It almost feels like Lead Design kinda forgot halfway what made this game popular in the first place
Ok guys, let's all take a trip back through time into the early 2010s, when League was just a teeny tiny game made by a barely functional indie studio, and suddenly it BLEW up. And do you know WHY it blew up? Let me give you the context:
If you wanted "real" competitive online gaming back then, and not just load an inoffical WC3 funmap called DotA, you had TWO choices effectively: Play Starcraft 2 or play Counter Strike. The entire esport segment was completly diveded by RTS and Ego-Shooter, that both catered to VERY different methods of skill expression: one primarely strategic, the other primarely mechanical/reflex based. In one the player was distanced from the things happening on the screen as his presence was split over countless units and buildings that had to be macro- and micro-managed, the other was literally "in there" with the Ego-perspective.
However, MOBAs then managed to somehow bring those two parts together: the concentrated presence and individual impact of a shooter combined with the strategic aspects of top-down strategy. Like this, a massive range of audience could be aimed for: both the shooter guys and the rts guys, plus everyone who had been kinda in between, yet found both extremes not really to their liking. It was literally the genre of mass-appeal simply in how the most basic mechanics worked. It was an empty niche, LoL jumped right in, and we all know what happened after: it grew FUCKING MASSIVE.
And there was simply not another game like LoL. Sure DotA 2 came out too but... putting raw player numbers side by side for a time League left them in the dust. At least for some years. Not sure how it is now, but if the DotA playerbase had remained loyal while the players kept leaving LoL like now (which means 95% of my friendlist being offline for months by now), this might have changed already. But back then... yeah, the game was not perfect by any means, but the direction it was going made many people say "Yo, they got this, they gonna make this awesome unique game even BETTER".
Also the game was not designed to be watched. It was designed to be PLAYED - simply because esport back then was not a thing yet. Kinda amazing that since they started working on making the game more Esport friendly, those numbers drop every year - and yet back then when Esport was barely an afterthought, it led to it being the most wached and played Esport in the western hemisphere.
But now, enter Season 5. Especially the juggernaut update. And I don't really want to blame Ghostcrawler again, but it all just fits to well with the timing: some random outsider who has never had much contact with MOBAs in general jumps on, and tries to twist and turn the game into something that it is definetly not.
One should think that someone who has worked on BOTH RTS and RPG should have had at least some sort of grasp on how a hybrid-form like a MOBA works, that empowers the player as an individual characters yet retains a certain strategic value. But sadly the exact opposite happened. It's one thing to be theoretically unqualified and fail, but it's a whole other to actually have experience on related subjects and yet fuck up so tremendously.
The careful balance of strategic and twitch-mechanics elements? Completly thrown out of the window. Good luck with your attempt to express skill while being dead before you can even press a button. The focus on the actual game? Bah, no need, we apparently need more "flashyness" for our LCS streams. And the uniqueness? Willfully being thrown out of the window while chasing behind the mechanical aesthetics of other games, such of Overwatch or whatever else appears to be popular instead of taking what League and only League could do and elaborate on it.
It's like the "new" top guys didn't give a shit about what this game was, and instead just started changing random shit because it's what they thought would work because "muh I am the designer why should I work myself into the project, make some research, or do my homework on the subject in general?! Look at me, I am GREG "MC" STREET who's only true skill is getting fired by Blizzard and having attended some classes in PR and self-representation". Just look at the threads he's in, where he posts, how he puts words in people's mouths and all that bollocks that comes with knowing how to exploit forum dynamics, because he knows he got a (luckily way smaller than years before) following of rabid white knights that just wait to lick their master's boot, yet strangely only show up AFTER he has commented on a thread.
He's a guy that can market himself, and I admit he does it well, but please, this is Lead Design. Not marketing. If fancy words are all you have, consider a change in profession.
But then again, it kind of explains the state of the game: if you let someone who is completly ignorant of the subject he is dealing with in and just let him do what thinks will now be profitable in the current state of the videogame industry, even if it means completly perverting the most basic ideals of the game and alienating players by the millions, then yeah, that's not going to go well. And yes, I'm going to say millions. If Riot says I'm lying on it, they can release their numbers on the playerbase. I know they got them, back in the day they proudly boasted with it. But since they don't I simply have to assume that they agree with this statement.
The one thing I got to ask then: if you want your game to be more like Fortnight or Overwatch, then... why should I not just go and play these games? Why should I stay with League when it is apparent that it no longer is its own game but rather the knock-off version of something else? Why should I as a player prefer any experience that is not the "original" version of it, just because this game is older? Experiences do not age, and while league once was a unique one, now it is on the path to generic mediocrity. There's not even a need for a game to show up and "kill" league. No, by attempting to be like the others, simply a mass of average games that however do their stuff that they set out to do right, will drown it out as it vanishes into obscurity.
Congratulations, it appears you sold the soul of the game, and what for? Absolutely nothing.
