“Ask Riot is a nice format but sometimes i wished that the community could direct questions to specific designers because although there are a lot of Rioters on Twitter or on the Boards and Reddit some designers are hard to reach. Would it be possible to create more communication channels for such specific questions?”

This is something we, and most studios, struggle with.

Communication with players is something that comes pretty easily for me, because I write quickly, and I don’t freak out too much when I get it wrong (and I get it wrong all the time). But it really freaks a lot of developers out. For some, it might take a long time to psyche themselves up to say something, and then they might agonize over every word in order to make sure they don’t say something that might be misunderstood. It’s also challenging to stop conversations sometimes. You can fall down the rabbit hole of 100 or more Boards or Reddit responses and before you know it, you didn’t actually get much design work on your item update done because you spent all day on Reddit.

So I could just say that spending X amount of hours a day on community interaction is part of their job, and we’ve considered that before, but that’s easier for some folks than others. I value communication in designers, but I value designing things more, and if the former interferes with the latter, it’s not a hard decision.

All that said, we totally recognize the player need to ask specific questions to someone who would have a lot of context on that particular project that they worked on. Just not sure of the right solution.

1/10/2017