Personally, while I agree that these issues are all bad on their own, my problem with the manner in which Riot has been designing and balancing League in recent times is that it feels like they're mostly running around in circles, while avoiding the real, much deeper problems with the game. Almost nine years and 100+ million players later, and the game is still largely running on legacy code, as well as legacy design that had already aged poorly a long time ago. Features that used to be selling points, such as the game's stat model, runes, masteries, summoner spells, etc. have all aged fairly poorly to varying degrees, and have warped the game's balance along some pretty rigidly-defined lines. Moreover, Riot's new designs always have to compete against much older content, and be compatible with much older systems, which itself limits the amount of stuff one can do with the game. When Riot tries to ignore this, we get absolutely terrible designs like Yasuo or Zoe, which altogether push the game in a worse direction.
Instead of addressing these issues comprehensively, namely by trying to get a good grasp of what is actually fun in League, and making deep, systemic changes to get there directly, it feels like Riot has mostly been pretending to innovate each time instead, coming up with extremely disruptive changes that have little to no positive long-term impact, just in time for the next major content update that begins the cycle anew. It's this weird situation where it feels like Riot's trying to reinvent the wheel each time, all while League ends up just going round in circles. Whereas previously I felt like there was a clear progression in Riot's design philosophy, it now feels like much of what has been learned has been lost, as for example with Riot trying to reintroduce Season 2-style items to the game, and reimplementing a ton of snowballing.
To be fair, I personally don't think Riot's design teams do a bad job all the time, necessarily, and I think it's often too easy to look at just the negatives when we've gotten some positives along the way (the big VGUs we've received, namely Sion, Poppy, Warwick, Irelia, etc. have usually been pretty awesome imo). Moreover, I do genuinely believe the design teams do try, and do have the large problem of contending with a game that was absolutely not originally designed to last this long, or be played by so many people. Every improvement they want to work on has to be pushed through this wall of old tech and dysfunctional design, as well as a whole bunch of players from different eras in the game's development, each of whom has at least some difference in what they want out of League. Working on League is not an easy job.
With that said, it also feels like whichever spark was present at Riot has now been lost: we're being told that Riot designers are humble, and that they blend the organization of a major corporation with the personalized, can-do attitude of the company's original startup days, but in practice it feels like the exact opposite has happened. Riot's attitude overall has become very corporate, what with communication becoming impersonal, and frequently stymied in favor of hype generation, yet when Rioters do interact, we've frequently had to deal with a pretty arrogant and unprofessional attitude, with several members of the company going here to pick fights and whine about how we're all negative, or don't matter in the face of their own, poorly-interpreted statistics. This has become a major problem in recent seasons, as it has driven the devs to implement changes absolutely no-one wanted, and maintain them in the game long after the playerbase's collective backlash should have told them not to. It's the reason why Dynamic Queue and the Ardent Censer meta remained for so long, and it's the reason why we have universally loathed reworks such as Mordekaiser's or Malzahar's still in the game. I suspect this change in attitude has cost League a very large amount of players, and the very fact that Riot has abruptly stopped publicly releasing their player count, revenue, etc. for the past three years heavily suggests this as well.
I still hope/wish for both Riot and League to improve, which is why I still post here, but I'm becoming increasingly less hopeful. It doesn't feel like we players are really being listened to, or like Riot cares that much even when they do read our feedback. There are a ton of major changes to League I'd like to see happen, as I think they've become necessary in an increasingly broken game, but I don't know if Riot has the resources, courage or even awareness to do so anymore. I haven't been liking the direction League has been taken for some time, and to some extent I don't even feel like there even is a clear direction anymore. All of this just leads to this state where I feel sad that this game I love has changed in a way I don't like, but also powerless at how little my opinion now seems to matter in the eyes of what has become a pretty corporate game developer. I've been waiting for the moment where I could get back onto League, and experience the same joy I felt throughout Seasons 3, 4, and 5, but at this point I'm not sure if that will ever happen.
. This guy is now "how not to rewrite a lore: the champion".
on a cannon were it was taken turret in a few hits. When it comes to normal players we just get ignored by Riot
