League of Legends: How Riot Games Plans on Improving Communication

The relationship between a customer and the company is essential to having a successful business. If the customer has problems or feedback, the company needs to be there. If a positive relationship is formed between the two parties, you’ll have a customer for life and most likely one that’ll pass on the word to other possible consumers.

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For League of Legends and Riot Games, their customer relations are the key to success. League of Legends is a free to play game that is partly fueled by in-game purchases from fans of the game. The key word there is “fans”. If someone is just interested in the game, they’re less likely to spend money or support the game (see esports).

Riot has a lot of tools at its disposal in terms of communicating with fans. They have several forums you can utilize, as well as Twitter accounts for most of their staff. Even with all these avenues of communication, Riot still thinks they can step their game up.

Ghostcrawler, Game Design Director for League of Legends outlined three ways Riot could improve communication and build more trust between the company and the community.

Talk More and Earlier

The biggest thing about communication, is well, talking. If there are no voices to be heard on either side of the equation, you can’t really grow at all.

According to Ghostcrawler, the biggest problem with silence is when players start to assume things. We all know what assuming does… “When we maintain radio silence, players fill in the gaps with their own speculations, which are sometimes correct and many times not,” said Ghostcrawler.

There also has to be a fine line between talking and talking too much. “I think we’ve struggled here to find the right balance, because 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.”

Ghostcrawler also brings up a very good point. If you start bringing up false promises as a result of talking too much, you’ll end up shooting yourself in the foot and hurting your relations. “We look dishonest if we change our mind in the face of new information (another risk of communicating early).”

Shift The Tone

Believe it or not, once upon a time Riot Games was a start-up company. Since 2009 when League of Legends was released, the game has made gigantic strides. From being the most popular game to hosting esports events within places like Madison Square Garden and the Staples Center, the game has been successful, to say the least.

As the company grows, the tone and culture has to be changed to reflect what they’ve become.

“The “brand” for Riot (though I kind of hate using that word) for a long time was the scrappy start-up that does things differently,” said Ghostcrawler. “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.”

Deliver a Strong Product

“We need to deliver good shit,” said Ghostcrawler.

Quality goes a long way in ensuring your fan base continues to come back. If you rush things or put no effort into a new product, your fan base will slip away. Riot also has to make sure they’re not just “all-talk”. They have to deliver on the product.

“Talking about our philosophies and future plans can help a lot to fill in dry periods, but if all we ever produce is talk, then players will understandably lose faith,” said Ghostcrawler.

Riot has become good at acting upon their words as they’ll provide several updates as to the slightest changes when working on things such as champions or the client. Another thing about Riot is that they’ve become transparent to the point where if they don’t like something they’ve talked about – they’ll make sure to tell you why they decided to move on without it. A clear example of this can be seen with the Sewn Chaos skin line for Blitzcrank and Amumu. They felt as if the quality wasn’t strong enough and decided to pull back on the project.