Throughout the current discourse regarding Vel’koz I’ve come to realization that Riot’s statements regarding player feedback are, in general, somewhat confusing.

They’ve stated repeatedly, most notably Phreak himself did, that the playerbase is (colloquially) utter garbage at suggesting specific gameplay changes. This is the case mostly due to the inherent biases any given player may or may not have regarding a champion they’d suggest changes for. Mains of any one champion are likely to have skewed perceptions of said champion’s strengths and weaknesses. In addition, taking into consideration the entire scope and balance state of a game as massive and complex as League is above the pay grade of extreme majority of the playerbase.

With the above in mind, Riot instead suggests us to give feedback more in the line of our personal feel/perceptions of any given champion or gameplay system in accordance with the notion of: “Playerbase is good at detecting problems (through the aforementioned ‘feeling’) but bad at suggesting solutions”.

This is where I start to have a problem. This line of thinking, stated from Riot, feels not only condescending and patronizing but also highly shortsighted.

For one, it makes the playerbase feel like they have little to no impact on the state of the game. If we assume that only the most dedicated of the playerbases for any specific champ would go out of their way to suggest specific gameplay changes to said champ (assuming they’re using good faith arguments), then the moment Riot says to them that they don’t care about their suggestions, the players of that champ will inevitably feel disregarded and insulted. The time, effort and dedication they put into their champ that allowed them (at least theoretically) to formulate well thought out suggestions for changes, is now being seen as wasted and worthless. Imagine spending hundreds and sometimes even thousands of hours on training and practicing a skill (in this case - mastering a specific champion) and then being told by the powers above you that your opinion is irrelevant and unwanted.

That’s like as if a piano manufacturing company would ignore the voices of pianists that specific line of pianos they made sounds wrong due to an issue with production, then argument their decision to ignore pianists feedback by stating something akin to: “You dont know what you want.” Ridiculous, isn’t it?

Secondly, I believe that ignoring specific feedbacks is also unpractical in the long run and actively makes Riot’s job harder for them.

Basic studies into collective intelligence state, paraphrasing, that if we assume that specific members of a group of people (in this case, mains of a specific champion) are at least vaguely correct about a specific thing (balance state of a champion), then by collecting data from members of said group and cumulating it together, in the end we should end up with a collective “generally correct” opinion, due to the fact that collectives usually reach a consensus regarding any one issue.

With this in mind, wouldn’t it be more practical for Riot, rather than take into consideration solely the “feelings” of the playerbase and then try to figure out how to improve said feelings, to instead make an attempt at collecting the specific suggestions/opinions of the players, confront it with their own internal data, test out whatever suggestions are most common through internal testing and then ship whatever solution ends up both closest to the common consensus and also healthiest for the game?

You could argue that it’s impossible for Riot to collect the specific feedbacks in large enough quantities for collective intelligence effect to kick in, but I vehemently disagree. Riot collect essentially all possible data from every single game of League ever played and about every League player. They could easily detect which players would theoretically be the most fitting for such feedback collecting process. In a way, they already do that through their surveys, but they instead use them only to gauge the aforementioned feelings the players have in regards to wider state of the game.

What I suggest is expanding the above system of surveys. It shouldn’t be an issue for Riot’s systems to detect which player mains what champion by collecting their game data. Why not send out surveys to those specific players with specific questions about their main and directly ask for suggestions? If we assume, lets say, a hundred serious answers by actual mains of any said champion are given to riot, there should be no issue for the devs to cumulate those answers together, pick out most common suggestions/solutions and test them against their own internal changes. Then they could ship to live/PBE whatever solution achieves a desired effect while also not breaking the balance of the game.

tl;dr. In my opinion - Riot’s feedback gathering tools are underutilized, and their current mindset of only listening to generalized feelings the players have about the larger state of League, rather than the specific suggestions they make, is not only unpleasantly patronizing and condescending but also a short-sighted solution to balance problems.