At times we can get really invested in long-term objectives, and go heads-down on features that take an incredibly long time to deliver (for example, devoting many of our engineers to working on the the updated client or big features like Hextech crafting). The downside to that is that it can make us over-focused on long-term goals at the expense of short-term player pain, or at the cost of not delivering small things you folks are just asking for outright.

Around the middle of last year we realized we needed to do a better job of balancing our long-term objectives with urgent or ongoing issues that you were talking to us about. So we built a list of ideas from player feedback channels like our forums, Reddit, etc. We also had our regional offices from around the world compile lists of player requests or issues from their regions, and from there we just asked the team to pick items off where they could as a part of normal development.

As an example: Players had been asking about the loading screen indicator for a long time. That feature, when we chose to prioritize it, took one member of the team a few days to implement into the game. It’s not the most polished loading screen indicator ever made, but it does the job and was something we could deliver without compromising our other goals. Other examples would be pinging the HUD, or auto-sorting the scoreboard. These were features that weren’t on our roadmap or among our long-term goals, but we prioritized them because you reminded us what’s important, and what an impact seemingly-small additions can make.

This is something you can expect to see us continue in 2017 and moving forward – it wasn’t a short-term shift. We want to do a better job of balancing long-term goals with short-term wins, and we especially want to improve at listening to you, hearing what’s important, and improving the game over time.