I feel a lot of players are looking at this Preseason the wrong way: a vocal minority of people are saying everyone's overreacting because the changes aren't so bad, but the problem isn't simply with what Riot has changed, but what they haven't changed: for three years now, players have been complaining about damage creep in the game, and the resulting snowballiness of matches and cheapening of play. This reached a boiling point in Preseason 8, where Riot's changes to Runes doubled down on this problem, and added more on top, notably more RNG mechanics that are almost universally loathed. Season 8 suffered severely because of it, with developers frequently getting into arguments with their own players, because the latter were completely fed up at the state the game had gone into. Content creators abandoned the game faster than they did before, but not before calling out League and Riot for the same problems. Finally, after months of denial and gaslighting, Riot finally caved and admitted that damage may be a bit too high, and games a bit too snowbally. Preseason was the time to fix this, and with the playerbase on edge, it really was make or break time. Riot absolutely needed to deliver a solution to the state of damage and snowballing in the game.
As it turns out, they didn't. Not only that, but their Preseason changes don't even seem to acknowledge damage creep in the game, particularly since damage has only gone up across the board. As far as Preseason changes go, these ones are probably among the tamest in the game's history, but the problem is precisely that these changes do nothing to address critical problems in the game's balance. This was supposed to be Riot's window of opportunity to finally fix the game, or at least lay the groundwork for it to be fixable over time, but unless we're getting a second Preseason this year, that window has already closed. Because of the structure of the game's updates, this also means that we'll be unlikely to see changes of that magnitude until next year, by which time it will be more than far too late. In many respects, it's not unlike Bethesda revealing that their next games would all be using their broken, outdated version of the Gamebryo engine: the devs have locked themselves into a design direction that is so poor it will cause serious harm to their company, yet that they cannot realistically escape from in the coming months. The only thing we can do is sit back and watch the train launch itself off a cliff in slow motion.
