The Contradiction of the Pre-Season.

Firstly, this is not a Riot bashing post, as my opinions on the current state of the game are mixed, and have always been mixed since literally the release of the game because it's impossible to appease everyone. The reason for this is to point out the contradictory nature of Riots stated goals of this season, point out what they did not achieve, and what they did achieve.

The contradiction is that they wanted to both reduce snowball, and also make games easier to close out. I realized, as I'm sure most of you did, this alone is a massively contradictory statement. Closing out games that you're winning more easily is pretty much exactly what snowballing is. You can't reduce snowballing and make it easier to win a game at the same time, you have to pick one or another. Turret plating was a great idea to reduce snowballing, having the plates give massive gold spikes does not. Increasing the overall power of minions does make it easier to close out a game, but it makes coming back difficult.

This isn't entirely Riots fault, we want it both ways, but we can't have that. We can't have a game where when we're ahead, it's easier to close out, while also not having snowball.

There's easy fixes to reduce snowballing/improve comeback odds, reduce/remove turret plating bonuses, reduce gold value of the losing teams minions while increasing the value of the winning teams minions. But is that what we really want? Do we want to see games rubber banding instead of snowballing, do we want to play games like that?

Honestly, I don't know, I'm not making any suggestions on which way the game should be taken because both ways have pros and cons, and I'll probably continue to play it either way. What I do know is that I love the game, and if you read all of this, agree or disagree with me, you do too, and I don't want to see this game burn down and fade into obscurity like so many before it.

This year marks 9 years of playing and loving this game. This game and this community have seen me through my marriage, the birth of my child, and my subsequent divorce. It has seen me through both the highest highs and darkest lows of my life, and I want, more than anything for this game to be here and popular and amazing for the next 9 years.

P.S. Turrets still don't do enough damage, #ritoplzfix