Save League of Legends - Revert Runes Reforged
In my opinion, season 8 was a complete mess. The rune overhaul was poorly designed and caused a giant, drawn-out decrease in playerbase and popularity.
From what I found out during the last months, Riot seemingly was trying to make League of Legends more fast-paced in order to appeal to the Chinese internet café scene. It would be nonsense to blame a company for trying to be economically successful, however, dumbing down the game caused a major decrease in game quality, therefore players complained and left. Nexus Blitz is probably an attempt to implement a fast-paced game mode while carefully slowing down Summoner's Rift games again.
Pointing fingers is not a solution and I do not care who's responsible for this approach, but we have to agree on one thing: it was a mistake. Admitting this mistake and getting rid of it is the first step to get back the game we all loved.
Reverting the state of the game back to the end of season 7 might sound weird at first (and I do know season 7 was not perfect), but it is a far better solution than trying to fix some numbers here and there while postponing most of the work to next pre-season.
I am talking about:
- Giving champions their base resistances back
Champions need more bulk. Strategy almost left this game completely last pre-season and it turned into a button-mashing oneshot fiesta. The calm aspect of League is gone - you are in constant fear of getting oneshot and most of the time there is nothing you can do about it. Ten kills at five minutes is no rarity; a 5v5 game of chess simply turned into a no-brainer. It is not fun and engaging - it is boring.
Increasing early tankiness will also make immobile champions viable again. The time window to kill someone was much bigger before season 8, so mobile champs had to take a lot more risk when going in. They just didn't succeed as much at killing their opponent all the time.
- Bringing back the runes + masteries system
The current runes dish out too much damage and cause more problems than solving them. Fervor of Battle was a healthier version of Conqueror and Jhin wasn't in such a frustrating spot when he used Deathfire Touch instead of Hail of Blades (which isn't used by anyone else). Grasp is just a tool for toplane abuse and there are too many niche runes that do not feel satisfying on most champs (Kleptomancy, Lethal Tempo, Glacial Augment).
I do not think all of the new runes are terrible and I believe we can keep some of them that turned out to be decent, flexible and rather healthy ones, like Guardian for example. However, the majority of old masteries was a lot more reasonable from my point of view.
In terms of the old rune system: I still do not know why it got removed. It was unique, fully customizable and encouraged creativity. Making runes free will also make the whole point of "players sitting on too much BE" invalid. They also helped not getting killed in an instant.
- Giving towers back their strength
Towers are too weak. We all know this. The problem of diving at almost no risk is heavily linked to the ridiculous amount of damage in the game, but towers also die too quickly. At this point, they do nothing but steal your minion gold. Especially nexus towers, your last line of defense, are, simply put, a joke.
Just like champions, they need their bulk back.
At least in terms of game balance it is possible to turn back time to fix mistakes and start over. 
"Ah... that fresh start smell."
We can go back and try again; this doesn't sound like a bad idea to me at all. What do you guys think?
I just want my favorite game back.
