"Dear League of Legends community..."
Before anybody starts typing out hate comments about how I am wrong, about how my opinion doesn't matter because I am not Challenger smurf on three accounts, I ask of you to read this post in full. This is not a professional opinion of a high-ranking player, this is an opinion of a person who enjoys this game to its fullest, despite its flaws...
"Dear League of Legends community, first I want to thank you all. You are the reason this game keeps rolling after almost 10 years of non-beta uptime. You play this game, you come back to the game after a hiatus, you invite new people to this game and overall this game only exists because of people like you who truly enjoy it. Also a thanks to the team of Riot Games, you keep the game fresh. You introduce some new changes, revert to some old changes, you bring in new items, remove old items, rework champions, revert champions, everything to deliver us a new experience everytime we open the client to start a game every day.
With that said, none of us are above flaws. And I am here today to address these flaws. I do not mean to be harmful about any of us, all of us, players or developers, but I feel like there are some things that need to be said.
One of the things that annoy me the most is the unbalance when it comes to the report system. People used to be rather chill when they played the game some odd 5 years back. They could take honest criticism and were rather understanding. The people who were actually a negative influence to the community got swiftly reported and swiftly kicked out of our LoL apartment so we who were the better behaving part of the community could continue coexisting. Nowadays it's a bit more difficult. People aren't honest with their honorations anymore and only use those to get the sweet rewards at the end of every honor level. Reporting has also become rather excessive to the point of where people report someone on the enemy team who typed in "ez" at the end of a game they won while at the same time report those on their own team who only wished to provide honest criticism and offer improvement because they were too much getting in the way of their own playstyle and felt insulted. Now, I do not know what the average age of the LoL community is, how much it changed compared to the past, but all I personally ask for is that people start honoring more honestly, that people stop reporting as much because they felt hurt by someone pointing out to them their own mistakes.
My second topic of concern, while I am not at the negative behavior of the community overall, is the issue with both this board and the work of Riot Games.
To the people using this board, while it may seem hypocritical of me at first to make this claim, it appears to me that you use this place less to offer constructive comments to improve the game in it's overall state and rather take it as your personal therapy session to complain loudly about certain aspects of the game you personally find to be either unhealthy to the game or just something you personally can't stand. And while there are certain topics, like the current Damage Meta we find ourselves in, which are most certainly topics to discuss over, especially when someone brings in the topic of the old Tank Meta in comparison, this should be taken more as a place to discuss problematic aspects of the game for Riot Games and other players to see and give constructive input on. This shouldn't be a place where you loudly shout our your own opinion on something in hopes of finding other people who share your sentiment in order to start a witch hunt in an attempt to force Riot to change the game according to your designs.
To Riot Games, I wish you were more responsive, to more than just the pro player scene. From what I gather, most of the time you take your balance designs from statistics. You look at statistics of which champion is popular, which one is not and look at stats like "average damage" or "damage healed/mitigated" to adjust the champions to the meta to keep it healthy. And I am not going to say that that is the wrong approach. However, I wish of you to take the opinions of the community as a whole into consideration when designing new patches. As you can clearly tell, people are right now rather fed up over the Damage Meta. And while I am not going to offer the idea to just go back to the Tank Meta where every game was G2 vs Origen and would last for 70+ minutes, many people think that this meta of ending the game on 22 minutes because one team simply had more damage than the other because the other team chose to pick a tank is not good either. I like the idea of taking the game to an overall more flashy, explosive and faster approach. But in your typical fashion you went overboard with it. And as deep as we are into this meta right now, a few champion or item nerfs wouldn't solve it. I can't offer any direct ways of how to fix this but maybe you should think about how long you want to hear the people cry at your front door because of this.
Now, there is one last point to make. The one everybody knows, everybody thinks they are not part of and the point everybody thinks they are right in their way to do. People, please don't be as toxic as you are right now. I know it is a bit presumptuous to declare that everybody is part of the "MOBA communities are toxic" meme but I dare say that there are very few individuals who are not, at least once, falling into this mindset. I myself am somebody who tends to get themselves into the game a bit too much and when several unfortunate circumstances happen at once, I just can't help to get a bit "toxic" or "salty" too and that is fine, that is human behavior, to get frustrated over things we have no influence over. However, there is no need to vent this feeling out on your teammates, or the opponents. There is no logical reason to start insulting people, in which ever language, or to wish upon them very unfortunate circumstances in real life. There is always an alternative. Get a pillow to shout into when something like that happens. Get something you can punch to let it out, there is just no need to be angry at the other people in the game. And 80% of the time, it was your own fault. Lack of vision, bad positioning, missed skillshots, there is a multitude of reasons why something went wrong that you could have prevented. And instead of blaming your teammates or insulting your opponents, just let it out outside the game and reflect on what happened. I just want this game to be as enjoyable as it used to be and even if the people stay like this, I will continue to play this game because, at the end of the day, I am not playing this game for the community behind it, I play it for the game itself and the fun it brings.
I am not sure what I hope to achieve with this little statement. I suppose I just want to write a little letter to everyone who is interested enough to read this to think a bit about how the game is right now and what we all can do to improve on it. I'm sure there will be many people who will downvote this simply because. There will also be people who will ridicule me for wasting my time writing something of this length. I'm not sure anybody will agree with what I am saying here, I just hope you'll take some time out of your day, read this, think about it, and tell me what you think. Whether you are an active member of the Boards, just a stray gamer like me who just wanted to write something here or a Riot employee who got bored enough to sit through this, I just wanna say thanks, for reading this, and for letting your thoughts about it stick as a comment down below. Hope you have a nice day.[sg-ahri-2]
