The successes and failures of Season 8

There's a lot of negativity on the forums as of late, and for the most part I'd say its justified. But I want to try to look more objectively at Season 8 so far and see what has been good, and what hasn't. In some cases, one item is both a success and a failure in different ways.

Success: Runes Reforged (Concept) Runes Reforged, at its heart, is a change that was necessary for the game's future growth. Much of the game was balanced around champions having the optimum runes for stats, which killed diversity as well as locking newer players out of jungle in particular. The removal of this baseline means that champions can be balanced on their base stats as opposed to their perceived optimum rune page, making balancing easier to do. Runes Reforged also gave us more impactful and unique ways to play the game.

Failure: Runes Reforged (Implementation) Despite being a good idea at its core, we are halfway through season 8 and it STILL feels like Runes Reforged is a work in progress, a beta. Pre-season was supposed to be this beta testing period, but even now there's some runes that simply outclass others. It also brought in several abuse cases, such as Kleptomancy Ezreal, which was 'fixed' by making the rune useless on virtually everyone so that it was balanced for Ezreal. It is kind of a joke that we've just had our first major international tournament of the year and the runes still feel like they're in beta.

Failure: Jungle Change 8.10 This jungle change is a failure in execution, plain and simple. The idea behind it is nice, i.e. making tracking and out-pathing the opposing jungler more important while allowing laners to have more agency over their own lane victory. This was clearly not well thought-out in its current implementation however, with the result being a further reduction in jungle diversity, and junglers having far less agency than their laners (essentially a swap in this regard). This means that the winning laners usually get the winning jungler, which in turn further snowballs the laners through ganks, while providing little avenues for a behind jungler to catch up. Jungle was unhealthy for the game, and now it is even worse. A full overhaul and rethink - preferably with lots of input from many professional junglers - is required here.

Success: Mana changes I'll get some flak for this one, but I truly believe that the nerfs to mages and mana in general is a very good thing. Mana very rarely felt like a limiting resource, and resource management very much should be a key part of playing a mage well. Nerfing mana as a whole means that mages have more skill expression, and mana/regen become more valuable statistics, and mana can have a more meaningful impact on a champion's power budget. The only issue here is that this was done before nerfing other problem classes, when mages were already arguably the most balanced role overall. This means their power relative to other classes is more noticeable than if the ADC update had come first, for example.

Failure: Zoe Zoe is a champion that has already failed on many levels. We all know that she was OP as hell on release due to tons of unnecessary bonus passives and other effects in her kit, as is the CertainlyT way. This was eventually brought to a more reasonable level, and in terms of balance she's fine now (although still very annoying to play against, as is also the CertainlyT way). However, Zoe is just a poor design overall, because her kit is extraordinarily binary outside of her W. I noticed this recently when seeing Zoe games in MSI - all the pro players ever do is throw out bubbles over walls ad infinitum until one lands, and then they use their Q>R combo to do absurd damage. Rinse and repeat for the whole game. This is a failure of design, because for all the flashiness of her kit, her gameplay is repetitive and linear.

Failure: ADC ADC as a role is in an awful spot, and this is coming from someone who mained the role in Season 7 and stuck with it through the meme period. ADC is just too important to the game, something that was evidenced by MSI. For virtually all of the major teams, the talking point was the ADC, and one could argue that the teams that made it to MSI were the ones that had the best ADC in that region. Uzi, the best ADC in the world, won the whole tournament, go figure, while Fnatic and TL did worse than expected primarily because their ADCs did not perform to their usual standard. ADCs have been too dominant for some time, and it has taken a ridiculous amount of time for this to be meaningfully addressed.

Success: Big patch, small patch This new patching paradigm is good, if only because the changes Riot are making are so turbulent this season as to make it a necessity. Season 8 feels like it's had more major changes than other seasons, with item overhauls, significant rune additions/alterations and class-wide re-balances occurring before we even hit the halfway mark. This patching system is probably the only thing keeping the game afloat at this point, but in future I hope to see the system applied to less monthly drastic changes.

Failure: Season 8 I'm going to be frank; Season 8 as a whole is a failure, a road to hell paved with good intentions. It is a season of drastic change thanks to runes reforged, which in turn necessitated further significant changes to make the game work with this new system. Changes we are still experiencing over 6 months later. Season 8 is at its core, a massive undertaking that Riot clearly were not prepared for, and did not think through or play test nearly enough. Season 8 will go down as the worst Season in League history, because it feels like a game in the midst of an identity crisis with Riot wanting to push the game's overall design in one way, with the player base generally wanting things to go another.

Success: Season 9? Season 8 at this point can be written off as a year-long beta. However, we don't necessarily have to lose hope, because if we can make it through this awful season, perhaps season 9 will be the one where Runes Reforged finally feels complete with the game well balanced around it. Riot have finally listened to the player base complaining that the damage in the game is at an absurd level, and that the correct course of action is to nerf things that are strong, not buff things that are weak by comparison. League balance should not be an arms race, and I'm glad that Riot are starting to see this. I'm also glad that they're reverting champions that had failed reworks (despite the balance of the reverts being questionable). If this trend continues, perhaps we will have a game we actually enjoy playing again by October.