[2020] What happened to Riot's community engagement and transparency from Beta to now?

Honestly, I can't speak for everyone, but for myself this definitely isn't it. I was pretty vocal in a lot of the "Raze is OP / Raze doesn't belong in the game" threads back in beta. For myself personally, I just work on gameplay content and live balance, and none of the big topics seem to be super focused on that right now so I'm not sure what to say. I didn't work on skin pricing, I don't interface with hit reg/bugs, I don't work on game systems for when competitive queue comes out, etc.

In general, we like to engage but we also don't want to speak on behalf of other teams or when we feel we lack information, which is why I'm not hopping into all of these threads. My guess would be that there are tons of other team members like me, just absorbing the feedback and hopping in on stuff that's relevant to what we specifically work on.

For sure, happy to provide any clarity. I understand the fear of Rioters "leaving the sub" because it's gotten too negative or something, but that's really not the case. Obviously I encourage folks to remember that we're people too on the other side of the screen etc. but as far as I'm concerned, hearing and responding to player feedback, however passionate and frustrated it may be, is part of our job so I'm going to be around here regardless.

Basically, I feel it's valuable for me to comment if we release a new piece of content (like an agent or map) that you all are upset about or you feel balance team isn't doing it's job. When that's not really the case, all I can really say is "sorry I don't work on that, here's a bit of info or a person who might be able to help you better" which just isn't super helpful a lot of the time, ya know?

Oh yeah, we monitor weapon balance all the time. There are a couple things we're looking at, but nothing definitive yet; most of the heavier balance topics have been agents and maps thus far. Weapons are something we review the data for all the time and we're committed to maintaining enough healthy choice competition to drive interesting decisions there.

All I know is that people on the team want this too and have wanted it for awhile. I just don't have the insight on our engineering bandwidth/prioritization on features like this, so I can't say anything definitively. We feel your pain though, I have several coworkers who change their keybindings at the beginning of every match based on the agent they're playing.

Thanks so much! I'll keep doing my best.

This is a game systems thing (so not my area), but we're aware of this pain. Right now, all the maps are weighed evenly, so you getting Bind 7 times in a row is incredibly bad luck, but it definitely does happen. Building a system to detect previous maps played for all players in a group, etc. to avoid repeats isn't free though, and I can't speak to that team's priorities so it's hard for me to say anything super helpful here aside from "we know getting the same map 3+ times in a row sucks even if it's unlikely"

Right now that team is tackling stuff like competitive queue, matchmaking, etc. so even if changes don't get made right now, that doesn't mean they're not listening or don't care; there are just always tradeoffs to consider when talking about investing in a feature like that vs. doing other things.

Once again, I don't work on this team, I have no idea what they've prioritized or are working towards, just trying to convey what I can. We feel you on the repeat maps, it happens to us too.

Yup, that's super fair and I'll try to be more cognizant of that. I appreciate the feedback!!