Riot design director talks transparency, regaining community trust

Riot has had a rough two weeks in the court of public opinion. First in the form of public disagreements with LCS owners, and more recently allegations of dysfunction at the highest level of Riot’s esports operation.

Riot Game’s League of Legends Design Director Greg “Ghostcrawler” Street provided his thoughts on what the company can do better via his ask.fm account. The answer came after he received the question “what thing do you think riot could improve that would go the furthest to creating a situation where the community trusts riot again?”

In his reply, Street outlined three major points that he felt Riot could improve upon. His first was openness to the community. “We need to just talk more and earlier,” Street said. However he also acknowledged the challenge in this saying, “if we talk about a problem too early with no solution immediately in sight, then it can feel to players like we are ridiculously slow or lack a sense of urgency.” He went on to mention his recent discussion of an update to the games Rune system as an example of trying to find the right time to make an announcement.

Street’s second point, and perhaps the most important in the post, was in regards to Riot’s culture as a whole:

Second, we need to shift our tone a little. The "brand" for Riot (though I kind of hate using that word) has always been the scrappy start-up that does things differently. When we were a little sloppy or brash or unconventional, it fit that narrative. But we aren't really that company any longer, and we need to figure out a new way to have a conversation that keeps our company culture intact but evolves to reflect the reality of the current size of Riot and success of LoL.

Finally, Street said that Riot needed to consistently deliver a quality product to players. He explained that, “This has been a bit of a slow year from us product-wise, because so much energy has gone into the client update, an [sic] we burned some players trust with the loss of solo queue.”