[2023] Phreak stating that you can type "Karthus Ult" instead of pinging it underlines his sheer oversimplification of the use of communication

Yeah that was a pretty dumb thing to say. I don't want to make it sound like your feedback is being ignored. It's obviously incorrect to imply that typing just 1:1 replaces quick pings as well. My bad on that.

Right now, overall player feedback has indicated that these changes have been good for the social experience as a whole. But as with anything, we intend to always keep our eyes and ears open. It could be there's something that we're missing, it could be that we think it's better back the way it was, even if there were measurable gains in toxicity, it could be that we find a perfect system that re-adds everything that you miss while retaining those gains, or something else entirely is the future for player communication tools.

Certainly we've made mistakes in the past. There have also been things that I personally enjoyed that players overall didn't (Dynamic Queue and role-based matchmaking were both things I personally really liked that didn't pan out). This is just to reiterate that we intend to always make the game the best it can be even if we make mistakes along the way. We're typically pretty quick to correct them.

On a related tangent, I liberally block people who come at with me with nothing but unfiltered toxicity and every day I still see more of them. I can indeed mute/block people who are jerks. But if a new person pops off with some dumb sh*t I still see flame in my games. I don't need to be flamed twice to still have been flamed. Of course, I could just turn off chat entirely / not go on twitter ever / not go on reddit ever / not go on youtube ever. But I do liberally block people and I still see garbage in some feed every day. To be clear, this is not about your post. I appreciate you making it. This is just to say that blocking does not prevent one from consistent exposure to toxicity. I agree that something more underlying would be really valuable. I'm also not personally able to change that, especially when most of these platforms are just social media at large.

Anyways I'm really just here to apologize for the braindead comment in the video. My bad. I'll try to do better next time.

To be fair I'm also extremely hard-headed sometimes.

I'm also happy to have unpopular opinions. I think Dynamic Queue's problem was kinda just an extension of the "Elo hell" collective delusion: People believed the ladder didn't matter because they thought everyone just abused group queueing. Anything to convince yourself you're not accurately rated below your goals. My experience as a Flex Queue enjoyer is that players still end up at their appropriate brackets despite the boosters. Somewhat similarly with role-based MM, it was people's fault. People would just say, "Oh, I didn't get main role, I'll just troll." I was excited to get an MMR per-role. I know I'm a worse Mid than Bot. I'd like to be fairly ranked at that role and play games against similarly-skilled mid laners without running an alt account.

Except trying to mitigate flame in fact does work. No one receives death threats in games without chat in them. The fact that surveys indicate that people feel less flamed when there are fewer specific pings reinforces that. And it's not about tilt. It's about, for example, not wanting to receive death threats while attempting to communicate with players, in or out of game. It's really not that much to ask for.

You can absolutely make a good faith claim that this reduction in toxicity is not worth the cost in good faith communication. But that's a judgment call and not, "it doesn't work." Because it does have an impact, actually.

Yes, and unfortunately sometimes ease of communication is not the only factor in our decision-making. Sometimes we make things that cause more harm than good. Speaking as the designer for the ping wheel, I have ... regrets. I wish I could go back and tell my naive past self that '?' is not the correct icon for MIA. Y'all get so creative with the tools we give you and that extends to expressing your frustration as well, and that was not something we anticipated at that time. When I was designing the system for Wild Rift we chose a different icon and that worked out much better. I think it would be much harder to remove in League, because of how expressive '?' has become and how accustomed players are to using it, but in a new game we could just change it from the start and MIA BM was almost eliminated, while the MIA ping was still very highly used.

I wasn't involved with these changes, but I'm pretty sure they had strong evidence that ult pings were overwhelmingly being used for bm purposes. You've all felt this: someone pings your ult while you're dead to let you know that you died with ult up, someone pings your ult after a fight to tell you that you're bad for not using it, someone spam pings your ult when you're not ready to engage, etc. Even when used legitimately, it's often just telling the player what they already know and they have a plan to use their ult already. Your ult is your highest commitment ability, of course you know it's up! You might not see the opportunity that another player does, and that is probably the best use case for ult ping, but it's much less common than the other ways it's used.

I know it never feels good when the devs take something away that you have legitimate uses for, but sometimes we gotta try some spicier changes. Because you're also telling us that our communication systems can make you miserable. Toxic experiences are a big trigger for people to leave League forever and we would really like that to not happen! Right now it seems to be having a meaningful impact on how comms feel to you, the broad player base is happier with the communications system based on the in-game surveys Phreak was talking about in his video. Making improvements here are really hard and this was a low cost change that had a meaningful impact. I've worked on a lot of player behavior systems that were much more expensive and didn't move the needle that much. I know that's going to feel unsatisfying for those of you who are using the ult ping as intended. And like Phreak said in his reply, we can try to bring back a way to use it that has a better balance of welcome communication vs unwelcome, but it's a much much trickier balance to strike.