Gameplay doesn't realize how much Riot spoils them.

Preface: I'm not saying Riot is a perfect gaming company. They're not. What I am saying is they bend over for the playerbase a lot harder than most companies I've ever seen. That being said, Gameplay is incredibly oblivious, as per always.

There are a few reasons I say they're pretty spoiling.

1 - Riot consistently patches faster than almost any other gaming company. With 2 week intervals on patches and the occasional bugfix, hotfix, etc, I know for a fact I haven't played a game with any company that patches at a faster pace. If you printed out Blizzard patch notes and left them on the ground you could probably date them the same way you archaeologically date topsoil (Mech Mage for 6 months at a time, anyone?). DotA is astronomically slow and the only times CoD got patches were the extremely infrequent buffs/nerfs and when you downloaded DLC map packs. Jagex patches at the same pace or so but they're working with Java and a game from 2001 which isn't nearly as tough of a task.

2 - Riot specifically shakes things up in preseason. It's their chance to experiment and make sweeping changes to the game. 7.22, 7.23, 7.24, and 7.25 will probably be Riot's PBE patches. 7.17 and 7.18 were pro player patches. You know what patches the rest of us got? Literally every other patch from 7.1 to 7.16 and 7.19 to 7.21.

3 - Riot listens to Gameplay A LOT more than they realize.

Gameplay asked for support to feel more meaningful, and that plunged us into Ardent meta. Gameplay asked for the AD to finally be killable again, and Riot nerfed Ardent and made masteries that encouraged more fighting and made it possible to blow up the AD. Gameplay wanted Blue Essence to be gained a little more consistently and towers to be a little tankier and Riot made both those happen these patch. Also, we've been asking for Runes to be changes from mindless stats for fucking years now and they were like, "Okay you got it. We'll tackle that this preseason."

First Win of the Day We've heard folks asking for ways to gain Blue Essence while in between levels, especially so you can buy >champions that would otherwise be just out of your reach. So we're converting some of the XP from the First >Win of the Day boost into straight-up Blue Essence. CLOSE ENOUGH 575 XP ⇒ 50 Blue Essence + 400 XP

Leveling Beyond 30 Leveling difficulty will now normalize once you reach level 50 (before this change, each band of 10 levels up until level >150 required progressively more experience). To learn more about this change, check out this post.

Over time, League of Legends has evolved to focus on 5-man grouping and teamfights. This can feel bad for players >who want to opt into the split-push or wave control game, so we're tweaking minion functionality and tower >tankiness to give them more room to succeed. BETTER ROCKS All turrets on Summoner's Rift have gained 300 health ROCK TERMITES Minions deal 50% ⇒ 40% reduced damage to turrets DISTANCE TRAINING After 20 minutes, minions gain +25 movement speed. This change will be enabled several days >into the patch so we can more accurately track its impact.

Taken from Riot 7.23 Patch Notes

Hell they even added 2 little features I've wanted them to return for a long time.

LEARN FROM THE BEST We’re adding the ability to spectate Challenger-tier games through the Ranked ladder >on the profile page

NOT BAD About 500 skin portraits in the HUD have been adjusted!

You know what Gameplay's response was?

1. A lot of people threatening to quit over preseason. If the game isn't fun for you anymore just quit but you gotta realize this is preseason and it's gonna be really lopsided for at least a month. It always has been and it always will be. Riot does change how the game operates to make it far more tolerable and take fringe cases out of the game.

2. Calling Riot cheap for their response to runes. You realize they entirely took the pay to play out of runes, right? There has only been one response on this forum I've seen thus far that was valid and that was about getting less orange essence from skins. Everything else is about how cheap Riot is when they've made leveling and progression much easier than before.

3. The worst responses are the ones complaining about losing old runes. I keep scrolling through here and seeing, "Wow you took the diversity out of my runes. Now I HAVE to run meta runes instead of catering them to my playstyle."

First off, stop. There was no diversity to old runes outside of full armor pages so that you could lane against Pantheon. The rest were just stat sticks. You ever watch pros? It was literally just the same pages per role again and again and again and they wouldn't use anything else because anything else didn't work. As much as people wanted full crit% Ashe or GP to work, it only worked against inexperienced players, and even then they'd probably have more success with consistent rune pages.

Second, it's still preseason. The only reason you can't mix up rune pages is because some are currently overtuned and Riot is currently working to change that, as seen by the buffs to Predator and nerfs to Aery. That being said, I've already mixed rune pages for specific champions. To be more specific, swapping from Precision secondary to Inspiration so that I could get Stopwatch and scale against Zed, so I do believe it allows for more mixing and matching and interesting features than just +9 armor vs. AD assassins.

Third and finally, even if they don't, at least they allow for enough variety and in-class diversity that the dominant keystone doesn't determine who gets played and who doesn't. I've seen more variety in my last 5 games than 10-15 games 3 patches ago.

tl;dr Riot does more for the game than people realize. When there are issues, it should be pointed out. For example, Ezreal is still a problem that needs to be addressed. However, they do a lot more than we give them credit for and Gameplay needs to stop being so up in arms and toxic about it when an issue or two makes it to the next patch. Especially during the part of the season they specifically state is going to be super variable and prone to change.