Drew Levin, leader of Product and Strategy on League of Legends, had a particularly slow week at work and decided to get active on Twitter and answer questions from players.
Now, after a week and several hundred tweets interacting with some of the game’s biggest streamers and creators, he’s completely won them over. Even those who didn’t agree with Levin’s answers on certain topics were just happy to have some transparency.
What was his strategy, though? How did Levin manage to have such a big impact on the community by just making some social media posts during a slow week at work?
Well, alongside having some genuine transparency and taking accountability for things that still need to be fixed in League of Legends, he also fought back against negativity toward the current state of the game.
Brave LoL dev wins over the LoL community within a week
League of Legends is one of the most popular multiplayer games in the world, and it has been for several years. And, while LoL’s incredible depth is a huge selling point for the game, it’s also arguably its greatest weakness.
If you have someone on your team who falls behind, things get bad fast. Some people will leave matches if they die early in lane. Others will flame their teammates just for making a small mistake. Some of the game’s biggest streamers are notorious for how angry they get at their teammates, with Tyler1 for instance building a massive streaming career off of raging in solo queue.
Despite this, Drew Levin decided to get active on Twitter for a week to see what would happen. He responded to hundreds of players in less than a week, pushing back against some of the game’s biggest creators and challenging them to have actual conversations about how the game can be improved.
No Arm Whatley, the very same League of Legends streamer who almost died from falling out of a building, gave Levin his flowers after a dispute the two of them had on Twitter.
Whatley was frustrated over the rate at which major changes were coming to League of Legends, but Levin called him out and believed that he took LoL dev Phroxzon’s words out of context, literally calling “bullsh*t” on one of Whatley’s tweets and having a lengthy argument about where the game needs to go.
Where most devs would have backed off or just chosen not to interact, Levin stood up for the dev team and explained the direction they’re trying to go with it. He’s fighting for the LoL devs to get more respect from its players, and he’s single-handedly winning.
But, when things don’t go right, he also admits it.
Levin’s spirit in replying to members of the community in a way that’s honest and doesn’t pull punches. Through the hundreds of replies, he also conceded that there are some issues with the game like ADC itemization being limited and the LoL client needing some work. Although he wasn’t afraid to point out when player problems may have been a skill issue, either.
This is even more insane considering that social media management isn’t even in Levin’s job description. He’s doing all of this in his free time. Him getting millions of views on his tweets was a side quest.
“My job is literally to make a bunch of decisions for 8 teams of devs spanning most of the live game, this week is extremely anomalous in terms of how much free time I have and no part of my job even requires me to be on social media,” he explained.
While League of Legends still holds onto its reputation as a game that’s hard to get into with a playerbase that’s more toxic than most games, efforts from devs like Drew Levin are what could help shift that perception and put League of Legends in a better spot.
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