David Ballowe
Ryan Rigney, communications lead for Riot Games’ League of Legends and Ole Miss School of Journalism graduate, returned to campus on Wednesday to share his insight on social media in the modern workplace with students.
Rigney, who addressed an audience in the Overby Center on Wednesday and participated in the 2020 Jobs Conference on Thursday, highlighted his company’s unique approach to their employee’s social media policy.
“The way we do it at Riot is anybody that works at the company, it doesn’t matter if you’re in accounting or one of the lead developers … You can go online and be officially ‘flared’ as a Riot Games employee. Anybody can go and talk on Reddit, and you can get a little badge next to your name.”
This coveted Reddit “red name” designation is available after completing Riot’s red name training program, and Rigney said this allows players to ask questions directly to the person best-suited to answer them.
Rigney began his career in journalism before he enrolled at Ole Miss, writing for many outlets — mostly for free. He released a book titled “Buttonless” in 2012, and this led to the job at Riot, which he accepted in 2014.
He mentioned that unlike Riot, many companies don’t allow employees to voice their opinions or list their affiliation with their respective companies on social media.
Launched in 2006, Riot Games began development on their first and most popular game, League of Legends.
Since 2009, when the title was officially released, the game has grown to be one of the largest online PC games in the world, with over 115 million active players in 2019, as estimated by RankedKings.com.
With this major growth comes a major fanbase, and some major public relations problems.
Rigney said that Riot Games has over 1,000 employees that are both active and have identified themselves as Riot employees on social media platforms.
Ole Miss eSports League of Legends team leader and junior chemistry major Tony Lybrand said he believes this interaction between Riot employees and their customers helps the game create a constructive virtual environment.
“Compared to companies like Blizzard, it’s very hard to find even one person that works at Blizzard actively saying they work at Blizzard and voicing their opinion and speaking with their customers,” Lybrand said, “but in Riot, you can see that all the time.”
Lybrand said that while other companies do have some social media presence, Riot’s has the most and the best.
While Riot Games has received a lot of praise for the way they handle business on social media, it doesn’t mean everything in League of Legends PR is smooth sailing.
One of the features of the game allows users to turn offensive language into asterisks, but then the team at Riot Games has to translate the game into over 27 different languages.
In October 2019, League of Legends ran in to a sensitive issue: the system banned the word Uyghur.
Uyghur is the name of an Islamic ethinic minority in China that is currently being forced into concentration camps, and since Riot Games is owned by Chinese mega-conglomerate Tencent Holdings Ltd., the global League assumed the ban was Chinese censorship. The backlash was worldwide.
Fans took to Reddit to voice their discontent over the ban.
“I’m guessing they don’t have much of a say in the matter as the company is 100% owned by Tencent,” said Reddit user ResplendentShade on the r/leagueoflegends thread.
Rigney, who goes by The_Cactopus on Reddit, was present for this Reddit “Flame War,” as these high-intensity Reddit confrontations are called, and he replied quickly on the thread that the system sometimes bans “really weird words for no good reason.”
The Riot team took immediate action and removed the ban on the word, in addition to reviewing the existing list of banned words.
The way Rigney handled the situation garnered praise from speech attendee and junior general business major Alexandra Kerwin.
“Ryan was able to make a public statement on (social media) before traditional press even caught wind of the issue,” Kerwin said. “PR has definitely changed with new media and is able to address and resolve issues more quickly.”
Rigney said that his job at Riot is his dream job, challenges and all.
