If you’ve queued up for a draft game in Dominion, you may have noticed that the game doesn’t dump team captains straight into the lobby. For instance, I queued up for a game this afternoon and went back into my match history to check some stats. The queue popped but I was still reading some stats so I clicked “Finish what I was doing.” When I was finally dropped into the lobby, I was the team captain, and with first ban I only had three seconds left to ban. In my confusion, I totally missed it.

In 5v5 and 3v3 draft modes you don’t see this happen because the client forces the captain to join the game immediately (and maybe everyone else – I’ll have to test it later). I made a post about the issue in the Dominion forums, to which Morello responded with the following:

Good catch – will raise visibility on this issue. Thanks!

If you see similar issues, I would highly recommend posting them to the Dominion forums. They’re much less cluttered than General Discussion and will probably see a flurry of Rioter activity today.

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.

The official LoL forums can be an exceedingly weird place and often play out like a game all their own. Threads catch fire without any apparent reason, and today is a prime example. For whatever reason, the LoL forum community is up in arms this weekend about Poppy and how OP she is. You remember Poppy right? She’s short, likes to slam people into and occasionally through walls. Still don’t remember?

I make the joke because I see her so rarely I can’t believe this is something people get up in arms about. And OP? Sure, with a 50-minute legendary farm, but her early game is atrocious, bad enough that I don’t even bother to play her anymore.

Thankfully, that’s what Riot wants to address. They want to level her power curve a bit so that she’s more enjoyable early game and less of a running-at-mach-4 bomb in the late game. There is some bad news, though. The intended design strategy to level that curve is to push her toward a tank/AD build. Yes, make her more like the existing tanky DPS. Here’s the quote from RiotStatikk:

Poppy from the outset was designed as a tank/fighter but is currently optimally used as (in my opinion) the strongest burst caster in the game if played well. We’re looking to address this by pushing more of her output into sustained damage rather than upfront burst. This change is less about “removing” her AP build and rather more about pushing forward her AD/Tank build.

I’m hoping Riot stays true to not removing her potential for an AP buid. AP Poppy is a lot of fun with a decent farm. I think the key is keeping her power level for both builds about even. When the tanky build takes over too much, I doubt we’ll see many AP Poppy players in the world.

If I had to pick one thing I love about Riot, it wouldn’t be the frequent champion releases, the skin sales, the contests, the fact that they provide a free game, the commitment to not sell power, or the long overdue Garen nerf (I am really happy about that last one, though). Out of all the things Riot does to give us a great game, the thing I love above all else is community involvement.

Of all the developers I’ve seen, I can comfortably say that Riot does the best job of staying involved with the community and using the forums to quickly and consistently address player concerns as soon as they’re on the radar. Sure, there are a few places the Riot staff has dropped the ball, and the occasional trolling still upsets me, but by and large, Riot’s pretty great about keeping the player base informed about the design that goes into a game.

The reason I decided to write this post today is actually because of Cataclysm. I know not many of you are playing, so I’ll try to cover the issue as briefly as possible. Blizzard made some major adjustments to the PvP system, most notably the way that you progress and earn gear. The honor system still exists but, unlike every other number system in the game, there has been point deflation. Items that used to cost tens of thousands of honor now cost 2200, max. A five-piece set of PvP gear now runs a total of 9900 honor. Obviously, battleground rewards have been scaled back, so players are earning less total honor, but about the same percentage related to gear as was the case in Wrath.

Cataclysm also introduced another world PvP zone named Tol Barad. Like Wintergrasp before it, Tol Barad offers raid access to the faction that controls it, a fight for which is waged every two and a half hours. When it launched, the defending team had a massive advantage and was able to win nearly 100 percent of the battles. To counteract the issue, Blizzard increased the reward for successfully attacking Tol Barad by a factor of 10, literally. The assaulting faction now receives 1800 honor (more than the cost of several of the pieces of gear) for a victory instead of 180. It’s a big problem because it has artificially inflated the gear level for a lot of PvP players and made running battlegrounds seem paltry by comparison.

The design issues this change raises belong to another post. The interesting part for the purposes of this post is that Blizzard hasn’t responded to the change at all, despite the fact that it just went live this past Tuesday. The latest blue posts are a full two and a half days old, one of which says we should look for a blog post after the new year discussing the design direction for Tol Barad. I realize two and half days isn’t that long, but this is prime playing time for a lot of people with the holidays in full swing and this change has already had major impact on the game, an impact that might be compounded if the fix is to re-nerf the rewards. It basically nullifies the gear reset for anyone who makes it to 85 after the change gets reverted.

I have never wished Phreak was a Blizzard employee until now.

I’ve been playing a lot of normal games lately and I’ve been seriously miffed at the lack of stat support for normal players. I love being able to see my K/D/A ratios for individual champions in ranked. I love looking at my total stats. Why don’t normal players get the same treatment?

Seriously, it sucks that the best I can see are my total minion kills, my takedowns (seriously, wtf is this), and total wins. I want to be able to get the same kind of data I get for ranked. I want to see my most played champions and who I’m best with. I want to know what champions need work.

I’ve made a thread in the hopes of raising Riot’s awareness on what I consider a fairly serious community issue. The stats are already being recorded, so let’s get access. You can find the thread, with an included poll, on the official forums. Get over there and vote for some normal stat goodness.