I think League is dangerously close to careening off a precipice into the abyss of unbridled complex

I've been playing a little over 2 years now, since the start of S6. Just recently I took a break from the game for about a month for work-related reasons and upon coming back I felt almost like a new player again. I'm not going to suggest I was a god before this break, but I'm a carry player and I generally do pretty well. But I was completely incompetent in all the games I played since. The meta feels as if it has completely shifted and I suddenly have all this reading and learning to do if I want to be at the level I was apparently at before.

Here's the fundamental idea that keeps coming to me when I think about where League is at right now. How many more champs/reworks or item additions/reworks will it take before League becomes less a game than a research project? The amount of raw "stuff" you need to become familiar with before you can develop a basic grasp of the game is staggering. I don't hear anyone talking about this and with the pace of new champions being released and reworked, I have to wonder if the developers have any idea either.

I don't think it's sustainable. I don't think you can have unbounded complexity because at a certain point the actual gameplay will become trivial compared to the benefits of data-mining the most optimal combinations of champions and items. This is even more true for any less experienced players that unsuspectingly think their gameplay is still the most determining factor for their success or failure in a game.

I think the development team needs to soberly consider how they manage this game moving forward. Some kind of policy like "No more additions without a comparable subtraction" might help in the short-term. However, I think an even more dramatic course of action is in order.

Something like a subset of the 140+ champions only being playable per season. Maybe a roster of 50-60 champions, with a good portion of each role. The lore could be tied into all of this to give explanations for this smaller roster. Perhaps the lore focuses on a war between Ionia and Demacia for a season and all the champions in the roster are from those two factions. It would be a nice way to tie all of the varied creative departments together and give them a shared creative goal for that season to make it a thoroughly unique and distinctive year. The lore would then take on a greater significance to the game beyond simply an idle entertainment for lore geeks. It would directly affect how players experience the game for that season as well as confine it into a size that's digestible to even more casual players.

The lore could be tied into balance changes even. When a champion of that season's roster is identified as weak, something could happen in a subplot in a comic strip for that week that explains how that champion was injured or empowered in some way. Lore and gameplay could be woven in such a fantastic way. What if the bi-weekly comic strip WAS the patch notes? What if each new rework was a story of a grand transformation for that champion in that year's lore?

It would also solve a lot of the balance issues that seem to progressively multiply. With more and more champions, the task of balancing them all becomes increasingly more difficult. A further downside of many champions is that newly created ones must have generally conservative kits to not disrupt the balance too much. If instead you're only balancing for 50-60 champions, you can then be a bit more free with a kit without fear of completely breaking the game.

You can have metas without marksman ADCs! That would be trivial. Just design a great overarching lore plot for the year that doesn't include any marksman ADCs in the roster.

These are just some ideas I think would make for a cool and sustainable direction for League in the long-term. But beyond this I want to get across that the intention is to simplify the game so it's still manageable for players that aren't dedicating their lives to it. This break I've taken has suggested to me that gameplay (the players choices in game) has taken a backseat to research out of game. Right now the gameplay just feels drowned out by the sheer VOLUME of the content. But what a good problem to have! What I'm trying to say is that artificially limiting that content won't actually make the game less... but MORE.

Thanks for reading this if you did. I love this game and I love the champions (most of them) and I even read some of the comic strips. I'd hate to see the game swallow itself in its own complexity, and I think that's a much bigger threat to it than Fortnite or whatever game of the month happens to roll around. Hey or maybe I'm totally wrong and there's no such thing as "too much complexity." Who knows. I don't.

PEACE