In all the recent activity on the forums (I won’t get into it here – head over there and read, or dig your way through the dev tracker), one post stuck out to me today, and got the attention of Riot president, Marc Merrill. The post points to an obvious trend – that every several weeks or so, a Riot employee mishandles a community issue and then has to publicly apologize for the action. It’s a frustrating thing to watch, because I really do believe in Riot’s ability to create and manage a community.

The reason Merrill stepped in was to admit that the community interaction is encouraged, but that maybe there isn’t enough training around employee/consumer relations. Here’s what he said:

I think it’s fair feedback.

We have a goal of wanting everyone at the company to directly interact with the community to continue to foster relationships, but we probably need to improve our training in this area.

We’re OK with taking our lumps when we’re out of line, it’s the only way we can improve!

I couldn’t agree more. I’ve often been shocked by the things some Riot posters are willing to jump on and say. I wrote a while back that trolling is among the worst things you could do to your community, and I’m glad to see Marc looking for solutions to the problem. I’ve noticed it most from the recent community hires. If you read the forums much, you’ll see certain community members go from black or purple names to red, but still try to maintain the same identity in the public realm. While it’s fine for the people who know those members well, the responses can be jarring and off-putting to new members of the community.

I hope Riot and its leadership continues to think on ways to improve the community experience. After all, this is a team game, and without the community around it, the game would wouldn’t be nearly as good.