Ladies and Gentlemen, This Is Your Captain Speaking... We're All Screwed

In what world does a balanced team comp lose to pure damage every single time? Games with a support, a tank and/or bruiser, a mage, an ADC, and an assasin should rightly be won against teams of equal skill who are three assassins, a mage, and an ADC. Literally, teams who FOREGO buying wards tend to perform better than teams with a dedicate support who buys them. Why?

Damage. Damage, damage, damage, damage, damage. That's all this game is now. Build all the resistances you want, the damage doesn't care. It cuts through those resistances like a northern warlord through a bedthrall. There is nothing, and I mean nothing you can do about it except bring as much damage as they do and outplay them. The entire concept of League strategy was always predicated on vision and having a balanced team that brought a little of everything to the table.

Nowdays, every single game has Zed, Yasuo, Yi, Darius, or some combination. Do you know why? Because these are easy champions with next to zero counterplay in the current meta. It doesn't matter how you play against them because they're going to put out so much damage that a single lifesteal item is all they need to recover a good 15% of their HP per hit. Tanks are useless. Supports are mostly useless, the odd Yuumi aside. Lulu is only a valuable support anymore because she can make her already unstoppable damage-driven allies even more unstoppable.

You broke the game, Riot. You broke it. You let it get away from you. There's no shame in it, you've been working at this for around a decade now, and when you make yearly overhauls for that long, it's bound to get away from you eventually. What you're doing wrong is that you're not cutting your losses. This game is currently beyond repair - in part because it, well, got away from you, and in part because I don't think you have a desire to fix it.

You have an agenda. There's a reason you want fast games. Maybe it's to force a ton of LCS highlights you can put into your yearly championship promo material. Maybe it's to help Asian players get more games in on their limited free time budget. Maybe you just hate your players. I don't know, and I don't care. It's your game, you're within rights to implement whatever agenda you like in its development. But I will tell you, all the same, that you're going about this the wrong way. Dozens of people on the boards alone agree, just take a look at Gameplay during any given hour of any given day. These are not happy people.

For those of you who think I'm full of it, here's a little proof.

The Thornmail Incident

Back when Thornmail was first implemented, it returned 20% of damage taken. That wasn't enough; they upped it to 25%. Later they increased it to 30%. It worked that way for FIVE MAJOR PATCHES. It wasn't until 5.16 that they cut it back down to 15% and put in bonus reflection based on total armor, and even then, it was still based on damage sustained. It was definitely a buff, as it was encouraging you to build more armor. You could surpass 30% far and away if you really invested in armor.

Then 7.14 happened, and it all changed drastically. Thornmail no longer scaled with damage sustained at all. Now it was just flat magic damage based on your total Armor. Specifically, 25 + 10% of bonus Armor. This means if you've invested manifold thousands of gold in 250 bonus armor, you're dealing a whopping 50 damage per hit taken to your attackers.

Why would they do this? To me, someone who mained tanks and ran Thornmail often, it was obvious: Yasuo could literally kill himself with 4 Q's on Thornmail. This is because his Q procs on-hit effects like an auto-attack; it worked against Thornmail too. Yi hardly fared better; a Yi would last about five hits before he killed himself on your Thornmail. Vayne, Quinn, Jinx, and other heavy-hitters during the 6.0 era all faced a similar fate.

Now answer me this. Let's say I've got 200 armor. This means I'm reflecting 65% of auto-attacks (and Yasuo's Q) I take. In what world should an attacker be able to kill himself that quickly from a little over half his own damage? The meta had shifted so heavily towards offense that it was literally possible to kill yourself on Thornmail long before you came close to killing your opponent.

Since then, it's only gotten more insane. The new runes have given more damage potential than ever. Just look; three entire rune sets geared heavily towards inflicting damage (Precision, Domination, and Sorcery are all extremely damage-oriented), and only one underwhelming set for survival. That's a full 60% of all runes that are about adding more damage to an already overtuned game.

Excuse Me, Does This Tunnel Have a Light?

Where do we go from here? Now that we know the game is shattered beyond repair, and about to get even worse with the implementation of things like shield-shredders, is there any hope for League? As much as I'd like to think so, no. It's too far gone, Riot is too different from what it was at the start, and everything is just way too far out of hand. It would take several years of off-time and rebuilding from the ground up to fix this game now. Therefore, I advocate for one of two things: Either make a sequel and drop League as we know it currently, or make a new game entirely.

A sequel could be an opportunity to go back to basics. Come in with rich lore from the start, rather than lore that was shoehorned in when Riot decided they wanted to take their world seriously. Approach the game from a fresh perspective, taking great care to balance and tune from zero. Implement a system for providing feedback that goes straight to the developers' desks and sorts itself, making it easier to see at a glance what the community likes and what they don't.

On the other hand, an entirely new game could be a way for Riot to expand its horizons and carry its fanbase into a new genre. It may open the door for all kinds of great things. Why settle for a MOBA when you're worth millions? Good companies don't just sit on their money, they invest it back into their enterprise. Try a strategy game. Maybe even an RPG. I'm sure many of us would love to step into your world with a character of our own design and interact with all these characters. There's so much you could be doing that could be great both for you and your players. Why waste all that capital on a game that's too far gone to fix?

I sincerely hope this company does something worthwhile. For as many really horrible ideas as they have, they have at least as many good ones. But League? League isn't gonna be where this theoretical worthwhile something happens.