Man waste so much time playing this game

Not because it's good, but just searching for the fun that use to exist which has been lost in the ether.

It's pretty pathetic how poorly designed this game has become after years of tweaking and changes by riot. Obviously the game will change, but there was clearly a fundamental change in design philosophy which has just been eating away at the game's design and is completely incomparable with the old design philosophy, which was used to design and balance the different stats (not talking about items specifically, the general stat itself).

It's like the game is now being designed by one particular minority group of the old community which played the game. You know that group, the group that thought that they were literally the best thing that ever happened to the game and couldn't fuck up. The kind of people who play call of duty and exclusively quick scope, despite being above the acceptable age to find that kind of thing cool.

Remember, the initial audience of this game was following in the wake of the RTS genre's esports popularity. This game was designed and based around a mod of an RTS. The fact that most of the player strategy has been removed from the game is a pretty sad state of affairs. It's not that some of the things which existed in the past don't exist anymore, it's that they are completely forced out of the game by being shut out by other less strategic elements.

There still exists strategy in the game, but it's all been moved to the pre-game lobby and away from the ACTUAL gameplay. You're forced to play to the optimal pattern of which ever champion you pick, because all deviations from the optimal now result in massive drop offs in power, with virtually no benefits.

There seems to be this pattern in the game, where riot has been moving power away from items and onto the champions themselves. Which as stated in another thread, adds individual champion identity, but at what cost? It's a very gradual change, but this is where you see shit like DFG and spell vamp suddenly becoming problems in need of removal. Most people are aware of how item changes affect champion balance, but most people don't consider that champion changes also have profound impact on item balance. This is why something like kog'maw had to be reverted. Yet remove some of the power from the atk spd items, give the champions you want to have a high atk spd better scaling with the stat. So that at the cost of champion build options, you now have more unique champions which really haven't gone up in power, but can't afford to build differently because they had target compensations to allow item nerfs.

PSA @ riot, quit going down this path and turn around. These kind of changes might seem appealing, especially if you're on the balance team, but this kind of design philosophy works to pigeonhole players and stifle creativity and player expression. This was pretty much the creeping death which silently ate away at games like World of Warcraft and Halo.