What is happening with Mobafire

[quote=FatelBlade]Editor tools are a joke and the website has been stagnant for what feels like years. The only "improvements" that seem to have been included was an overhaul to the notification systems (2016), a bar on the bottom of the screen that does jack shit and Mobafire Prime. The bar at the stop of the screen moves, too. All of this was accomplished and the forums don't even have local times included, when a random forum asks for your local time so that it can show you nice post times. This website is essentially the same thing as it was years ago, while other Leauge of Legends sites have evolved. LolKing has guides, summoner lookup, you can view skins, and find high level replays. If you want summoner lookup with Mobafire, head on over to Elophant! Whats elophant, you ask? I'm actually not sure, because it's trash. The elophant client doesn't work, achievements don't work, and other than that it is a carbon copy of Mobafire. What is going on with this site that it can be so shitty for so long?[/quote]

[quote=Matt]Regarding Elophant, we've kept the client and related tools available because they mostly still worked and people were still using them and wanted us to keep them up as they were. Unfortunately with the updates to the League client, it is pretty much entirely broken now. We've already been discussing how to handle it. We're also discussing a number of other things relating to Elophant, but we're not ready to share yet. Basically, we're aware and we're working on it. Regarding localized times, the reason other forums have such features is they are using open source forum packages and we built our own forum so that we could integrate it tightly with the rest of our tools and features. As such, any features like that need to be built in by us. I actually already built a feature some time ago for localizing time displays and implemented it through the forums but it has been stuck in "beta testing" hell and never got launched publicly. I'll go take a look at it and see if I can roll it out to the rest of the site and get it launched from here in a timely manner. Regarding editor tools, what are your specific issues with them? We actually have a totally separate and new system that we built to replace both the wiki and database, which you can see already in use on our newer sites. However, MOBAFire SmiteFire and DOTAFire were launched before we built that system, and trying to swap out their existing wiki and database with the new system is a very big and very messy project because of how they are tied in to the platform. We have been toying with it but it's not going to happen over night. We're always open to suggestions for new content or features too! If you have any other requests let me know and we will give it some thought.[/quote]

[quote=FalseoGod]Thanks for your professionalism Matt![/quote]

[quote=Matt]Just FYI I spent the last couple hours working on that timezone code, and came up with a solution to implement it throughout all our sites at once. Just now I rolled it out to SmiteFire for public testing. You can go to SmiteFire now and see it in action site-wide if you like. It's also ready to roll out on MOBAFire too but I want to make sure it's OK using SmiteFire first. So once we're sure it's all looking good there, we can immediately roll it out here too, and you'll finally have site-wide localized time displays :) Two caveats with this feature. First is, the time zone is currently not configurable. It reads the time zone from your browser, which in turn reads it from your operating system, so once this is rolled out all the time displays will be based on your OS setting. This should be fine for pretty much everyone, but if enough people want to be able to configure it separately of their OS, I do have a solution in mind, I just don't suspect anyone will really need it. Second is, the conversion happens locally in your browser. Meaning, when the page first loads you will see the site timezone briefly (PST) and a half second after the page loads they will all change to your local time. The change happens fast so hopefully people don't find this too jarring. Again, you can go check it out on SmiteFire if you want to see what I mean![/quote]

[quote=Superior current]Mobafire definitely needs a visual update and possibly new features added so it can look fresh and keep it competitive with other similar sites. While the guides still get a lot of views, the forums often feel quite dead sadly.[/quote]

[quote=jhoijhoi]While I loved Elophant the first time I saw it (before MobaFire partnered it), it seems like a waste to keep the sites separate now. The fun thing about Elophant that the other sites didn't have was the achievements. But now that achievements are impossible, it seems like the other stuff (champ/role/item stats) would fit nicely on MobaFire. Just checking out the Akali page - all that info could go on the Akali page here at MobaFire. I think it would actually quite improve MobaFire's information being able to see the actual items people buy the most on Akali, or what her matchups are like, or popular builds. And then guides are there to help with stuff beyond item purchases etc. In general the Akali page on MobaFire is confusing. You only see guides. Yes, guides are what people come to MobaFire for, but could that be changed? Check out for example, LoLKing's Akali page. Just WOW. What can I see at first glance? Everything! Awesome cool visual header, clear tabs for other pages. The tabs don't reload the page, it's all built on the one page. On the Overview page there is immediate interactivity with the ability to check out Akali's winrate and popularity, and even sort by date/patch, map and queue. Awesome. Following that, is a Akali "cheat sheet" that you can sort by highest win rate or most popular that obviously just pulls information from the client (the way Elophant does). Like I was saying, this sort of thing is great for people who just want to VERY QUICKLY have a look at builds/runes/masteries. How cool would it be if you could sort from highest win rate, most popular and then HIGHLY RATED MOBAFIRE GUIDES? A button at the bottom could say "Read More at Guide" or something. Another cool thing at the bottom of the page is the Leaderboard. But why can't MobaFire have something like this? Except MobaFire-centric? Who has the highest Akali Mastery on MobaFire? Who has the highest KDA on Akali on MobaFire? Who has the highest rated Akali guide on MobaFire? Then at the end: Champions similar to Akali. Perfect for widening the scope of an audience, telling them where to go next. Their Abilities page is also very beautiful and aesthetically pleasing. The Statistics page is like CounterStats. Again, why does MobaFire have these extra LoL sites that would make more sense as part of an awesome MobaFire? But let's be positive about what MobaFire has that LoLKing doesn't. MobaFire has a tab for discussion about the champion - excellent! There should be more done to feature those discussion threads when a champion is reworked or released or a new item comes out that would be awesome on that champion. MobaFire's Q&A is awesome as well! But people don't know it exists! MobaFire includes champion lore, which is great, thank you. Perhaps there could be an option to filter champions by region or associates? League's official Universe page is SO beautiful, perhaps inspiration can be gained there (or even update champions to show region alliance with the icons). MobaFire also has videos - but they are completely ignored. People will upload videos and then nothing happens with them. Couldn't the Akali page have a box for videos uploaded by people and it plays automatically, on mute? And you can upvote/downvote and that prioritizes which videos are the most impressive/funny/cool to be seen more often? Now let's check out MobaFire's sister sites that are gorgeous in comparison to MobaFire. Look at how the News Feed on the other sites don't scroll on forever and ever. Look at the super cool "Quick Matchup" voting on OverwatchFire. Look at how much ENGAGEMENT occurs with those counters/matchup things? All those comments, all those votes? How do those comments/votes compare with the amount of visitor input on MobaFire? And not just that, the COMMENTS of the VOTES are ALSO upvoted/downvoted. There is SO much engagement! (though really, you should be able to reply to those individual comments to continue the discussion) This sort of easy, super simple "who wins" and then discussion prompt is so great for adding richness to community discussions. DotaFire's landing page has the Discord box, which is really cool and would be great on MobaFire. (though the Hero Talents visuals are a little clunky and ugly in comparison to the rest of the cheat sheet) Okay, and now let's just quickly check other guide sites, seeing as I'm on a wishing spree. Solomid's ability to include the interactive content they're talking about is great. I'd love to be able to create an Official Masteries Chapter that copies the content from the cheat sheet and shows it in the actual guide. Same with Runes and Skill Order. And check out that SEXY fixed table of contents on the right! SUPER useful! How cool is it that chapters can have subchapters that appear as tabs? Like Item Builds is a chapter, then subchapters like "Bruiser", "Tank" and "Burst". Clicking these tabs loads the separate builds. League of Legends Counter: Love the "general counter tips" that you can vote on or submit more tips. I remember creating a "General Tips" thread where people could submit general tips. It did well for a bit, but there was no quality control. Imagine being able to upvote/downvote tips for/against the champion?! So cool! Anyway, that's enough from me. tldr: 1. CounterStats and Elophant have functionalities that could be properly incorporated into MobaFire 2. Champion pages are outdated compared to other similar websites 3. Guide formats can be improved (think chapter headers, improved runes/masteries input, toc) 4. Community is dead on MobaFire because there aren't things to engage them. Matchup/Counters voting and discussion would be amazing. Champion tips/tricks voting and discussion would be amazing. Q&A pushed to forefront would be great. 5. MobaFire landing page needs an upgrade in visuals and displays (Discord channel!) But Matt, you're doing a great job in the scheme of things. I love MobaFire and I always will. MobaFire has a loyal clientele and userbase. Just these other sites are pretty-well more advanced now. And I obviously don't know the stats behind Elophant and CounterStats, but if they're not well-trafficked, why not port their functionalities to MobaFire? But mainly, MobaFire needs more things that get visitors involved and makes them want to come back. Cheers <3 PS: I still hate Ashe Guide and Ashe Build Guide pages. Yeah, I know. Google Spiders. But srsly. ^ weird, links won't hyperlink. http://www.mobafire.com/league-of-legends/ashe-guide http://www.mobafire.com/league-of-legends/champion/ashe-13 Edit: If I find time today, I'll enjoy making a mock-up champion page with awesome cool shit on it to satisfy my wishlist. Stay tunnnnnnnnnnnnned.[/quote]

[quote=PsiGuard]Hey Jai, I appreciate the detailed comment. Suffice it to say I'll make sure the rest of the staff hears about your suggestions and ideas. Since your comment is pretty long, I'm gonna keep my response fairly general and not get into specifics on every point if that's all right. [quote=jhoijhoi]tldr: 1. CounterStats and Elophant have functionalities that could be properly incorporated into MobaFire 2. Champion pages are outdated compared to other similar websites 3. Guide formats can be improved (think chapter headers, improved runes/masteries input, toc) 4. Community is dead on MobaFire because there aren't things to engage them. Matchup/Counters voting and discussion would be amazing. Champion tips/tricks voting and discussion would be amazing. Q&A pushed to forefront would be great. 5. MobaFire landing page needs an upgrade in visuals and displays (Discord channel!)[/quote] 1. I totally agree. It's up to the higher-ups as to what's gonna happen with Elophant though. It could be that some things that seem like a great idea on paper don't work well logistically. I guess we'll see. 2. You have some good ideas about strengths of other sites. I'm not super on board with adding even more lore stuff (I think it's more valuable to keep things focused on useful, easily digestible gameplay information), but I like your suggestions for other useful stats on the champion pages. 3. As a fellow guide author, you know I'd love all of this stuff. I'm definitely hoping for some improvements to our guide tools and presentation in the future. 4. A lot of cool stuff on our sister sites doesn't make it to Mobafire (or takes longer to get implemented here) because Mobafire is a lot older and doesn't have the same infrastructure to support these new features. Kinda sucks but basically it's a lot harder to implement here, so sometimes those features get shelved so the devs can work on more important things. 5. I recently added a slider to help people find the Discord, hopefully that's at least something. :P Thanks again for the feedback.[/quote]

[quote=Matt]Thanks for the detailed post jhoijhoi! That is extremely helpful to us and we're having a lot of discussion about this. Keeping sites like Elophant and Counterstats separate was a bit of an experiment. We were finding that we would spend a lot of time building a new section in to MOBAFire and then it would end up not seeing much use because the vast majority of our traffic is here for the guides. We felt that splitting out projects like that to be their own site would give them more room to breathe and a better chance at being seen and used. We're still torn on that, but we can see that there would be value in having both - stats on MF and a stand alone site. There's no real reason not to (other than the extra work to design both). We have been pulling some stats in to our guide sites from our stats sites but, more of a sampling with links off to the separate site for the "main event". We're discussing potential for bringing it more on to the guide sites now so the separate sites are more of an option but you can get it all here if you prefer. However, it will be a balancing act, because we do want to keep the focus on guides and not diminish that too much with stats and data. Guides are and will always be our bread and butter. However there's no reason we can't spice it up with some stats if people would find it useful. We are making efforts to bring some of those features from our newer sites back to MOBAFire but it's difficult because they've been built to use new platform components like I mentioned in my previous post. We're working on it but it's a large and risky task. Hopefully you'll be seeing some headway on that soon though. So if you (and anyone else reading this thread) could dictate your personal toplist of things that would be changed/improved/added to on MF, what would they be (in order of importance)? We're discussing a potential roadmap for MF so this is a good chance to sway our plans :)[/quote]

[quote=jhoijhoi][mention=psiguard] :) [mention=Matt], no worries ^^ And seeing as no one else has said anything... My personal wishlist: 1. Rehaul MobaFire coding-wise from the ground up, so that it is easier to add in modules/platform components in the future, or as demand insists. MobaFire feels patch-worky at times, as if large blocks are added, removed and/or updated at random times. There's a consistent art/colour scheme, but I think it's outdated now. It was great five years ago, but we're used to sleeker webpages now. 2. You mention that guides are the bread and butter of MobaFire, and certainly MobaFire's guide writing system and functionalities are greater than that of other sites. The ability to control how our guides appear is a huge boon that other guide writing sites are not privy to. But other guide sites have some tools that MobaFire lacks: - Collapsable chapters (lolking) - Side-bar ToC for ease of access (solomid) - Interactive displays of masteries/runes/ability sequences in guide chapters (solomid) - Subchapter tabs (solomid) And some further suggestions: - Ability to insert our own official chapter header - Cheatsheet is too large to be looked at quickly, needs to be smaller, more compact, more at-a-glance - Guide stats are not obvious enough - Social website link buttons are clunky - Guide tabs should include "Champion" tab and Q&A tab - Guide editor tutorial/wizard would make the guide tool accessible to everyone - Team Roles on Guide Settings need to be updated (do tags do anything?) - Remove comment to vote - Voting bar should move down the page as you scroll, so you don't have to scroll all the way back up to vote - Plug author's other guides at the bottom of the page to direct the reader to explore more 3. Increase interactivity of visitors/members with "simple" things like the ability to vote on champion match ups, submit champion tips/tricks, vote on guides easily, answer outstanding Q&As, joblist (so on the front page or community page is a call to action where someone can generate +rep or a badge for completing certain tasks like updating a champion's ratios, commenting on a guide without any comments, posting a new thread etc), voting on which champion is most like this champion (for people wanting to play a champion "like x"), "online users" count/status bar showing who is online with clickable names, 4. Revamp champion pages to include stats available from sister sites and stats gained from MobaFire (like registered elo users - does all info come along, so can you see their mastery levels of champs? would be fun to see which MobaFire member has the most mastery points on x champion) 5. Reward users more. Is it that difficult to add more titles/badges for +rep? What about a badge for someone who has updated a guide more than 5 times? What about a badge for someone who is dedicated to Q&As? What about badges for mastery (so if someone has a mastery level 5 of a champion, they get the badge)? Badge for someone, who on average writes a novel in each post? 8D 6. That wiki homepage though. And the subpages *cringe* I remember spending SOOOOOOOO much time on those pages, trying to get them to be awesome. Most pages are awful, especially the MobaFire-related pages with broken images. The wiki looks so dead. It could be so much more. Look at those revision and credit histories. Breaks my heart to see so much effort just wasted and dead. Old pages should be put into a "Legacy Vault" - can't be edited, but can be viewed, viewer discretion advised. 7. Mobile/tablet version. 8. Other random things: + What does the Rune Builder do, anyway? Also, the rules are squashed? http://www.mobafire.com/league-of-legends/runes + Blogs? + Why is the "League of Legends Calendar" where it is? It definitely is too big? + Why do YouTube videos not fit the width of a guide automatically? + Why do columns in guides illogical in terms of not dividing automatically into even portions? + Could news stories look like lolking's recent stories where the picture is to the left and the text is to the right and it just looks so much nicer and cleaner? + Featured/Popular guides take up a lot of space and aren't exciting - they don't make me want to click on them. To a new user the coloured borders mean nothing - what happened to the elo ribbons? + The only way to look at more Q&A questions and answers from a question is a tiny "Q&A" link next to the question itself. Landing page itself should sort by unanswered first. Aaaaaanyway :) I think that's me. Been wracking my brain thinking of things and I guess that's all I could eek out. As per usual, none of this is criticism. If I hated the site, I'd never come back. It's been nearly 6 years now and I am still here. xox jhoi[/quote]

[quote=Matt]Thanks jhoijhoi! That is fantastic. A few things we've already been discussing, several things we hadn't considered but definitely will. We'll be going over your list together this week as we make some plans. I'll probably have a few questions about some of your suggestions, I'll ping you if I need clarification on anything though. Thanks so much for taking the time to put this list together![/quote]