Fighting a Proxy Singed is the single worst experience in this game.

Some prefaces:

1. I am not claiming Singed is unbalanced, or in need of a specific buff or nerf. This is a topic about Singed's champion direction, and how it enables a strategy that, when you play against, removes all the fun from the game for you.
2. I am a level 30 EUW player with around 4k games played since pre-Season 1; this is just my NA account.
3. For anyone not aware, proxy Singed is when people play Singed between the current enemy tower, and their Nexus, using his poison trail to kill minion waves while avoiding any combat with the enemy laner.

Fighting against a proxy Singed makes me not want to play this game. There are plenty of match-ups in LoL that are biased in one champion's favour, and heavens know I've raged my fair share against them, but very few completely remove the reasons I play the game in the manner proxy Singed does. I can appreciate that Singed's champion design is intended to make him a tanky champion you do not chase; the problem is that proxy Singed creates a situation that is lose-lose for their opponent, often both in-game and for the player's actual enjoyment.

For me, the laning phase is an important part of LoL. Spacing, harassing, positioning for ganks and attempting to avoid theirs, trying to keep your CS reasonable, and taking enemy towers, or denying them creeps through zoning; all of these are interesting game mechanics that players learn to master as they get better at playing the game. Improving at any of these is a tangible reward for players, and none of them are in play when you are playing against a champion who isn't even on the same screen as you half the time.

Let's first look at how dealing with proxy Singed is a lose-lose in gameplay terms.

There are two options when facing him; the first is farm equally yourself, before the minions hit the turret (Plan A). We should then compare the relative efficiency of the two farming methods.

Singed uses a very small portion of his mana to clear a wave, and because he is constantly on the move, takes minimal damage from the creep wave while doing so. Additionally, because he is farming between the towers, the creeps will never damage his own tower.

Most other top laners, barring exceptions such as Heimerdinger, will not be even remotely as efficient, especially during the earlier stages of the game. If you let the minions reach the tower and last hit between turret shots, your turret is taking damage while Singed's is not. If you tank the creeps yourself before they hit the turret, then with no creep wave of your own, you will take full damage from the wave, meaning you need to have some sort of sustenance for yourself if you don't want to end up on low health and very vulnerable to a gank. Finally, because you never have a creep wave of your own, you can never push the enemy's turret.

This situation is at best going even, and in most cases, losing resources compared to Singed. This is amplified if you do not have Teleport yourself, as it means you will also lose a creep wave while returning to lane.

The second option is to attack Singed, either solo, or with help from your jungler and/or mid (Plan B).

Firstly, there is the creep cost to consider. The nature of Singed's Q means that even while being ganked, he still has a good chance of getting the CS from a passing minion wave. You, meanwhile, will generally lose at least one minion wave in the time it takes to kill Singed (if you succeed), if not two depending on how difficult it is to kill him at the current stage of the game.

Secondly, the pressure cost elsewhere. If mid comes to help, the enemy mid is getting a free push on mid tower, and your mid is similarly losing CS from being out of their lane. It can be very difficult in solo queue to convince a mid laner to come and help kill a proxy Singed. Singed's presence in your own jungle also causes problems for the jungler. A good proxy Singed will bring wards to aid their escape and also keep vision over much of your jungle, as well as potentially stealing jungle camps when available.

Thirdly, and perhaps the biggest problem, is that even trying to chase Singed away can be very difficult depending on your team composition; you are not guaranteed a kill just because you decide to tackle the issue this way, as Singed is designed to be a champion who is hard to catch. His damage never requires him to stop moving, meaning he will always be moving faster than a champion who has to stop to cast a spell or move; he also has inherent movement speed on his ult, and the slow on his W, not to mention most Singed players running Ghost.

Finally, although the change to allow champions to regain their kill value (i.e. how much you get when you kill them) by killing minions has alleviated the problem of it not being worth your time in gold to kill a, e.g. 0/7 proxy Singed, it is still a contributing factor.

Essentially, Singed is the perfect storm of exceptionally efficient wave clear coupled with excellent escape options that allows him to use this strategy to its fullest. While some other champions like Udyr can also try to proxy, they generally have to commit more, have a harder time escaping, and need a bigger gold advantage over their laning opponent to make it work.

The next aspect, most importantly here, is why I call this strategy anti-fun.

In Plan A, you are not doing anything enjoyable in the game. Auto-attacking minions with nobody around is not fun. Nobody is so interested in this activity that they load up Practice mode just so they can kill creeps in a game with nobody else in it. None of the enjoyable aspects of laning that I mentioned above are present here. You're not even practising your skills at last hitting - unless done under the turret - since you have to kill the creep wave from 100 to 0. There is absolutely nothing enjoyable about this experience whatsoever, and it is not why I, or anyone I know of, plays LoL.

And in Plan B, you are almost always playing on Singed's terms. Yes, you're doing it in your jungle/top lane, which confers some advantage in how much distance Singed has to cover to reach his own safety, but you inherently must play to what Singed is best at, which is escaping from being chased, while putting out damage on those who are chasing, leaving them vulnerable too. You know that you're losing any creeps in top lane while it's happening, and that your tower is being pressured while you're away, and the only hope is that you will actually kill Singed to try and make it worth it. Now that death timers in the early game are far less punitive, this also applies to how quickly a proxy Singed can return to lane and get back to their devilry.

With this huge tract of text provided, I cannot say what I would do to improve this situation. I can't personally see any simple solution to this problem, as it is an emergent problem from a number of different factors, all of which combine to produce this result. I can only repeat my main point, which is that playing against this is deeply enjoyable and frustrating, and every time it happens it is the last time I play LoL that day because it is simply not fun and there is no real reason to play LoL casually, if not for fun. I have not yet encountered a single person who can say that they enjoy the gameplay of playing against proxy Singed.

Please, please, please Riot; take a look at Singed, and try and create a champion who retains the core identity of a 'tanky' mad scientist, but does not have this strategy available to him. The recent buff to his E was enough to bring back a resurgence of Singed players, and with him, this playstyle.