A Critique of The Game Through the Eyes of a Returning Player Playing on an Alt

Tl;DR, This game is no longer fun for anyone beyond a certain demographic, and probably won't ever be again.

Edit: Oh, goody, here come the super-fans, telling me to "just stop playing", even though this post is literally about why I'm going to stop playing. I should have known better to critique the world's most perfect game. How blasphemous of me, to mar the divine name of Riot games so. My mistake, super-fans. What I MEANT to say, was that this game is the literal best thing ever created by Man. No human can do better. We should all off ourselves, because we have truly peaked. Please disregard the entirety of this post. My bad.

Title says it all. I created an alt to try and remember why I used to love this game, what made it fun, and try and recapture that nostalgic feeling. Back in the day, there was nothing quite like queuing up for a game, trying out new rune combos, figuring out what items do well on which characters, theorycrafting builds, etc.

I played several games, won some, lost some, and through the entire experience, I realized something.

Riot has no idea how to make the game fun for new players anymore.

The only thing keeping me playing was the prospect of playing a better, more fun mode, like draft pick, or 3v3, and unlocking the non-trash summoner spells, and that wasn't exciting, more like pulling a splinter out of your finger. Relieved when it's finally over, but not exciting or pleasant.

The runes hardly have any interesting synergies or fun combos anymore. They are so streamlined, the only combos you can really use are what secondary tree goes with what keystone, what keystone might be interesting, and that's about it. Nearly every other rune on the non-keystone sections remain nearly the same between most other characters using that tree, because most are too niche or just plain not good that it doesn't matter.

Theorycrafting is out the window, as many items have been reworked, combined, and removed.

There isn't a learning/difficulty curve past the first 12-15 levels, and whatever curve exists is entirely artificial, as many features are locked until you play longer, in a transparent attempt to force a sense of "accomplishment" among players (sounds familiar, eh?) and try to convince new players that, really, honestly, the game isn't that bad, you can do it, and if you do, you get more options!

Except it IS bad, most CAN'T and WON'T do it, and every new player is so woefully underprepared thanks to the STILL undercooked and poorly-implemented tutorial that the outcome of games often boils down to which new player feeds the smurf on the other team the most. I agree that the tutorial is BETTER than before, but until I see absolutely no new players calmly walking into turrets and auto-attacking the enemy at level 1 and then spamming pings when nobody follows them, I'm not giving them any credit.

Beyond the initial, forced difficulty curve and terrible tutorial, the lower levels are absolutely flooded with the most toxic trolls, leveling bots, and noobs who refuse to even attempt to learn or listen.

The environment is absolutely cannibalistic, as smurfs fight over how many noob kills they deserve/need or gloat about how "you only beat me because this is my second time playing Aatrox in an adc role", or taunt newer players on the enemy team after turret diving them for the umpteenth time, killing them, and escaping with a sliver of health because nobody has smite and mid is a leveling bot idling under turret/feeding the zed harder than a charity organization feeds a third-world village.

The matchmaking system is terrible, reports don't do anything, and people get away with soft-throwing while spamming smiley faces and penguin dab emotes, I report them, and they appear in the very next game due to the insanely small player pool at that MMR with nothing so much as a chat ban.

The very fact that Riot Games can somehow stay in business while creating such an unwelcoming environment for new players is a testament to the power of using famous YouTubers for marketing and the extreme devotion of their most hardcore fans (AKA the ones who use LoL emotes/stickers in their comments and make inside jokes about the game on dev releases, no matter how disliked the post might be. These are the same people who buy every skin as soon as it comes out, even if they rarely use the champion.)

And that's a bad thing. League feels like work, not like a game, and once you finally get the promotion you wanted, you end up with something just as bad, just a bit different, just like a day job.

It's not me being toxic, this is not be trying to be negative. The worst I ever got was a single chat ban more than a year ago. I haven't been anywhere close to toxic, I've been more than patient, and I have tried my best to be positive and enjoy what little there is to enjoy in this game.

Before you go and flame me for "being bad" or "just being a hater" or tell me to "just stop playing, lol", I want you to keep this in mind:

Why do you play this game?

Is it to win? Considering most players have around 50 percent or less winrate, good luck.

Is it to have fun? Well, I hope you enjoy sitting through a 45-minute game with your jg dc'd while you play support and being 3v2'd in bot lane every 3 minutes under tower, because that's pretty much a good average of what any game you lose feels like.

To quote a famous streamer, roughly 1/3 of your games you lose and it's not your fault, 1/3 of the your games you have an even chance of winning/losing depending on how you play, and 1/3 of your games you win without even trying. It's like the golden rule of MOBA-style games.

That means only 1/3 of your games are anywhere close to fair, and even less than that are well-earned victories.

If you spend 1.5 hours playing 3 games, only 30 minutes of that time you were having a good game, win or lose. That's a lot of unpleasant time spent. Not very much "bang for your buck", as it were.

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To finish up this insanely long post, a long time ago, Riot took a fun mod for Warcraft and threw a new spin on it. It was fresh, fun, creative.

But over the years, they slowly stripped away all the goofy, quirky aspects of the game and left only the focus-tested, corporate-approved shell of its former glory. They stripped the individuality of runes away, they took away the goofy items, they removed their best game mode, dominion, after refusing to work on it for years or even promote community-led tournaments (until dominion was about to be removed, way to rub salt on the wound, riot), promised clash, put it under wraps for much longer than promised, mostly removed any fun rotating game modes because people stopped playing once the fun modes weren't there and they wanted money more than customer satisfaction.

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(this is where I start tossing around theories and opinions, not really facts. They are based on observable facts, but are as of right now, not able to be proven.)

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Riot hasn't done anything remotely interesting or exciting for a long time. All their efforts so far have been minute changes to ranked structure and how they introduce players to the game, all of which do nothing to make the game fun for noobs, instead making it seem brainless before coldly dumping them into a very unforgiving atmosphere, promising their version of in-game lootboxes if they stick with them, and even better, more exclusive prizes if they do well enough in games (hextech chests). They don't care about a good, fun product anymore, they only care about safe, business-smart choices that earn them the most money over the longest period of time.

They built for sustainability through business tactics cleverly hidden, but very similar to, other vastly less-liked corporations such as EA, Bethesda, and Activision-Blizzard- that is, they trick customers into wanting to continue playing for the distant promise of virtual rewards, purposely frustrate them, and try to get them to spend money to get the most OP champion at the moment when they can't wait to buy it with in-game credits.

Why do you think the game has been so unbalanced? That's always the first complaint anyone brings up about the game- champion balance. It's unbalanced because Riot takes a shotgun approach to nerfs and buffs...on PURPOSE. FOTM champs come and go with each patch, and only a rare few stay in the top. Balance is always shifting, and this has been possible to correct for years, and yet Riot seems to only make it worse.

Think about it...if the tier list stayed somewhat even, nobody would be buying very many champions or skins, because they'd be happy with their small pool of champions. The only way to get them to change their minds is to nerf and buff champions in a very uneven manner.

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What do you think about any of this? I know I got into tin-foil hat territory at the end, but I truly believe Riot has the ability to make better balance decisions, but chooses not to. Many times, they've done the exact opposite of what most of the playerbase have asked for, and all in the name of profits. I will probably keep playing, as my friends still occasionally play this, but otherwise, unless Riot makes clear, concise steps in the right direction and actually start doing right by their casual and semi-hardcore playerbase, I will be leaving Summoner's Rift and not looking back.