A Few Stray Thoughts...

About a year ago, a couple of friends from Runescape told me about a game that they were recently getting into and thought was pretty cool. Curious, I decided to tag along with them with the idea being that I could always play one game if the other became too boring. With that, I had officially joined LoL.

To suggest that this game and my thoughts of it have changed in the past year or so is a bit of an understatement. When I first joined, it seemed as the learning curve for new people was simpler to understand and generally easier. Characters with easier to master skillsets existed in each position, allowing people to figure out and function decently at their role right from the get go. made for incredibly simple to understand yet powerful characters who new players could rely on, with there being plenty of others with higher difficulty which allowed people to essentially "evolve" as they continued on. The community was also extremely nice and helpful, as I'd often be able to get tips from both teams and even if I performed horribly would still get the occasional "nice try" or "you did well". Because of this, I avoided the other games I played and focused on playing this one. With this becoming my main game as well, I also chose to put in hundreds of $'s in things like skins/avatars, as I sorta thought I could not only show my support but also slowly help continue to make this game good.

I'm not exactly sure when it happened, but my views on this game have changed severely over the last little while which has caused me to slowly drift in the direction of other games. The overall gameplay is incredibly imbalanced and simplistic (if you don't ban , then you're almost always going to lose horribly to them), forcing people to play one style or be punished heavily for it. The queues are also incredibly slow (unless you choose support, or fill should you want to get support 95%, you're looking at 5-10min wait times), forcing me to wait and group up with friends or risk being bored even before the game even starts. As the piece de resistance, there seems to be an egotistical and toxic edge that haunts many people in the games I play now. Rather than it being based on actual skill, it's more often determined by which team has less afk'ers/trolls or which team has more high-ranked smurfs. The sheer amount of written abuse I see, even from my own teammates, makes me often have to mute everyone in the game or risk being berated with hundreds of lines of text during a game after every minor mistake or misplay. Oh, and if you "want" to win then you have to figure out a way to carry them through the game. Basically, if you win then they win and if you lose then they win as well. Flawed logic, I know.

While many could end a post like this by saying "and with that, I choose to quit the game for good right here right now", I'm not one of them. Instead, I'm just not going to play as often and not try even if I do play. Trying in this game is far too time consuming with minimal reward at the end. Seems flawed? I know.