- Everything you listed as a negative is in fact strategy. Yet you're arguing it cancels out strategy. You need to realize that players who have been around for 5-8 years.... even bronzes and silvers..... learn over time. The more you learn and hone the game, the more difficult it is for new players to compete versus you. I know you may very well believe older seasons had some silver lining or greener grass. But I've been there. Although every season has had its upheavals and item adjustments/kit changes, the same has generally held true:
Games: 25 minutes-30 minutes.
Snowballs: Happen level 2 and never stop as long as one team's morale is broken.
Objectives: Same objective preference and impact (Drakes structurally are different and random, but players prioritize them based on their knowledge of the game the same: They either ignore them, use them as baits, or they push for the 10 sec after spawn kill. Players haven't reduced or increased their interest in killing).
Turrets: Actually harder to kill, contrary to what players today would have you think. You didn't need minions to do full damage to a turret in the past. Now you get a 66% damage reduction with no minions. If a team is fastidious about keeping minions away from turrets, they last a LONG time. If they ignore the minions and let the other team just push freely, yeah. Cardboard turrets.
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Strategy does exist in your sense as well. I'm sorry you never see it yourself.
Sometimes strategy is a split push if you are countered. Sometimes it's joining team fights.
Sometimes it's choosing to counter the other team's first pick in Queue.
Sometimes it's playing meta champs vs nonmeta.
Sometimes it's on a micro level, and saving your skills for defensive play rather than blowing your kit to engage.
Sometimes it's being aware of geometry and knowing how fast your opponents are and being able to back out if things sour.
Sometimes it's saving wards so you can have 2-3 up at an important point of the game, rather than being on cooldown.
Sometimes it's itemization or runes.
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Teamwork.
Yeah. I do know teams suck. But I'm not and ever going to get on the bandwagon of complaining "one person lost us the game."
That's simply not true. What lost the game was not the 1 feeder. It was the team members who REACTED to the feeder. It's almost a universal constant:
-Feeder feeds.
-Team reacts by yelling at them, reducing not just the morale of the already feeder, but the TEAM too.
-Team spends far less time punctually playing and more time typing. Loses CS. Walks into bushes without warding because of typing. Ignores drake timers. Begins missing obvious plays like a split push, while chasing a fight.
-Feeder begins to argue about whose playing worse because the rest of the team is cussing them out while also playing horribly.
-Other teammates begin to defend the feeder, and begin to feed themselves, on purpose, because they think their teammates are bullies, and would rather lose "one game" than enable bullies to win.
-Ragers afk.
-People who legitimately still want to win start making irrational moves like diving bombing at baron in a 1v5, killing themselves with almost no chance of sniping it.
-Game collapses.
Game doesn't fall apart because of one person. One bad player can be coached on how to be less of a burden on a team. But the League community does the opposite.
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Damage isn't any higher than it's ever been. In fact in most serious cases, it's down, like 
. He lost about 120% AD scaling on his Q, and his W was seriously nerfed. In Season 4 I could 2 shot with him. Now.... I hate playing him because 50% of the time, the early game dominance just isn't there, and I hate split pushing where I need minions to split push.
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Meta. Meta is for most part an illusion. There's too many champs and too many productive ways to build them to ever actually go through the game theory and say, THIS IS THE META. In reality almost every champ has legitimate counters, counters others, has synergies with yet others, and if the desired team vs the desired team is picked, they completely dominate the meta.
POPULARITY exists. Basic, easy concepts exists. Players trying to copy abstract LCS play exists. Meta? No. There is a reason the mages trying to copy LCS bot lane play are failing at outperforming adcs in bot. Because LCS chose it because they wanted to be unpredictable, and knew they could, while copy cats just don't understand the sustainability issues.
- What I do think is a problem: Over time, high elo players have learned very readily they can make money by boosting low elo players, and by STREAMING FOR DONATIONS. Low/mid elo brackets are utterly congested with players looking to exploit the fact that a good twitch.tv/youtube video sells, especially if you can claim to be a high elo. They are rampant in low elo, and you will probably experience one every game/other game, and sometimes even 2 (because they duo). And because low elo players do not understand what this means..... they do not hole up and play defensively. They just ..... play in the same haphazard style, serving up deaths.
And then the team, which also doesn't understand there's a smurf there.... begins raging on the feeder who didn't understand the smurf and became his "victim" and starting the whole cycle of #3.
**In reality most games there is no actual feeder. ** There's a victim who stands out more prominently because they were the first to fall. They are the same skill level as the other 4 players on their team. Any one of them could have been a feeder first. It's just in the eye of the beholder.
And yeah. Smurfing does suck for that reason. It creates the serious illusion of imbalance, broken champs, and metas/nonmetas. And leads to all these posts about how the game is missing its "Freshness" or how something was ripped from it, or how a new system which essentially is a restructured version of the old system is to blame....
