Why LoL's Direction Towards Shorter Games Was A Mistake

TL;DR: LoL's moving into HOTS' niche, and getting blasted for it.

Keep in mind this is just my opinion.

When it comes to market and gameplay, multiple different games in the same genre get big because they fill different niches. If two games have the same niche within the same genre, the better game's just going to squash the worse game, and the worse game is going to have an extremely tiny player base.

Looking at MOBAs, there's really three worth looking at: LoL, DOTA 2, and Heroes of the Storm (HOTS).

Each MOBA had their own niche when they were big, in their golden era.

LoL established itself as a casual-player oriented lengthier game, best played by players who wanted a skill based game, but didn't really want to invest massive amounts of time in becoming the best. Early LoL had a LOT of luck mechanics (remember stuff like dodge?), to give worse players a leg up against better players.

DOTA had a similar game length, but was more oriented to the core-player base. Since the game was (is? dunno .-.) balanced around the highest level of play, it appeals more towards players who really want to get better. If there was ever a complaint about a character being OP, the appropriate response is usually "git gud skrub". Players who wanted to play a longer game, willing to spend around 35-50 minutes on a game would split between LoL and DOTA.

HOTS is a casual-player oriented game, though it has established itself as a quicker game. The gameplay typically progresses more rapidly due to mechanics such as globalized XP. Players who wanted to play a shorter MOBA, who didn't want lengthier games, had more reason to play HOTS as compared to LoL and DOTA.

So back to LoL and why I think shortening the game time is a big mistake.

As LoL is a MOBA (genre) with a casual-appeal, the only real difference in niche compared to HOTS is the game length. The shorter game length does multiple things: First, it pushes away veteran players who joined LoL back when it first got big, as the games have gotten much shorter and much more snowbally.

Second, it makes older mechanics that were built around previous game states obsolete, making the game difficult to maintain. Champions who relied on surviving the early game and scaling up aren't really viable because the game now revolves so heavily around the early game.

Third, and most importantly, it causes LoL to drift into the HOTS specialty, and LoL is not nearly as good as HOTS in this niche, IMO, because HOTS is so much easier to balance. Because there aren't items in HOTS, every character is much easier to balance and finetune, and every mechanic has been designed with one game state in mind, whilst LoL has all sorts of mechanics that are growing increasingly obsolete with every update.

LoL is slowly drifting away from the gameplay that made the game big in the first place. Unfortunately, because some of the new mechanics that have been released have been geared towards faster gameplay, it is now difficult for the dev team to push back towards longer games. No matter which way the devs decide to go, they need to do a lot of work, and they need to do it fast, because it won't be much longer before players realize that LoL is ending up in the dumpster.

Players who miss the longer games are eventually going to get tired and move to DOTA, which has been conceptually stable for a long time.

Players who want casual gameplay with shorter lengths are going to switch to HOTS, which has been occupying that niche for quite a while, and has been geared towards that style of gameplay.