Snowballing Erases Skill Expression

Snowballing erases skill expression and makes the game boring. It's the nature of League to some extent, since taking a lead grants gold, which allows a player to purchase item advantages to keep snowballing, but it seems really excessive at the moment.

Take three of my recent games as examples: I am playing jg and I meet up with the enemy jungler at level 2 at the rift scuttler. We have a pretty even fight, but I am the stronger early duelist and I end up chasing him down, predicting his escape routes and taking first blood. I then pull off a couple early ganks that go well. That all took a bit of skill expression to do but we're less than 5 minutes in. Now I head back to the shop and purchase some items. Now I have a lead over the enemy and no one can come close to a fair fight 1vs1, so I can go where I want when I want and I can keep pushing my lead into a snowball with much less continued skill expression required for the rest of the game. A little while of this goes on, and I can easily 1 vs 2 with zero risk because I have a and Conqueror, while the enemy tanks building does nothing at all to slow me down because I have access to more snowball gold because I am a damage dealer accumulating kills and true damage is stupid. Now it takes 3 of their team members to stop me from split pushing their base but they still can't kill me, and I keep mindlessly spinning away and then shoving waves right back at them while they are trapped in their base while my teammates are wrecking the remainder of them 4 vs 2. Eventually I can 1 vs 3 them anyways and win the game. So there was decent skill expression for the first 5-8 minutes of the game with opportunity for the enemy to make a comeback, but afterwards it was pure mindless snowball with no viable options for the enemy at all. That wasn't much fun for either side.

Game 2: I am playing jg and I manage to take a small lead early on but the match still seems pretty even. Then I start building tank shredding items and start ganking a lot to help my allies shove the enemy tanks out of their lanes because they are safe to bully. Then I get my ult and assassinate a squishy. Up until this point, there might have been a little bit of skill expression on my part and some strategy required, but now the snowball is going strong. I end up getting and simply mindlessly slaughtering anyone I target, tank or squishy alike. I have the lead so with the way snowballing works, I just need to press R and 100-0 (cuz assassin identity) the enemy with no counterplay (muh "high risk high reward") to keep the snowball building. I honestly got bored and started making absolutely idiotic picks and ulting into the full enemy team, but it didn't really matter because I would still get 1-2 kills out of it and my teammates were already snowballing themselves because their opponents were getting shut out of the game by my snowballing. Their tanks tried to stack armor all game long just to survive me, but it didn't matter because they were tanks facing a snowballing opponent and they never get as much kill potential as an assassin or fighter so they don't get to rake in the gold therefore don't get to exist in such a snowball centric meta. They invested every cent they got into trying to counterbuild me with armor, even though I had AP teammates, but it didn't help them against me at all because I was snowballing therefore I could keep buying tank shredding items and brute force crushing them when they tried to play the game. Once the snowball started, this game got boring fast.

Game 3: Another game, I am up against a and . Unfortunately, Zoe's opponent dies a couple of times early on because he wasn't playing a strong waveclearing champion, and interacting with Zoe at all in laning risks her completely 100-0ing with no chance to fight back because during her CC, you lose half your hp to one ability and the other half to + electrocute. Now Zoe is snowballing, so she can continue to do this unless she royally screws up and gets shut down repeatedly. I try to hold mid lane, but Zoe flashes on me and drops a sleepy bubble then 100-0s me too. I lack the required multiple mobility abilities to be able to dodge Zoe's abilities and gapclose on Zoe effectively, so there is little I can do to punish her while I desperately try to help save the lane knowing that the condition for me to be 1-shot is Zoe landing a single ability on me. During all of this time, Rengar is snowballing by ganking the other lanes uncontested. At this point, my options are pretty limited, but I see a risky opportunity to take dragon that seems like it might be what we need to get back into the game. Suddenly Rengar leaps out of stealth and 100-0s me in 0.2 seconds then takes the dragon I was heading over to ward or kill. Oh boy. It feels so nice being "outplayed" in 0.2 seconds by snowball. Fights lasting 0.2 seconds while death timers last 40+ seconds and it takes 20-30 seconds to walk back to lane sure seems like compelling game design (/s). In other games, like CoD (which I don't play for good reasons), where fights last 0-2 seconds, respawn timers are usually like 3-10 seconds, the maps are small, and snowballing from purchasing items doesn't exist so at least the 1 second fights remain on roughly equal footing for skill expression.

Snowballing in League deletes the skill expression from encounters and kills strategy in the game. The only people who want this are smurfs so that they can rack up 40 kills by abusing new players and certain streamers/wanna-be-pros who demand "solo carrying" in order to boost their ego/views with snowball kill montages. Riot, can you please fix this? It's not a fun environment for 8-9/10 players in each game and, for me at least, it's boring even when I am one of the snowballing 1-2 players. Getting kills and CS should reward some advantages, but never so much that snowballing completely erases counterplay and skill expression for someone's opponents.