10, 2010. It was actually a great post, giving players a closer look at upcoming changes to the recommended items for each character in game. Unfortunately, the blog wasn’t updated very often (despite several posts on June 8th that were conspicuously just a few minutes apart) and content that would otherwise be appropriate for a blog was sent to the forums. More unfortunate still is that the forums lack functionality to make them a decent place to get information. The red tracker is pretty weak when compared to community alternatives (CL Gaming’s is awesome), there is no search function, and posts go up so fast that important posts often get buried.

Oddly enough, Riot is pretty good at communicating with players on the forums. Red posters respond regularly to community concerns, but how much of the community actually sees those posts? Shurelia started a thread a few days ago just to make a weak Rammus joke. That thread has since become one of the most transparent looks at the design process behind League of Legends the company has ever had in the public forums. Shurelia has leaked changes for several champions next patch. Morello has posted to drop knowledge on some fool several times. It’s an awesome post, but the community needs easy access to that information, access that should come from Riot. Pendragon’s ban post would also make a perfect blog entry.

As it currently stands, we have the easiest access to the announcements that have disappointed us in the past. The good stuff, like designers thoughts on different champions or interesting posts about design in general, are buried under tens of thousands of forum posts without a way to search for them. Riot needs a centralized location to highlight the positive aspects of its relationship to the playerbase. Personally, I think a blog is perfect solution (and it just so happens I know a fairly prolific League of Legends blogger).

I know that the issues I mentioned in this post are complicated. I know that Riot has to make sure it can deliver a quality product before releasing features willy-nilly. I know it isn’t as easy as just flipping a switch. As you probably noticed, these three solutions all concern communication. That’s really where Riot is missing the mark. The game is still pretty great, the upcoming features still look awesome. By communicating more effectively with the playerbase, Riot can capitalize on the positive aspects of League of Legends and restore the good faith of its loyal fans.