LoL: "We Know Players Dont Read" ﻿– Phreak Slams Inflexible Community

That well known LoL personality "Phreak" doesn't hold back with his opinions, especially regarding League of Legends' patch notes and criticism, is nothing new. In his most recent "rant", the Riot employee slammed the community about their apparent inability to read and react to the in-game changes. The community reacted not that well to say the least.

Phreak Slams Zeri Players — Phreak had some comments regarding Zeri Players |©Riot Games (Montage)

That the League of Legends patch news are sometimes hard to analyze and understand should be nothing new for long-standing players of the game. And that certain changes are just slowly sinking into the mind of the community is well known in LoL and many other regularly updated games.

Well, Riot employee and well known LoL esports personality David "Phreak" Turley, is known for his comments about the community reactions regarding his patch note videos and the LoL patch notes in general. Over the years he had multiple clinches with community members. Now, a small sentence within one of his patch notes preview videos sparked a controversial debate.

LoL: Phreak Enrages Community With Comment About Zeri Players

Phreaks LoL videos have reached some sort of legendary status in the League of Legends community. On the one side because of the insight players can gain from them, since Phreak talks about the changes and the balance teams ideas behind them, and on the other side because of his rather controversial comments about the community itself.

In his newest preview video regarding the upcoming Patch 13.17, Phreak is in the middle of an explanation about the planned Hecarim and Shojin adjustments, when he couldn't stop himself from bringing in a story of the past.

[...] My actual expectation is Hecarim's resting win rate, assuming players actually move over, will raise between patch 13.16 to patch 13.17. I think he will gain win rate, assuming players actually shift biulds. Now we saw Zeri, that on day one more than half of all Zero players built Trinity Force as first item, so we know players don't read

As you can imagine the later part of this comment wasn't very well received by the community, and so it was only a question of time, when the first threads about it would pop up. So, just a couple of hours later this was indeed happening as the Reddit user "Lunariz" created on the LoL Subreddit, in which he asked what the reasons behind this slow adaption to Zeri's item build could have been.

Phreak: "On day 1 (after the patch), more than half of Zeri players built Trinity Force first item. So we know that players don't read"
by u/Lunariz in leagueoflegends

After describing Phreak's comments, the user asked the community,

I wonder how much of this effect comes from the item recommendation system. Since recommendations are always delayed by an entire patch, items that are now "bad" will still be recommended as top tier. Should players be reading patch notes more carefully, or is there something Riot could do to let players adopt new builds more quickly?

Certainly an interesting question, which obviously indicates, that the players might not have the fault in this situation. And to be honest he'r right about that. Even players, which studied the patch notes deeply would think twice if the recommendation system says that Triforce might be the best possible item to build on Zeri.

Zeri Wild Rift webp — Zeri is always up for some controversy |©Riot Games

And of course it's more like an illusion by Phreak to assume, that most players are even reading the patch notes and are able to understand them deeply enough to build against the recommendation made by his own company. Especially after the first day, that these changes went live.

And many community reactions are indicating the same. The user "Shin_mmi", who wrote the most upvoted comment so far, stated that,

Despite reading patch or not, when I asked Zeri players why they were building Tri Force after patch was because the recommended items page in the shop had it listed there still.

Or to say it with the LOUDER VOICE, of the user "zamantukendi",

BECAUSE YOUR RECOMMENDED ITEMS SHOP AFTER F***** 5 MONTH STILL RECOMMENDS TRINITY. Obviously low elo players buy it if it is recommended by game shop. Holy

The user "fuckspez3", explained the situation, in which the biggest portion of LoL players are in and which might explain the rather slow adjustments of item builds in the game.

This statement is an insult to the casual playerbase, which feeds him.
Most of the people are casual players that play from time to time and when they have time they jump straight to the game, ignoring a wall of text that is hidden. If people are building it wrong it is because the recommended items arent getting properly updated.

Other community members are pointing out, that beside the download, there is no indication that a new patch is even there, since there is close to no indicator for this on the launcher's front page, and not everyone is following the devs and their work on social media or Reddit.

Also, maybe Zeri and Trinity Force are a special case in themselves, since Zeri and the item got changed several times over the last couple of months, and it's very likely that many players were left behind confused.

The user "Celext described this in a rather drastic manner,

Riot makes niche changes on specific item interactions on champions expecting everyone to read patch after patch. Then makes condescending statements "WOW these zeri players are so dumb they didnt notice we changed two sentences on her 9 paragraph tool tip!"Chronobreak energy.

Well, it will be interesting to see, if Riot is going to change anything about the item recommendations or their patch note policy in general. But since the patch notes are a niche, then videos about the patch notes are even more niche. So maybe Phreak can be happy that the biggest portion of the community will never hear his comments about them, ever.

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