Who needs good game design if you have a Blaustoise

So Riot Blaustoise made a thread on twitter about mobile champions and his hypothesis is that mobile champions are just more fun to play and oh so mechanically intensive which ofc attracts the younger players and it's just us old fucks no one needs anymore that are frustrated with mobile champions. i guess hinting at that we are too slow or too old to keep up?

Now i don't think playrate=funrate which is his assumption from the start and there have been enough examples why this isn't true. For example camille was actually really good before she got popular in s8 with comet spam toplane and since then she has forever been a pretty good pick but even s7 before ardent and s6 she was very good but had like a 3% playrate with mains reaching absurd 60%+ winrates. Camille is a more recent design (one of the very first to break former design philosophies in my opinion) she has a lot of mechanics, animation cancels, pretty high mobility for a diver outplay potential with her ult but her playrate considerably dropped when she got out of meta ESPECIALLY in lower elo. Is she now a not fun to play champion? Or is it because she is weaker than she used to and people swap over to better champions? So a highly mobile mechanical champion that by blaustoises logic is inherently more fun doesn't pull very good pickrates until masters+ where she is used for her kit and not her fun rate. Then you have very popular immobile champs like Darius.

Now let's look at blaustoises prime examples of highest fun/pickrates: Yasuo, lee sin, akali, irelia,riven

These names sound familiar to the boards don't they? So why are these champs so popular while other champs in the same category aren't that popular like camille or leblanc another example with a lot of mobility. Irelia was very popular whenever she was good before her rework when she had one dash compared to fifteen gapclosers she posses now. Nautilus was insanely popular a few patches ago when he was basically autowin botlane prior to that noone gave a shit despite him not being bad. Lux an immobile mage pulled absurd pickrates not too long ago and now she is meh in terms of pickrate UNLESS we look at bronze to gold where she pulls incredible 30% pickrate in bronze dropping to 12 if you go diamond+. So we have immobile ones that go up and down in pickrate depending on their state as well as mobile subjectively "fun" champs that also go up and down depending on where they stand in the meta. We have immobile champs like lux and darius that are always popular even when objectively bad or atleast worse picks.

So what is the mystery behind certain champions being always super popular? Is it really that simple? Mobile=fun? Let's look at what these champions do: Camille: Pretty obvious attaches to a wall u see her doing that u can expect her to jump in u can dodge it, flash it, hook her, flay her, knock her back up left right and if she misses she is probably done for.

Leblanc: goes very obvious forward, you can hook her, flash her, dash her, she goes back to a known point where u can prepare something against her. If she doesn't succeed she has an obvious way out but has to wait and try again.

Akali: Dashes in dashes out goes stealth, stuns you, slows you, stealths again, dashes onto you, gets 60% permanent movement speed buff, dashes out again. All her animations are very fast, incredibly hard to react to. She can use her mobility very freely, hard to predict what she might do.

Now this is very simplified ofc but i hope people will notice what i'm trying to point out. Despite being mobile and having a lot of outplay opportunities leblanc and camille are still restricted. Slowish travel times, downtime on their ability to do something. Very obvious and straight forward mobility. They drop their load and are kinda awkwardly standing around until they can get back to doing something if they fuck up there isn't a whole lot they can do to save them (more than other champions less than other champions) which is exactly my point. These newest designs jungle hoop girl, pyke, akali, irelia do not only have high mobility. They also have basically no counterplay to it. Fast animations, always an answer to if they fuck up, pretty free to use their mobility minus irelia a bit who is restricted to minions and her marks. Not much to react to or play around. Irelia has an ultimate that is better than entire champion picks. All in tradition of yasuo and lee sin. Champions who are not only highly mobile but also don't really pay anything for their mobility.

So in tl;dr:

I don't think it's just cool and young people preferring flashy mobile champions just because of them being mobile but more so that these champions have absolutely no cost to it. They win all ins, they have a dozen tools to get out of every bad position they brought themselves into. Many of them are incredibly safe while scaling fantastically. They have very few restrictions to their mobility on top of the same or even more damage output than their immobile counterparts.Just look what a jax or camille does compared to a darius. Or that hoop thingy compared to a talon who is incredibly OP rn btw and can oneshot basically anyone but then there is qiyana who does the same while stunning people, dashing in and out, stealthing on demand, stunning entire teams into the wall. Free mobility unlike talon who is restricted to Q and walls to jump over. It's less so them being inherently fun but more so that they cover your mistakes by the champions very own design while other champions have u punished if you fail on them. Ofc champions are super popular when they are just straight up better than anything else and there is no reason to pick someone else ON TOP of being very forgiving.

And i think it's really bad for riot to lie into their own pockets like that. Instead of admitting the criticism when people are more frustrated than ever with all these new champions and mechanics being so very forgiving, having no cost to what they can do, can do more than other champions ON TOP of their mobility and i actually find it very cheap in how blau does it and just blames it on old(er) players and regions (euw/na compared to china/kr) instead of looking in depth into these champions and compare them to other designs. Let's also not forget how lightly riot treats riven, yasuo, lee sin and others. Who might get a nudge down once but then immediately buffed back up+promotion everywhere+skins while other champions just get straight up nuked. No wonder they don't get popular if you not only make these monstrosities of a kit but also keep them numerical good all the time.