Twisted Treeline [Dealing with the "Funnel" Issue]
Hello, My name is Divine I have been primarily a 3v3 only player for the past 5 years.
I have been challenger for 4 of those 5 years and if there is one thing that I can't seem to understand is why our community is completely ignored by Riot.
We have been dealing with the issue of support meta (Called Funnel meta in 5v5) since late 2014/early 2015 and it has just been getting worse and worse to deal with each season. Almost everyone who plays 3v3 casually that i know of hates it and thinks it is not fun to play against, most of the challenger players that i know of between NA and EUW/EUNE think that it is unfun to play with and unfun to play against it. However Riot doesn't even consider adjusting things to help balance things out.
However, when funnel meta showed up in 5v5 Riot immediately reacts and tries to neutralize it as fast as possible due to being incredibly toxic for the game and being unfun to play against. I understand that 5v5 is the main gamemode and riot want to focus most of their attention there and 3v3 players make up such a small minority of the community that we are basically negligible (Around 0.07%) i believe was the amount of games we had last time we were given data. We have been begging for things to change for many years and have been left ignored, there have been rare occasions where we get some kind of bug fix or thing added to 3s, but i don't think i have seen that happen more than once or twice a year.
The changes riot made to jungle items with monster hunter works very well for the environment of summoners rift, but on twisted treeline you can barely feel the effects of monster hunter. When the talk came around to whether or not they would even add monster hunter to 3v3 riot told us that they liked that we had 2 different playstyles we could use, either jungle meta or funnel meta. But there really is not 2 options, in order to beat a team using funnel meta in high MMR you need to play a perfect game where you never lose pressure, and never die before 15 minutes as the jungle meta team. Playing funnel meta vs funnel meta is just a farming contest until 1 team makes a single mistake and the game ends there in most cases.
We have been begging for anything to happen for years now, and I just really want to know if anyone at riot even supports us in trying to balance out our game mode. A lot of us only play twisted treeline, and being ignored because our community is small really hurts. Most of us do not ask for much, but some love to help save our map from being completely dead would be a great service to us.
Having Riot acknowledge that there is a problem with twisted treeline would be the first step, but honestly all that is really needed is more bans. There are around 10 champions that just basically block any other playstyle from being relevant however with only 6 bans we are left throwing them all at 6/10 and hoping we get more of the broken champs than the enemy team. Another solution would be removing or nerfing support items or even adding an exp penalty to monster hunter for 3s. Supports and the funnel champion scale so incredibly fast that they basically become untouchable by the 10 minute mark unless you constantly put pressure on them, but then run the risk of dying once and guaranteeing a loss. I'm not sure what the best solution to fixing 3v3 is at this point but honestly, if we can't get any love to balance the map a little bit i think most of us would rather have riot remove the gamemode all together. I love 3v3 too much to just sit back and watch riot let it die.
