Solution to Snowballing and Lack of Close games

Riot and friends might disagree with me on this, but I'm of the opinion that turning Summoner's Rift onto a 20-30 minute match has been a big mistake. Furthermore, the method in which this was achieved by way of snowballing and nerfing towers, has seriously damaged player agency and just fun in general. Shortening Summoner's Rift is not bad thing but the method in which it was achieved has resulted in a devolution of the game overall. If you're so concerned with shortening the game, you should consider examining Dominion, as that gamemode was designed to be short and had none of the issues that we currently have.

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The reason Player Agency is so important is it helps with team morale and also makes the game very attractive for replay; When I talk about Player agency, I'm referring to the individual player's sense of self-worth and impact on the game's outcome. Snowballing has created a situation where 1 or 2 people get a ton of Player Agency but the rest either feel like they're being carried or getting curb-stomped with no recourse. That means that 10-20% of the playerbase is experiencing fun, and replay value, and 80-90% feel cheated or otherwise mostly worthless in the grand scheme of the game; needless to say this is very bad.

When the outcome of a match is determined by 1 or 2 players getting fed or feeding, that could be considered to be terrible design; There are 10 players in every match it would be better if it was 2 to 3 as it would account for 3/5 of each team and therefore a majority resulting in a loss or victory. The real issue is the impact of items and the lack of effective defenses when someone feeds or gets fed. If the game was correctly designed, if a player gets fed, building armor and magic resist items should be enough to blunt their advantage so you aren't getting 1-shot while you start building damage after compensating for the feed. This clearly isn't the case as champions go from 0 to Crazy in like 1 or two items; I think the** ITEMS** are the lack of DEFENSES are the issue here.

tl;dr Player's individual value is important; The lack of defenses and overtuned offenses are the reason snowballing is so bad.

My Solution to Snowballing calls for a revision to how Armor and Magic Resist function. Armor and Magic Resist would now block a flat value of bonus damage to each respective defensive stat: 100 Armor would block 100 points of bonus physical damage but not base AD, 100 Magic Resist would block 100 points of magic damage but not the base damage of abilities.

Tanks would gain access to methods of boosting their defenses and the efficiency of their defenses as tank items: would be given an active effect that increases armor every time you take physical damage in place of reducing attack speed, would have an active effect that would cause your magic resist to absorb 2x the normal value of magic damage for a short time. Base damage would be unaffected so Assassins, Tank, and Supports can still contribute damage regardless of defenses. Also, all forms of penetration would be removed from the game including** Lethality**. This would be done so Tanks could do the job of protecting squishy targets from burst and when dealing with a fed assassin, players can still build defenses at lower amounts and still have the defenses count for something.

For DPS to do high damage it will require more heavy use of attack speed and iterative damage abilities; As a result late game tower pushes will be extremely potent, thus the game will end more quickly after a lead is established. This will diminish the tilt factor of losing a fight as the game ends quickly enough that players can move on.

Thoughts? Comments?