Meddler
Is a good example of how extremely different being a Transportation Engineer, and a Lead Game Designer, are very different career choices... often taken by people with very different ways of thinking. The 'streamlining' of League of Legends has taken it's razor thin balance and simply tumped it out over a chasm of useless, flashy updates that invariably also involve wrecking the razor blade. While our games now flow with the best of traffic (often using round-a-bouts), and the fluidity of game play has improved drastically... the actual balancing of the game has been dropped in the toilet, and no one wants to pick it up out of the muck.
While, yes, many good changes have been brought to League, there have also been many alterations to mechanics and game play that, for a very long time RIOT guaranteed in a dozen or more posts a week on the old boards would never be implemented... as they were inherently bad designs for the game, and would only serve to drive an ever widening gap of balancing issues. What were those issues?
- True Damage
- Hard CC Commonality
- Guaranteed Escape Commonality
- Mixing Tankiness with Damage (See: Atma's Impaler)
- Mixing Speed with Lifesteal (See: Malady)
- % Damage
What do all of these things do for you? They force you to increase the stats of the tank items, providing them far more resilience and utility to the kits of champions full of resilience and utility. This forces you to play champions who natively have True Damage, or in the case of DuskBlade you can simply be any champion that scales off of AD. Your inherently squishy champions - who must purely build damage or be rendered useless, are dive bait that vanish in one shot to champions with vastly more utility, toughness, and survability.
Why do I point the finger, specifically, at Meddler? Before his ascent to Lead Designer he made good champions (let's laugh now when you look at the broken messes that are Gnar, Syndra, Varus, and Ziggs), and the balance of the game revolved, slowly, as various broken meta's rose and fell. Since then? A singular, item driven, Meta has risen that has moved further and further into AD Burst and Golem Tanks. This meta is not going anywhere, any time soon.
Don't tell me to read the 'planned patch notes.' "I will balance your game on Tuesday, for you to buy RP today!" seems to be the dopey phrase of the current design team under the present leadership. Intentions and plans for three years have been either late delivery, utterly undercut in what is actually delivered, or both.