Why Quintessences made games longer, but more fun.

You start a match. Queue is about 5 min. Find a match. Champion select. Dodge.

I mean, well. You start the match. You spawn in the rift. Everything is peachy.

Season 6: 15 min in, you're still in laning phase. Level 11, and halfway through your build. The top laners are both tanks. Midlaners begin to roam, but only to snag a blue buff. Junglers are level 12.

Season 8: 15 min in, enemy inhibitor and one of the nexus turrets have been taken. You're level 13 and your jungler is level 15. You all push mid and end the game with a last minute Rift Harald and Baron Buff.

Matches have gotten... really short. Too short for comfort. Matches in the rift begin and end so fast, going into Twisted Treeline lasts longer.

This was because of the runes of that time.

Before you had attack speed steroids and stacking max %HP, everything was per level. Levels meant a lot. You either farm a good 15 min or your presence was unneeded. Junglers and Supports had items which pushed in their aggressive aspect to boost them since they can't farm. Kill gold was more spread across the team than it is now. Funnel strats weren't "Funnel" strats. It was only making your team stronger. Back then, carrying on 18 kills was godly, but granted barely a gold advantage.

Now, you can almost get 40 kills in a 20 min game. Everything is so funneled they released a support to "unfunnel" the marksmen. And early game is NOT great, so much that the best early game champion; Talon; is preforming better in late game.

If we had more control about what we wanted our champion to do like back then, we could make games more... "Fair."