Is League Healthy Right Now?

Let me preface all of this by saying the following: I love League of Legends. I have loyally played since around season 2 and want nothing more than to see the game continue to succeed. If I am angry, it is only because I passionately care about it and its community. I know things evolve over time and I have enjoyed many, many of the changes that we've seen over these years with few complaints. However, it seems the current state of affairs has become overall more toxic on a mechanical level, leading to heightened emotions and more toxicity on a personal level. People seem overall madder now than ever with the game seeming overall less fun under general circumstances than ever. It's not easy to direct that anger at any one thing because... honestly, it sometimes feels like the entire game is broken. In the interest of myself as well as the League community, I want to share my feelings and opinions on the current state of affairs.

Nowadays the game feels like League of Snowballs, where you either stomp or you get stomped. I'm not saying we don't like team play. We do! But when everything is decided by outside interference rather than your own efforts, it makes the game feel meaningless. I can be 4/0/0 in my lane and my teammates will just jump in to tear down the enemy tower in seconds. I can be 0/4/0 in my lane and my teammates will just jump in to tear down the enemy tower in seconds. They're like a ravenous swarm of locusts, constantly hungering for their next objective. In the face of something so vast as an entire team, my singular self just feels redundant, so why should I even be here? I get it, objectives are how you win games; but at this point we're just circumventing the necessary steps intended to reach that conclusion and just powering through it with sheer numbers. Kills are supposed to be important! CS is supposed to be important! Forcing your opponent back to base is supposed to be important! These are stepping stones that are supposed to create the means and the opportunity for a turret to be taken. They are the depth and meaning in the game and why it's supposed to be fun. So why is Riot so ravenously incentivizing us to skip all of this and go straight to the finish line? I thoroughly believe that even though objectives are the ultimate goal, the game will only be healthy if they are not the primary focus!

In a game of Chess, do you go straight for the king? Of course not! You are expected to outmaneuver your opponent many times over so you can whittle down the overwhelming defenses in order to create an opening to strike at and bring down the king. In a game of Football, is every play a mad dash or throw for the endzone? Nonsense! They break the distance into small parts, securing checkpoints along the way, opening up multiple options beyond (but including!) simply rushing the endzone, which is why the sport is diverse and engaging. I still love you Riot, but at this moment I believe you're being a bit childish by putting entirely too much focus on making the game fun to watch, forcing constant climaxes with minimal buildup, which unfortunately makes it far less fun to actually play. A good story has a lengthy buildup with small events scattered throughout and a brief climax before winding down. I feel like I've given too many analogies, but the message has been so forgotten for so long that I can't help but continue striking at that dead horse...

Another atrocious culprit is that damage is out of hand. Specifically, physical damage is grossly and belligerently way out of hand. I honestly feel like mages as a whole are in a healthy spot, but physical damage dealers are in such an unhealthy, overloaded, bloated, insurmountably powerful spot that mages and tanks feel like crap by comparison, minus a few outliers like Brand support, who is only capitalizing on the toxic "oneshot or get oneshotted" state of affairs right now. I mean, as just one example, if a mage is overperforming then you can just adjust his cooldowns and ratios, whereas an AD will always still have massive autoattacks and probably be either tankier or more able to escape. I tend to notice that AP characters are on average way less capable of surviving unfavorable situations. If get flanked by a champion or two that they can't handle in a fight, they're just screwed. Some fringe cases exist like but that's just about all of them. Whereas on the AD spectrum, even proper flanking with fed characters won't be much concern for all of which are reasonably within the spectrum who just generally don't give a damn and escape anyway. Despite overall superior survivability, AD characters also tend to be the premier choice for dealing damage as well. Harsh is the history of lethality being broken, but how many complaints of magic pen do you typically see? Many are the eras where ADCs are too strong, but how many times can you look back and say the mage class as a whole was dominating the game? All in all, you can usually reasonably build against magic damage without sacrificing your build effectiveness, unless it's who will just blow anything up, but that's just how he rolls. AD, on the other hand, is infamously the problem child here, with its assassins, bruisers and marksmen often being the ones setting the toxic trends in staggering numbers. Again, there are individuals like Sejuani who was too powerful for a time, but the AP section as a whole was not the issue; only that character was.

Have we considered it might be that the items themselves aren't accounting for all the discrepancies between damage types and/or their interactions against other items and their users? Or perhaps AP items are immensely lacking in variety, generally forcing unadaptive builds onto the champions who use them? I mean how many AP items build against AD while still remaining offensive? But AD has and their damage dealers can often build just fine, but most AP damage dealers would be making a significant trade off by purchasing . I believe jungle items also do a good job of demonstrating the overwhelming lack of diversity/adaptability in AP character builds. is an AP champion's only option with being strictly AD, and even caters more to autoattackers like or just pure tanks, and though most tanks are actually AP... I don't really think they identify with a damage type one way or the other. What unique items do AP characters have? is just , is just , is just , is just etcetera. AD mostly has the same tools as AP. Despite that, it also has lots of its own amazing things like and, y'know, LIFESTEAL which is kind of a gigantic freakin' deal right? Really good for carrying when you're ahead. Plus only offers middling AP and a %reduction to a stat that, for most people, doesn't even grow naturally anyway. Meanwhile AD has two options based on circumstance both of which give middling damage AND a very good bonus effect. And which set is the one getting buffed? Naturally, it's the AD set so now they affect base stats as well. Why is it getting buffed anyway? Well, that's because other AD items are SO GOOD already that these aren't great options comparatively despite being pretty good as is. Isn't it fair to say AD is the privileged group here? Even if I'm wrong (I don't feel like I am) about them being more problematic, I don't think anyone would argue they have more build diversity and adaptability, as well as more unique items for all sorts of special circumstances.

I was in a game recently where me and my team were up against a Talon/Rengar/Irelia/Quinn/Soraka. 3 AD assassins and 1 AD diver, supported by a healer. I joked to my allies, "If anyone here doesn't build armor, I'm disowning you." They laughed and agreed, ready to build against their opponents. For reference, our team comp was Cho'gath(me)/Zyra/Jax/Vayne/Swain; a pretty nice team comp with many desirable elements. We take our lumps in the early game as expected, but as we got our core items and introduced armor into our builds we started blazing through the early handicap and even established a lead. I as Cho had over 300 armor, 5000HP and enough damage to solokill even Irelia in under 10 seconds, almost oneshotting anyone else. Despite being built so thoroughly against, they were able to spring back after buying armor pen items and start tearing through even me before I could so much as get a full combo off. We ended up losing that game against an enemy comp that brought nothing to the table but damage, overwhelmingly most of which should have been negated outright. It's not like we threw it by doing something stupid. Most of us played well for our elo. We had the better comp, better build, and we played very reasonably well, but the sheer power of physical attackers and their infallible items allowed them to tear us apart before we could even react. They were able to assassinate a 300 armor 5000HP Cho, a Jax with 210 armor and Swain with 155 armor and Zhonya's, all while under heavy CC and fire, in a matter of seconds with only pure physical damage and almost no CC.

Frankly, even with a reasonable level of underperformance, I'd think such a handicap against opponents of the same elo should rightly result in a crippling defeat. Instead we see situations like this all the time now. They aren't even uncommon. Right now, AD damage is king, and all that stands in its way will be mowed down by its sovereign might. So of course we have tons of people playing bursty early game characters because it's all that stands a chance, which turns the game into rocket tag. Whoever hits the other person with their oneshot combo first wins.

So what are we left with? A game with no build up that heads straight for objectives and is saturated with team fights that end in three seconds due to overwhelming force on both sides. It's no wonder games are a foregone conclusion entirely too early; people are ragequitting after one or two kills, which happens two or three minutes into a game because we're forced into a deathmatch over siege minions as the only decent revenue in lane, and now Scuttler is forcing jungle brawls. As soon as the tiniest of gold leads is established, the entire rest of the team will jump into that lane or jungle to ensure the lead is kept and the snowball just commences from there, rewarding that team exorbitant amounts of gold for first turret and denying the defending team any chance to catch up. Creepscoring was already more of a long-term plan before its value got reduced even further for some strange reason, and it's much more difficult to properly do than to simply braindead team rush a lane, so why pick the high risk low reward option over the low risk high reward one? So the only option you have when behind is to YOLO yourself at the hypercharged enemy team and hope you can perform a miracle upset, else you all die instantly and solidify your defeat. Fighting under turret isn't going to help much either because your whole team is dead by the time it shoots the enemy Tahm Kench three times, and we all know that catfish-frog-demon thing couldn't be bothered to care.

I guess what I'm trying to say is, this game can definitely feel broken at the moment, and the reasons are pretty crystal clear. I remember counterplay being mentioned a lot in recent years as very important, but where's the counterplay in being oneshotted? Where is the counterplay in lacking proper items that can effectively deal with what you're facing? I believe the game has too much damage with too little in the way of building against it. I believe AD characters get all the fun toys. I believe late game characters are getting the shaft in favor of early game characters. I mean, there's always an early game but there's not always a late game, y'know? So why is it that the late game characters don't even influence the late game as dramatically as early game characters influence the early game? Character diversity is low because of this. The game feels boring when you're winning and boring when you're losing, which in some people's opinions is putting it generously. It's more stressful than ever since one misstep spells death, and death might spell loss. There's too much negative with too little positive. I believe that's why the community seems toxic. Am I crazy or do I have some kind of a point here?