You are ruining this game!
No, not Riot. The community.
My previous threads have reiterated this in every conceivable way. I don't know how else to word it, and I'm not sure if I'm insane for continuing to reiterate this, I'm unlucky enough to run into the same people time and again, or an overwhelming chunk of the community simply refuses to learn, develop, grow, adapt and actually understand the game.
It happened again. Multiple times. I get paired with people who just want to deal damage. As the support, as I've said repeatedly in the past that the support's job at its core is doing everything the team isn't, this means I'm doing EVERYTHING that isn't doing damage. Do you know how big that list gets if the entire team elects to go all damage?! In the worst case scenario, the "job" of each role looks something like this:
Top: Damage Mid: Damage ADC: Damage Jungle: Damage Support: Wards, ward smashing, peeling, poking, buffing, crowd control, tanking, pushing lanes, defending lanes, healing, smashing towers, spotting (keeping an eye on the map for the rest of the team), and the list goes on.
The game is a bit more balanced now than it was the previous year, but the mindset is still firmly stuck in an extremely selfish meta. People are only interested in how much damage they can do, how many kills they can get, and fuck everything else. It's created an environment that is unbelievably toxic, and no one seems to be learning from their mistakes. It's an exercise in insanity of the highest order, and as long as there are players like me who will adapt and sacrifice their own wants for the greater good, people will continue to be ignorant of the universe around them. Overspecialization as a team breeds incredible weakness. It's led to a surrender at 2 meta where the whole team just gives up after the enemy's first blood because everyone decided to go all damage and no one has a contingency plan or anything to fall back on (which, by the way, when that happens, the support suddenly has one more job they have to juggle). If one person, namely the support, is doing EVERYTHING, and that is so damn obviously apparent to anyone born with eyes on the enemy team, guess who they're going to focus all their attention on at the start of the game until the very end?
The ward limits and trinkets have been around for about a year and a half now, probably longer. You can only place THREE WARDS, and all the Sightstones in the universe will not raise the cap. Nothing you do will raise the cap. If I had a dollar for every time I get yelled at for not laying down enough wards or not buying a Sightstone when I'm overcapping on my ward placement (laying down so many wards with the GST alone that I'm erasing previously laid wards), I could pay off the national debt. Forever.
No one seems to learn this. No one can buy a fucking clue, and I'm losing my mind trying to spell it out in every conceivable way. You can lead these horses to water, but you have to drown them in it before they realize they're wet. It's the most basic thing. Upgrade your trinket. Lay down a ward somewhere when it's up. I'm not asking you to hack off a limb with a butter knife. It's 250 gold to upgrade your trinket, and you get basically unlimited wards with it. With all the minions you're killing as the "damage main", even stealing all the jungle camps from your own jungler and flashing to kill that one last minion before your ally could, you have more than enough money to buy a damn trinket upgrade. But no, people would rather drink a gallon of bleach than ward even once if they aren't forced to as the support, much less buy the upgrade.
What learning disability, what kind of brain damage do people have that they continue to tread down this road time and again? There's no tank meta; the fact that everyone continues to go all AD melee assassin is evidence enough that even you don't believe in the tank meta, or with your religious devotion to it you'd pick a tank, too.
No one gets to say that the support is the easy role anymore. I end up trying to juggle more roles and functions in one game than assassin mains will do in an entire season. With how homogenous and kill crazy my teams have gotten, I don't even get the most basic privilege of recalling. Being constantly on hand, trying to keep the entire enemy team at bay and hoping the ADC has more sense than to try and flash over the wall into a 1v5, immediately prioritizing mana, mana regen and cooldown reduction so you don't have to recall as often, along with boots of mobility and homeguard; all of it so I can just barely keep up with an ADC who is unaware of my existence unless we're losing, then it's suddenly my fault no matter what. And then I'm ordered to go ward the dragon that no one will try to fight, which has already been gone for about two minutes now, and the enemy team is pushing the mid towers now completely uncontested and "GROUP MID YOU FUCKING BRONZE SUPPORT".
You are ruining the game for me. It's no longer fun; it's now an overclocking stress test, and I've been overclocked for the past year and a half now. I don't want to quit the game, but I'm tired of doing every job imaginable for a team that simply refuses to do anything else aside from do damage. And all the "get good"s out there isn't going to resolve this. The community has a serious issue with a lack of foresight, hindsight, and every other sight including literal vision. I don't know what else to do at this point, and I'm going mad reiterating the same thing ad infinitum and no one seeming to buy a clue. No, no buying clues. Gotta finish that Infinity Edge.
