A New Perspective

So Everyone has complained from time to time about various things. Illaoi is broken, darius is broken, where is my DFG, etc etc.... But why does this happen? What encourages these changes? Why does Soraka have skillshots in her kit?

I would like to paint a simple picture for all of you today to put a perspective on the recent balance changes to the game as well as changes to the community and its development in general and why we are here today. It is up to you to decide whether or not im blowing smoke or am actually on to something here.

I guess i will start at the beginning. When League was still in its infant stages. Remember when the summoners rift had snow on it? Or when you could go gragas and malphite botlane without a care in the world? Remember when you where first learning how the game worked and people helped you out and the community was somewhat nice. Remember Nikasaur? Yes those times. The beginning of a magical game that just felt fun to play. A time when we where all innocent and care free, and people could play ap Master Yi because the word meta didnt exist yet.

What is meta and where did it come from? Well meta defines how we should play and what works best depending on the recent patch changes. Terms like FOTM and Champselect.org come from this concept. Who decides what the meta should be? Drives it to go a certain way? Us? Wrong. Riot? Wrong again. The pros decide what the meta is. But but why isnt riot in charge of the meta? Its simple really, Riot gets their revenue from the pros. (twitch streams, Madison Square Garden, pro merchandise). In fact the riot points we purchase dont hold a candle to the dough they rake in from the pro scene. So of course they are going to make changes that benefit the pros and damn solo queue players to the dark recesses of hell. LCS bigplays = LCS bigmoney.

"So if the meta is defined by pros who know what works best and Riot makes changes because of that then how does it affect our community?" Well im glad you asked ladies and gentlemen. Have you ever been flamed for playing teemo? or taking mid? or banning the wrong champ? All of these things are effected by our current meta on a daily basis. Most of the time people are toxic over one of two things. They didnt get their op pick/gank/whatever is op at the time. Or they are blaming others because there isnt possibly anything wrong with the way they play at all. One of these problems is caused by meta, the other is natural in every game on the market that i can think of. In general the meta restricts our choices in how we want to play the game and it dictates what we can do successfully as well as adding toxicity to our games. Just food for thought. :)

So how do we change this, how do we make solo/duo Que better for ourselves. How do we prevent our items and summoners from being deleted and our ap/ad ratios restricted so we can only play one role with our favorite champions? Ill let you all in on a big secret. We the community are the ones with all the power here.

If the food chain goes like this: Pros - Riot - Twitch Streamers/ Youtubers - Community

Then it looks as if Pros are the bigwigs to go after. After all Riot needs the pros to make them the money, therefor they try to make them happy and spend all their time advertising them for those snappy LCS Bigplays. But who put the pros on such a high pedestal??? We did. We hype the pros up all the time, we watch their streams, we show up to Madison Square Garden, we buy their merchandise. We dump so much money into the pros all the time and Riot makes bank off of it. Sooooo if we stop having nergasms every time dyrus changes his facial expression for a split second and stop wasting our lives watching two people 1v1 anivia, then riot will have to start appealing to us. And then its back to the good ol days of champions who dont have 8 different passives per ability and items that actually make sense to build. The game will be fun again like it should have been all of this time. Dont forget we make up 99% of the community, i think if we express a little self control and stop jizzing on our computer screens over Faker clearing a creep wave without his flash up we could make a change for the better. Not just for our community but for our sanity and entertainment value.

Thanks for entertaining the opinion that maybe we dont have to be bottom feeding scrublords that are at the mercy of a greedy business.

Power to the people!