"What happened to league of legends?"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iqem7TI0XR4

I can empathize with him, even though I haven't played nearly as much, when he says he's tired of change itself.

He says that LoL has no real end point of balance they are trying to achieve, they just keep the game in a constant state of flux for the sake of freshness. But the concept of this constant flux itself actually gets old. He's yearning for some stability.

I don't think it's an impossible or unreasonable request when you consider that for many years Dota 2 was a relatively unchanged game. They seemed to take the attitude of "if it ain't broke don't fix it". They almost never added new features, heroes, or items. They took a light touch with regards to balance changes, only moving in when necessary. They were trying to preserve the integrity of a game that was already competitive and popular before they even bought it. They didn't just fiddle with things to see what would happen. They didn't feel the need to force every champion to have an equal play or winrate, they were ok with some heroes being pocket picks. They didn't care about tweaking everything constantly to enforce a meta, because they let the players decide what they were going to do with the tools they were given. They didn't gut your favorite heroes because they were terrorizing low elo, even though they had no presence in pro play and no viability in high elo. They looked to the best players as a gauge of where legitimate balance issues existed and only balanced based on that. They expected low elo players to just git gud.

Change for the sake of change is bad. It's exhausting to have to keep up with it all. The more invested you get in particular roles and champions, the worst you are effected by arbitrary and unnecessary changes.

I never use to want to one trick to climb because I just found it boring. But this season I decided I was going to do it. I invest all this time into mastering Shyvana. I'm climbing MMR with a 75% winrate and seeing how high can take her before I go into ranked, then bam, jungle changes. Now shyvana is dumpster tier and the jungle in general is not very impactful at low elo. So even my role experience isn't that transferable to carrying the game anymore, even if I switched jungle champions. I feel forced to go learn a new role to one trick that can carry stronger, on top of learning a new champion to one trick. I started learning Yorick, only for them to announce steraks changes upcoming. Which may very well gutter him too.

I feel like nothing is safe to invest in. It's very demotivating if you actually want to improve your play. I don't have the time to keep searching for new champions every month that are capable of solo carrying, viable, and work well for my style of play and skillset.

I think he also has a point about them breaking things and leaving them unfixed for too long. I mean, how do you on the one hand have a game where you're upsetting players by changing too much too fast, but on the other hand have a game that is upsetting people because you leave genuine problems festering for too long? I think that is what happens when you just aren't focused on refining what you have to perfection, but instead are obsessed with constantly reiterating your designs to be new and fresh. All this is going to do is keep breaking things while leaving problems unaddressed at the same time. It's not possible to be focused on refining the game's balance while also having the conflicting goal of constantly shaking things up with change for the sake of change.

I can also relate to the video author concerning his preference for forgotten picks and unorthodox strategies. I too like trying to make work things people say shouldn't work or aren't good. That's why it has taken me so long to actually try climbing to gold in this game, just because I didn't care much before. I just liked charting my own path with unique builds and strategies.

Some of the reworks have bothered me a lot. Like Gangplank and Foria. I loved their kits before, but can't stand to play them now. I also had a problem with how they changed the style of gangplank. He went from an agile looking split pusher into a lumbering beast. His spec ops skin doesn't look right on him anymore. Only in the case of Yorick has a rework resulted in them turning a champion I didn't like playing into one I loved playing to the point where he's one of my mains. I mean, sure, I can say I played urgot and warwick more after their rework than before so that is a success from my perspective - but I never continued to actively play them, and don't really have a desire to. Some people who actually mained them before aren't happy. Honestly I think I care more about visual updates more than gameplay updates. Visual crappiness does more to keep me from playing udyr, nunu, rumble, corki, malphite, mundo, zilean, or cho gath than their outdated kits ever did. These are all champions I would have played more of if they didn't look like crap. The simplicity of outdatedness of their kits was never what was stopping me. Conversely, you could take the new gameplay of warwick and urgot, give them their old skins, and I still wouldn't have wanted to play them.