@RiotRepertoir
"I'm aware of the perception. What do you think are the things in the game that are resulting in this?"
Several. The first thing, which is mostly invisible in the actual gameplay, is of course underlying statistics, driven by gold distribution uhhh mechanics. But I don't need to go in depth about this, since you guys already know this.
Second is jungle. Junglers are way too strong. They have so much free time to roam and gank. Lanes are less about solo or duo skill because of this. It'd be helpful if jungle was actually hard. But it's become so easy that I can hop on my main, Leblanc, and jungle with Leblanc. Ranged junglers really shouldn't be a thing - or if they are, they should feel really unfairly treated versus say, melee junglers. That's how it was for the majority of old League. Jungling with a ranged champion was HARD. There isn't a huge or meaningful difference between one jungle path and another jungle path. When I'm the jungler, I can't say "hmm should I take this camp to accomplish X instead of Y", because the camps are all the same thing. Individual jungle camps could be higher risk higher reward, but they're simply not.
Third, ability cooldowns don't matter that much. It used to be that if you spent all your high cooldown abilities or mana as a mage, that was meaningful. Old Leblanc is a GREAT example of this. Opponents in the know and who prepare beforehand to get into range could Flash and punish you really hard. Now? Not so much. In League of skillshots, if you just sidestep around here and there, even if you blow all your most important abilities, your enemies still can't kill you! You blow all your important cooldowns and the enemy team is onto you, while your tank is ahead and trying to protect you? No problem! Your tank misses their skillshot! Now you're screwed! They're a sitting pile of health no one is attacking, and everyone is focusing you! Your other teammates around you run frantically out of fear, when it's the reality that if they just sat there without clicking to move at all, and pressed all their abilities, you'd be able to kill the enemy team. But that'd require game knowledge or mechanics, so we can't have that. So much for carrying.
Also, it's great that this communication thing is going on. But players want to be surprised. They don't want to have to rationalize this stuff. All this stuff we're chatting about here, is stuff we don't want to be chatting about. These things should be implicit and recognized on a deeper level. I think that's what the issue is.
