50-50 Booking
Riot has shifted (in a not so subtle or slow way) towards a mentality used by the WWE. This is what is called 50-50 booking. WWE believes, in their idiocy, that fans do not care about finishes to matches or who wins or loses, despite recording the lowest ratings for RAW repeatedly over the last few years. Despite the outrage at HiaC at the finish, Vince McMahon decides to laugh at his fans, the people who pay him money.
Riot has decided this is the business model they wish to follow. Now, hear me out. I am not talking about the "stay at 50% winrate" type thing. This is something far worse.
In an ideal world, if you are at the ELO you should be, you will hover around a 50% winrate (based on current performance) unless you are at Challenger, in which case you can have higher than 50% or you are at Iron 4, where you can have lower.
This is all fine and dandy because it is logical.
However, the problem is, adding aspects to the game that enforce coin-flip mentality to rule the game means everything you did up until that point is all for nothing.
You can play a perfect game of solo queue. You can dominate lane, you can roam and get your other lanes ahead, you can do everything right... And for some reason, your team decides to make the call to start Baron even with you warning pinging them not to. You do your best to stop the enemy team from jumping in but nothing you do matters as your team refuses to listen and the enemy JG steals the Baron.
The Baron Buff is so strong that it is hard to lose a game with it, if your team is even slightly decent. So... your hard work is undone and 20-40 minutes of your time (or more if the teams are super slow) is gone forever with something you have no control over.
The Elder Dragon is already a late-game win-con as well with similar effects on the game (especially if you get to two of them).
Riot looks to further compound this problem by adding in an execute to Elder Dragon, making it even more of a 50-50 if your team refuses to do any setup or if the enemy gets a lucky steal.
Even worse than this is the extreme frequency of bots, AFKs and outright trolls that have come into the game over the last year or two. You have a fair chance of losing outright because of this. Previously, this was more winnable than it is now. However, with the addition of turret plates, the lowering of skill in the game, the increase in number of ganks made by JGs because of JG changes, etc the snowball is nearly unstoppable unless the enemy team is riddled with incompetence.
Much the same can be said for turbo-int'ing players that walk into lane and instantly feed, TP back to lane, feed again, walk back and feed again and rinse and repeat until their enemy laner is able to turret dive them and they are complaining that they cannot play safer because they can be dove. The level of power on bruisers and assassins is such that once this happens, the game is nearly unwinnable if that player has any concept of macro at all.
A big issue is the almost nonexistent cooldowns in the game. CDR is extremely common on every role and cooldowns are way too short for almost all classes. Tons of classes have almost no mana requirements (except the more traditional ones) and some of the worst offenders do not even have energy.
These types of things make the combat far less based on skill and more based on who has the more powerful win buttons.
This reduces skill and increases the odds of getting a free win because X player on Y team got fed by Z int'ing player or AFK (or both).
This causes a lot of the frustration in the game and a lot of toxicity. The hyper-mobile damage meta is further proof of this. It is flashy and makes people look and feel like they are Faker, but in reality, they are pushing 2 buttons and getting a triple kill because... Rito said so? Take Ryze as example. His previous iteration required knowledge of his combos and matchups and timing on his button presses, etc. He is one of the champions Faker suggested to learn to play because he teaches you to push the right buttons in the right order. Now? You push two buttons and you make everything blow up like you see in the pro games and it feels and sounds and looks impressive, but it is not. The champion is a standard burst mage with a lot of his intricacies removed for the sake of lower-skill players.
This trend has happened with almost every champion and even the design team is setup to create this type of champion. This makes one mistake start to funnel into a snowball effect that can be almost impossible to come back from in most games. In previous metas you could clean up your play and if you played very well you have a chance of outscaling. Now, a player with a lead can easily push the lead further and further until there is no fighting them and do so with minimal skill and even less game knowledge.
Most of the matchups are identical now. Press your win-buttons faster than the enemy does. In previous metas itemization and matchup knowledge were more important.
These things create a feeling of the coin-flip games that are talked about so often. And that is before we even get into the paper-rock-scissors in the draft.
Drafting now is based on getting counterpicks in solo queue. If your top laner picks first and the enemy picks a mage or ranged person to counter their bruiser or tank, they will rage-quit rather fast, after feeding the person and leaving the team to deal with them 4v5. The draft decides the game way too often because of this same mentality of making the game so "accessible" to people of any skill level. The types of playable champions should be a goal of yours, not a gift.
If you want to learn to play Akali like Chovy, you should earn it, not be handed a million dashes with insta-burst damage so you can feel like you are good some percentage of the time and feel awful the other percentage of the time. You should practice and prove you /can/ be that good.
You should not go into a game and know the game will either be lost or won at 6-8 minutes but be forced to play for another 20-30 minutes while your team rages at each other or hope for a massive comeback at the 40+ minute mark after you spent every second of the game doing everything you can to prevent your team from losing while they turbo-feed.
And while you cannot control the behavior of your players, the drafts and style of gameplay encouraged in this 50-50 meta is this "I quit" mentality. It comes from frustration at the game being directly against you.
If you want more proof of this, the domination of snowball champions with overloaded kits, generally assassins or heavily overpowered bruisers shows quite a bit of it. However, the sudden burst of hook champions in bot lane (and with Pyke in mid or top even) dominating everything, making every late game team fight whoever lands the first insta-kill hook (and the buffing of Blitzcrank to match).
Another thing to consider is the level of play at World's this year. Sure, we get to see some truly incredible plays and games, but many of the teams in many regions are extremely weak. Outside of the top team or two in NA and EU, the regions as a whole are exceptionally bad. LPL and and LCK have much stronger mid and lower tier teams so that helps a lot at least. However, you can see things like Garen/Yuumi, Sona/Tahm Kench, and various other gigantic balls of stats just taking over pro games. Whoever happens to get a better RNG on drakes during their gigantic ball of stats powerspike has a huge advantage.
Only the really good teams (in fact only SKT?), seem to know how to handle this strategy without banning Yuumi, for example.and no one would claim that Garen takes any exceptional level of skill to pull off. It makes for a very boring, very low-skill level event for anything less than top tier or just below top tier teams. It also adds to the idea of 50-50 booking as so many of the games are decided by one tiny misclick or baron steal in darkness, where before the better team almost always won.
Just some food for thought.
This is long-winded and not perfectly worded as I am still a little groggy and have felt rough, but I do want to say that this is a bad direction for any game or form of entertainment. You can see it with the $700,000,000 in decreased merchandise sales from Riot last year or with the viewership outside of China for World's, the cuts to various parts of Riot, etc.
Thoughts?
[sg-ezreal]