Open the gate.

I'm sure this gets brought up a fair amount but I've never expressed my opinion of this so here goes.

The rune system. blurgh

I understand the need for customizing of champions to differentiate each summoner based on the runes they have chosen. Fair enough. What I don't understand is the need for there to be 2 of these systems (Masteries) and the grind that goes along with the former. I get that Riot need to make money but somehow other MOBA's seem to do just fine without such a time/money sink.

Now don't have all day to play LoL in fact it’s roughly 1-2 games a night if at all. I not looking for pity by any means. But having this rune system in place (or the high price in time/RLcash) stops me from being a better player just because I don't want to main a champion or pay my way to success. I like to be competitive but I feel with the rune system in place it takes the time I spend getting IP - to buy new champions so that I can counter pick effectively - and puts it into something that feels empty and exhaustive.

I have generic rune pages in place (AD, AP, Jungler, Top, Support and Bruiser). But as you can imagine they aren't optimal for each champion and so counter picking becomes counterproductive as, even though I may have the upper hand in terms of champion spells, I don't have the base stats for the champion selected.

If this is a necessity and RIOT/community feel that this 100% needs to be in place then fine, but make it less intrusive, more fun and less of a burden so we can all be challengers (< ---- Optimism)

I assume I'm not alone in this but I also assume that there are advocates for such a system. But is there a need for 2 systems that advance a person’s abilities and stats? Is there a need for the cost?

This system just feels extremely narrow for a game with such a diverse set of champions available.

TLDR: Scrap or re-imagine the rune system.