Thread:Willbachbakal/@comment-1920550-20160422050145/@comment-1330314-20160604005911

I don't think Riot's stance on Lucian's balance is particularly controversial. He's too strong, so he's getting nerfed, though I think Riot suddenly treating Lightslinger like it's not a mini-basic attack, when that's what it was balanced around previously, isn't the best or most consistent decision (not that Lucian really needed crit synergy, though). Several Rioters have mentioned that Lucian probably needs design changes to truly succeed, because he still isn't particularly unique and only succeeds when OP, and personally I'd go for making him the most mobile marksman around (Kalista's mobility is more kite-oriented), and therefore someone really good at quickly picking off squishies in the back line by dodging around the front line.

As for DQ, I wasn't particularly interested until recently, as I don't play Ranked at all, but I think it's probably the biggest goof Riot has ever made. They released a broken system way too soon and seemingly before trying to improve Solo Queue, handled communication terribly (and haven't been all that good with communication recently in general), and are clinging on far too hard to an idea that's becoming increasingly unattractive by the day. I strongly suspect the recent round table was essentially just damage control, and while Riot did finally give a strong response on the subject ("SoloQ isn't coming back"), the video itself did not feel honest. The whole thing was clearly edited, and it felt the Rioters giving the answers were substituting F-bombs for concrete responses in an attempt to appear approachable to players. Socrates and Lobster frequently answered Gbay and Scarra's questions incompletely, or with only vague statements, and even dodged some of them completely; and in the end it didn't feel like there was that much of an honest take on DQ compared to SoloQ: it was basically assumed then that SoloQ wasn't coming back no matter what and that DQ would stay instead, when a good point of discussion would have been to just lay down exactly how both queues compare in terms of queue times, match quality, role selection, toxicity, etc. They did mention a few points, namely a reduction in toxicity, but their presentation felt more like it was meant to look professional (i.e. "look at all the statistics and big data we have that you don't"), instead of genuinely being professional (i.e. sharing the actual data in a separate post and then giving their interpretation, along with a list of the factors considered, plus their reasoning, instead of just jumping to the conclusion, which leaves many players to question the validity of the results).

Regarding the whole communication issues, I think many parts of Riot are still in transition from a small company with a small consumer base, to a billion-dollar market leader with the world's biggest playerbase. They still haven't really scaled or structured their communication to adapt to a larger flow of input (even their own Boards have little to no moderation on most of their pages, and very uneven and incomplete dev-to-player exchanges), or to a larger internal structure (which is likely why we got conflicting responses on DQ from different departments within Riot), which is coming here to bite them in the ass. Riot's going to have to hire many, many more people in charge of communication, and needs to build a proper communication system that should at least give players the feeling that they're listening to them and answering them personally.