[2021] Riot needs to improve communication on Wild Rift

over 3 years ago - /u/draggles - Direct link

EDIT: Some great suggestions here. Thanks so much for your help! Gonna mull over these for a bit.

Hey folks,

I see the feedback a lot that the communication from the Wild Rift dev team is bad. (Yes we released the balance patch early again here's an explanation on that i'm sorry ok).

For those that I haven't met yet, I'm the communications lead on the team - my role is to help the devs tell stories and provide updates about the things they're working on. Part community manager, part PR shill, part therapist, yada yada. I also look after products like patch notes, dev blogs, and dev diaries with the rest of the publishing team here at Riot.

Wild Rift is a huge, complicated game, and my personal visibility is sometimes pretty limited. We do work hard to bring the devs together to tell us about their updates, but realise we can still do better. If I, or one of my regional colleagues doesn't know about a thing, it's unlikely it'll get to y'all in some official form. So I come with a couple questions!

How can we make our communications better? What would be useful for you to know more about? (Note: stuff like "more transparency" isn't particularly useful - looking for specific things we can do!)
What do other games do that you like? Riot's games or otherwise?
Does Chargeblade sound like a slurping dog to anyone else?

Okay that's it, go wild

External link →

over 3 years ago - /u/draggles - Direct link

EDIT: Some great suggestions here. Thanks so much for your help! Gonna mull over these for a bit.

Hey folks,

I see the feedback a lot that the communication from the Wild Rift dev team is bad. (Yes we released the balance patch early again here's an explanation on that i'm sorry ok).

How can we make our communications better? What would be useful for you to know more about? (Note: stuff like "more transparency" isn't particularly useful - looking for specific things we can do!)
What do other games do that you like? Riot's games or otherwise?
Does Chargeblade sound like a slurping dog to anyone else?

Okay that's it, go wild

External link →

over 3 years ago - /u/draggles - Direct link

Originally posted by Jmmz6

Its outstanding how we have been without voice chat since 29 July and not until recently a few days ago we got a response about it, the game is full of bugs such as the one mentioned before,you can't watch friends games, lag spikes, FPS drops out of nowhere, the game sound sometimes is on sometimes is off,the matchmaking....all the trolls and afk players that goes wild and unpunished, the mmr problem and the list goes on and yet the team instead of talk with the community and try to find a common ground just look the other way and keep realising skins doing nothing about it, for f**k sake is the second time you release a patch unnoticed, how do u expect the people to take seriously this dev team

All great notes - there's a lot we haven't addressed directly. Most of the things you mentioned (voice chat, FPS drops, etc) - I generally encourage the dev team to give updates as frequently as possible, but only when we have meaningful updates. Right now, we don't really have much to share on those things. Like, that's truly as transparent as I can be on it, as that's all I know. Voice chat is being worked on, with no ETA on a fix. FPS drops, I would encourage you to report to support-wildrift.riotgames.com as they're often device-specific. Spectator bug is known, and being figured out.

I can address a couple of these things:

Lag spikes - Has been a high priority for the team for a while. Settings like the dual-channel communication feature have seen strong upsides in terms of reducing the "999 ping" spikes that many of you have seen, but we've also seen device temperature issues while it's on. We've been working through that problem space with the tech team. I hope we can share more positive news on this soon.

Trolling and AFKs - Something I personally care a lot about, and it sucks when it happens. There's a few things to think about here. If we increased the amount of penalties we gave to players by 100%, would players notice? 1000%? "Solving" (sidenote: I don't think it's possible to solve, just heavily treat) the trolling/AFKing problem is more than just punishing offenders, it's considering things like "How do we reward people who play fair?"; "How do we give more control to players to moderate their own communities?"; "How do we give more visibility into the actions we do take?"; "How do we make our policies more clear?"; "How much acceptance should we have in a players' mobile connection not dropping at the last minute?". I poke this team about once a week when we see more reports of this stuff.

MMR - What's "the mmr problem" in this context? If it's imbalanced matches, I sense that there's a) a lot of tweaking we still need to do behind the scenes, b) updates in patch 2.5 that give us way more control over how accurate matchmaking is, c) more education about how our matchmaking works, and d) some expectations from players that every game will always have variables that affect how teams are formed and how games end.

2.4b dropping early - I explained this one here.

Why do we keep releasing skins - because they don't impact the development or timeline for anything else you mentioned

As much as I'd love to come forth and say all these problems will be fixed tomorrow, it's not a realistic scenario -- to solve the issues in our software we need a lot of play and device info from players to check if it's localised to a specific phone, or whether a specific app is messing with WR in some way, or even whether people are just playing in hotter locales so their phone heats up more easily. I hope this at least gives you some context in how I think about this stuff, anyway.

over 3 years ago - /u/draggles - Direct link

Originally posted by berktugkan

they should remove chat completely

i'm gonna be honest - i never turned text chat on, and i still have a great time. i don't have time to type in a WR game, and personally i can get by with pings.

i know i'm in a unique spot where players will both a) be on their best behaviour when they get into game with me and b) troll the absolute fk out of me because you don't get too many chances to do so -- but i do think we have enough options for ingame comms through pings, emotes, and flashing aggressively at my lane opponent.

for those of y'all that do like to have chat on, totally fine, but i don't think much can be shared there in solo queue at least

over 3 years ago - /u/draggles - Direct link

Originally posted by pokachipokachi

Brawlhalla does dev streams every once in a while (you can check their schedule on Twitch). Nothing serious, just developers playing the game in a dev server, showcasing incoming skins or just talking about the game, about what's being worked on behind the scenes , about what they can talk and cannot talk about. Then they play a couple of casual games with the community on the normal servers and the stream ends and they raid any brawlhalla streamer. One stream is for dev talk, another is for esport talk. Ive been playing it for years now and the community went from talking about "the devs" to knowing each by name and loving all of them, because they get to display their charm. I'm sure theres someone in your dev team that would love doing something similiar.

i do like this - but it's hard bound to english-speakers (anything we do i'd like to be more accessible to speakers around the world). i feel like this is something that rioters should maybe do by themselves - but not so much it feels like extra work. hmm

over 3 years ago - /u/draggles - Direct link

Originally posted by mysticalmilkman

You could set up an official social media channel that focuses on Wild Rift updates/patches as well as collecting player feedback.

Right now there’s no real way to effectively communicate feedback outside of the dev team one off reaching out.

Even if you had a webpage with a leave a comment box…

It would be useful to us to also know the technical roadmap. We know the content roadmap but have vague insight into the game’s changes. With PC league you get the PBE and the buffer that allows, right now there isn’t any sort of “hey we’re thinking of making these changes” area for the passionate folks to check out.

Great call. The actual intake of feedback is something we rely a lot of watching player communications across the world, our in-game surveys, and actual data with how players interact with the game. Something we've def been missing is a direct line to Riot (in the vein of Ask Riot or a feedback box). Lemme look into this

over 3 years ago - /u/draggles - Direct link

Originally posted by mq003at

Dear Riot, can you help me with my homework? "I have a bag of balls, 1/4 of them are green, 1/8 are blue, and 1/12 are yellow, and the remaining 26 are white. How many balls do I have?" Please, I just need to solve this problem so I can play the game for the whole night ;).

Joking aside, I am pretty happy that we have a person from Riot here to improve communication (including the therapist part xD). I hope we all can get along in good terms from now on.

Joking aside, I am pretty happy that we have a person from Riot here to improve communication (including the therapist part xD). I hope we all can get along on good terms from now on. not spend time doing something like this. Hell, some dev teams even treat players like trash (I'm talking about Blizzard if anyone reads the news).

you have 48 balls - 12 green, 6 blue, 4 yellow, 26 white. we saved wild rift

over 3 years ago - /u/draggles - Direct link

Originally posted by Spideraxe30

More Michael Chow would greatly improve comms, 10/10 scientists agree

the main reason michael isn't in more of our stuff is his calendar. man has a lot on his plate that doesn't involve getting in front of his camera and reeling off superlatives. michael chow videos are like a fine dessert - they must be savoured

over 3 years ago - /u/draggles - Direct link

Originally posted by 1stFuriosa

I've played a lot of games after decades, I've never seen a dev who is as active as Riot in terms of communication. I hope you can make like a monthly Ask Wild Rift (answer like 3-5 questions is more than enough), just like Ask Valorant.

I wish Valve devs communicates with its player, this is what i didnt get when i play Valve games.

Sometimes silence is good, but i hate it. This is what Valve does: https://youtu.be/9hBTueJGyyo

i really like ask riot. okay, you've convinced me, we should do this. as soon as i figure out a good process for it. actually acts as a good venue to do more recent updates on current topics

over 3 years ago - /u/draggles - Direct link

Originally posted by blackxanary12

I more concernt for the 4 other ppl that play with afk or troll, yes they may be punished but, what about us the victim ? We still lose our LP/rank point , We need somekind of protections If we enounter afk/troller in our team

you should get the fortitude they lost divided up between you, iirc (it is a v small token, but there is something!)

over 3 years ago - /u/draggles - Direct link

Originally posted by nmfpriv

Nice initiative here is my suggestion

Be more transparent on why you buff or nerf champions, give us hard data and what your vision is for champions..

Last patch you needed Annie because ‘Annie has been heating up the midlane’.. what does that even mean?? Give us win rates per elo, ban rates, stats..

You didn’t touch Akali/Katarina.. give us stats why you decided not to, or is it just planned for future patches? Be more transparent about your plans.

This would be resolved with dev diaries where you can give deeper insight on these aspects and decision making rational.

mm, good call. /u/wav3break let's start putting some deeper thoughts in for 2.4c?

over 3 years ago - /u/draggles - Direct link

Originally posted by ventus2812

Any updates when is Wildrift coming to India?

Nothing to report, unfortunately. South Asia is an amazing region with so many passionate mobile gamers, and given the state of the world right now it is super complex to set up infrastructure and get the game out to y'all in a way that's worthy of your time. We hear you, but there's a lot holding us back as it stands. As soon as we have more updates on an India launch, we'll shout that message from the rooftops. In the meantime, I hope you're staying safe and well.

over 3 years ago - /u/draggles - Direct link

Originally posted by sktchup

All great notes - there's a lot we haven't addressed directly. Most of the things you mentioned (voice chat, FPS drops, etc) - I generally encourage the dev team to give updates as frequently as possible, but only when we have meaningful updates. Right now, we don't really have much to share on those things. Like, that's truly as transparent as I can be on it, as that's all I know. Voice chat is being worked on, with no ETA on a fix. FPS drops, I would encourage you to report to support-wildrift.riotgames.com as they're often device-specific. Spectator bug is known, and being figured out.

FIDDLE HALLOWEEN EVENT confirmed??? 👀👀👀

Get Quirk on the line.

But in all seriousness, I think you guys are doing fine on most fronts, there will always be something people will complain about.

I used to think the matchmaking was completely whack too until I watched Friend win some 32 out of 35 games on stream in SoloQ, at which point I realized it's not about the matchmaking, it's about me being better lol

People (and I with them) sometimes feel they keep losing games even if they play well and get SVP, but playing well and getting SVP doesn't always mean you actually, positively influenced the game.

As for trolls/AFKs, I agree with you that they'll never be eradicated, especially in a mobile game. I have good internet and I'm usually near a charger while playing, but even I got disconnected a few times, and once my phone died on me because the charger was unplugged from the wall and I didn't realize it. Stuff happens and it would be crazy to severely punish people who accidentally go AFK.

But I think something should be done to make things more acceptable for people who were on the team of the person who went AFK. Something like preventing them from losing rank/lp when that happens would make it less frustrating for people, though I know you guys mentioned you were looking into how that could be implemented.

It would be great if there was a way to actually detect when people go AFK on purpose (typing "goodbye I'm out", or sitting at fountain spamming abilities) since that would allow for more severe punishment, but I have no clue if or how that could be added to the game.

On an unrelated note, is making voice chat (once fixed) available for all players in all games as a toggable option, as opposed to just for players queing up together, something the team has or would ever consider doing?

FIDDLE HALLOWEEN EVENT confirmed??? 👀👀👀

this is why we can't have nice comms

I used to think the matchmaking was completely whack too until I watched Friend win some 32 out of 35 games on stream in SoloQ, at which point I realized it's not about the matchmaking, it's about me being better lol

It's partly about the matchmaking, for sure. There's a lot more we want to do to improve it, especially around visibility when there's a disconnect between a players' MMR and their rank

On an unrelated note, is making voice chat (once fixed) available for all players in all games as a toggable option, as opposed to just for players queing up together, something the team has or would ever consider doing?

I don't think it's on the cards soon - League is an intense game, and until we have more ways to give people ways to have a safer and more comfortable experience in voice (without needing to opt out and losing competitive advantage), I don't think we'll move to full-team voice any time soon. We're constantly reevaluating this call across all our games to fit each game's needs (valorant has full team voice, for example - you may have seen the valorant team going ham on voice and chat moderation tools), but we'd probably make the decision in conjunction with League PC if it did change.

over 3 years ago - /u/draggles - Direct link

Originally posted by nosleepatall

/u/draggles
Trolling and AFKs

Have played other mobile mobas before, it was a long journey (with frequent complaints from players) to get the right weight to penalties.

From a teammate perspective, it certainly helps to get a feedback about reported players on short notice (within minutes, or half an hour): Is the report found to be valid? What are the consequences?

For the offender: Punishments should be noticeable and somewhat painful to either make an offender reconsider his notions or temporarily remove him from game modes. Repeat offenses in a short amount of time should add considerably to the weight of the penalty.

good ideas, thank you

over 3 years ago - /u/draggles - Direct link

Originally posted by HotTakes4HotCakes

Something else I'd like for them to give a little more thought/transparency to is what a balance change means for low elo vs high elo. The Yi buff may have been trying to give him a bit more use in high elo but turned him into a nightmare for low elo. And to be totally honest that was utterly unsurprising.

In terms of communication, what would help is if at some point between the last patch and this one, someone told us "yes, we see Yi has become a problem, we are working on it for the next patch". Simple acknowledgement that you hear what's wrong, have confirmed it on your end, and telling us there's a fix on the way even if you don't have specifics of that fix, it will do a lot to curb anger.

Don't wait until the patch notes to give us good news.

We actually talk specifically about this over here, but agree that we should provide some of this context in the patch notes themselves.

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[2021] Riot needs to improve communication on Wild Rift

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