I think we're starting to fully see the flaws in the "big patch, little patch" model Riot proposed for this season -- it takes a lot longer than just one patch cycle to properly identify the issues brought by a major, gameplay-changing patch, let alone fix them, and so League has become increasingly unstable over time, when it already wasn't all that stable to begin with. Because short patch cycles have led to shorter-term vision on balancing, I feel it's also led to a ton of champions receiving more damage and/or snowballing potential just to keep up with the rest, exacerbating the game's existing major problems. As such, it feels like League as a whole has become even more centered around snowballing and majorly excessive damage, with balance across champions being so out of wack that we've ended with stuff like Ezreal having a pick rate nearing 50% on Korea, on top of a 50%+ win rate. Whereas seasonal complaints in the past mostly revolved around certain champions or classes (e.g. Juggernauts at the end of S5), it feels like the biggest complaints at this point in Season 8 are about the game itself, as well as its core gameplay. This isn't the first time players have complained about snowballing in League (that was also a major complaint in S3), but it is the first time such a complaint has been brought up in a manner that directly blames Riot for deliberately enacting it. League has run long enough to be considered an old game, and as such many players have expected it to have the stability and solid core of one. To see League remain so chaotic and unbalanced at this point in time is therefore fairly worrying.
To me, what bothers me more than just the speed at which League has been updating itself is the seeming lack of process behind it: if Riot had developed the tools to rapidly anticipate, identify and efficiently address whichever balance problems were brought up by their patches, then their pace of updates could be fine, if every little patch cleanly solved the previous big patch's issues, and brought the game back to a stable state. As it stands, not only is this not the case, but the process of balancing itself feels tremendously opaque: Riot's been talking a lot about statistics recently, but we're not seeing how these statistics inform their balance decisions, nor does there seem to be a clear procedure for balancing any part of the game at all. As such, the balancing process feels largely arbitrary, and the fact that the game's balance is depending on the opinion of a few humans, when much of the playerbase's confidence in said humans has dropped, has been cause for concern. This has not been improved by the details Riot accidentally let on, such as the fact that they only have two jungler playtesters, or that their evaluation for top lane balance in NA is apparently largely informed by the meta in Vietnam. Adding to this, we've seen Riot repeat a ton of mistakes they've made in the past, namely by forgetting to give champions counterplay, or balancing them in ways that didn't work before, in addition to implementing changes whose impact was so easy to anticipate, one wonders how they made it through playtesting at all (e.g. Galio's AP scaling changes, Kai'Sa's post-release patch, all of Zoe, etc.). All of this leads to the impression that the design and balancing process suffers from poor quality control, as well as a general lack of direction.
I may be wrong on all of this, but then I am not the only one with this opinion, and the only way Riot can truly counteract that is if they show exactly how they structure their design and balancing pipeline, how/whether they take in player feedback, and what their vision actually is for League. Right now, the playerbase feels largely ignored, even outright looked down upon, and it feels like the devs have been designing with incentives other than the players in mind. Player-developer communications are at an all-time low, which I think has contributed to the lack of understanding the playerbase has of League's current development. It also generally feels like Riot's made a concerted effort to obfuscate or even completely hide crucial information about their own game, so that we players are left without the common ground to properly discuss what is going on in League. It's not a positive environment overall, and until Riot makes a proper effort to share with us exactly what they want out of League, it's only going to get worse.
