I left a game in progress for the first time in five years.

Let's have a chat about the state of this game. (Again...)

Blue Kayn running around with insane movement speed like literally everything is warded, just picking us off in our own jungle one by one in two shots. I don't know if he was vision hacking, extremely lucky, or gifted at predicting our positions. What I do know is this: The game was nothing but a juiced-up power fantasy for him. He didn't touch a single tower. Not once. Not one tower in 32 minutes. He wasn't even present when his team took dragons, as far as I could tell. The only thing he did all game was chase us around through jungle and oneshot us. Even when we played the escape right, he'd just Chill Smite us and oneshot. Oneshot, oneshot, oneshot.

The game as it stands now exists for this sort of thing. It's tooled to give people who pick extremely imbalanced champions the means to demolish enemy players with zero effort. If you farm up enough gold for just one item on certain champions right now, that's it. It's game over. He's going to kill you. Again and again and again. He'll do it under your towers. He'll do it in your jungle. He'll do it in your fountain if he has to. It's going to happen, and there's nothing, no juke, no build, no flash, no CC, nothing you can do to stop it.

Video games are great for that. Make you feel invincible. Letting you stomp on all the opposition. It's a nice change from real life, where obstacles seem to make every step more difficult than the last. But don't we all think it's not even a little too much to ask that such things be kept to singleplayer games? Multiplayer games are supposed to be about competition. The thrill of engaging opponents with tactics you never thought of, methods you've never seen, and trying to adapt and overcome. At the end of a good multiplayer match, you should feel like congratulating your opponent for their victory and friending them to play together sometime.

That's not how you feel after League games anymore. If you won, you feel smug. Arrogant. You feel like you're using the opponent as a footstool, and that's usually exactly why you played. If you lost, you feel decimated. Like there's no point in ever touching the game again. The game right now is so... wild. So unpredictable. So extreme. Almost everything is overtuned. This game we used to love, that used to inspire us to practice, to learn the macro, to think and develop groundbreaking new builds... Now it just tells you what to build for Maximum Enemy QQ and asks both sides to try and make the enemy forfeit before you do. The goal should not be making the opponent forfeit! Surrender is supposed to be a last resort, not the endgame. Yet for every ten games I play, the losing side surrenders in eight of them. Losing isn't fun anymore. And for competitors like myself, winning isn't fun either. It's not enjoyable destroying another player's self-esteem because I picked Yasuo or Mordekaiser.

So yeah, I did abandon my team. I apologize to them, but their hearts were already out of it anyway. They saw no path to victory from the moment their 23/1 Kayn was 15/0. But I, for one, had taken quite enough of playing deliberately to avoid Kayn and getting hunted down by him from across the map anyway. I was tired of being the stepping stone in his power fantasy. I'm a human being, and I refuse to let a video game treat me like a stranger's heavybag, so I'm not ashamed to admit that I left right here on Riot's own boards. You wanna ban me? You can't, because I quit.