Season 9 Jungle thoughts

As far as I know (that should be a sign that this could be very wrong) riot is planning on changing the jungle in pre-season 10 because of some of the problems in the jungle this season. I wanted to create this thread to have a space for people to state what they think those inherent problems are. Now I am low elo and am really bad at the game, my micro play is trash and I have such an issue with it that sometimes I zone in on it and completely forget to pay attention to the map and macro. Even my macro play can be horrendous and in the heart of the moment I cant figure out the right move, but I do watch a lot of higher elo jungle games. I do watch guides and out of game I can usually Identify what I did and am doing wrong (correcting it is much harder). Now that we have gotten the "lawl your just bad" out of the way. I am decent with numbers and between the guides and the common behaviors of junglers across all elo's (again from my limited anecdotal experience of watching vods and playing the game) there are a few well known patterns and what I believe are problems that need to be looked at.

1. Red side and Blue side imbalance When the changes to how the jungle camps worked first came in it was supposed to create diversity in the jungle, but after multiple XP nerfs and reshifting it has become very obvious that the red side is valued above the blue by a wide margin because of the extra xp and gold gained on both krugs and raptors. While it is true that krugs take longer to reach and kill as well as the raptors tending to be one of the most damaging camps unless you have a lot of aoe, the extra time and damage is not enough to offset their greater values for the wolves and gromp. Evening out the sides with time, damage and gains may help. An interesting thought I had which may never work is what if blue side respawned faster so taking it once isnt huge but hyper farming it could even it out a bit.

2. Rubber band XP One of the issues that I have personally noticed is how rubberband xp works on camps right now. The first clear of every camp is not going to give you nearly as much as later clears. And if you havent spent a lot of time clearing those camps their lower levels means they are going to be worth less and less. The biggest issue I feel this provides is the perverse incentive to not invade and clear your opponents camps for them. Counter jungling is less rewarding when you clear their level 1 camps for them while they gank and when they finally get to that camp they get the bigger stronger and more worthwhile version of that camp. With one of the earlier stated goals to have more jungler on jungler interaction making counter jungling less impactful and meaningful seems counterintuitive to that goal and right now that is how the camp levels work.

3. Unrewarding jungle Much like the rubber band xp makes counterjungling worse the overall current state of the jungle makes farming junglers a bit weaker than their ganking partners. Because leeching xp from lanes is almost as efficient as farming your camps a ganking jungler gets just as fed as a farming jungler while only farming half of his jungle. Ironically I do not think the issue is TOO overblown right now as we can see from champions like dr. mundo that a farming style CAN still work with a spattering of ganking thrown in along the way, but for many this still feels like farming junglers are much weaker than their early game ganking counterparts.

Ultimately it seems the meta is currently pushed towards early game ganking junglers at the expense of all other types. Rubber band xp makes counter jungling more helpful to the enemy than hurtful, and the jungles low xp and gold gains makes wasting time on an extended gank hurt much less than in prior seasons.

I am curious to see other's thoughts on what season 9 jungle issues are and what can be done to solve them. Thank you for reading all the way here for those that did.