Riot, you have a real problem with LCS/LCK and you need to stop acting like it doesn't exist

Short and sharp: pro play has become incredibly boring. So boring it is almost unwatchable for me now unless it involves the top 2 or 3 teams because honestly, everything below that is a fucking fiesta, and not in a good way.

This isn't even a subjective opinion either. Look at the viewership. EU LCS has more than HALVED for a lot of its games, NA is the same outside of TSM/CLG/C9 and some Immortalz games. The other week I tuned in to watch EU LCS and it had less than 30k viewers. Most LCK streams now sit at about 10k on average. SKT pushes it up obviously, but holy fuck, are the games there boring now. For being the "best region in the world" it is now astonishingly drab to watch.

Here are my opinions why the game has lost a ton of viewership (up to and over 50%):

A) The casters. EU has never fully recovered from the loss of Joe and Deman. Sjokz is the only reason I would ever watch that stream now, because not only is she Kreygasm, she is incredibly knowledgeable and a really good presenter.

LCK lost Monte and DoA. Rest in Pepperonis, nothing more needs to be said here.

NA has a strong caster and desk lineup. Makes it more entertaining to watch even when the game is a snoozefest (I honestly have no idea how they manage to talk so much about absolutely nothing for so long, these guys deserve everything they're paid).

B) The meta, the games, the champs. I thought 5 bans would make pro play a lot more interesting, it hasn't. Champ diversity is still low and the repetition is horrible. But it's more about play style. Teams play so safe all game, every game. It's predictable and stale, and watching the bottom 5 or 6 teams play is like watching a team of cats try to be herded towards the enemy nexus: the coordination is horrendous.

Having said all of that, I think the main enemy here is time. In season 2 and 3 the game was so exciting to watch and teams were in a way still figuring the game out. Now, almost nothing is impressive or exciting and a lot of the time even the casters sound on cruise control, bored, talking to fill time. We've seen everything. New champs freshen up the game for a week or two and then it's back to being the same ol' same ol.

You already make a ton of changes purely for the sake of it (cough those fucking stupid patches right before worlds cough) in an effort to try to surprise us, but that only makes the game worse and is unbelievably unfair on the players, so what are you going to do?

C) The players. Again, EU has the weakest lineup here. There are no xPeke's in this region anymore, no Moscow 5. The personalities are weak and the teams uninteresting. When Korea started losing a lot of its good players to other regions, it started the decline of LCK. Did you watch a Kongdoo Monster game last season? Have you watched an Ever 8 game lately? The continual bleed of some of the best talent in this region has all but killed Korean League. Once upon a time you could watch any team, any game and it was almost always great to watch. That is no longer the case.

It was probably intentional by Riot to try to distribute Korean players to other parts of the world, in my opinion, in order to try to close the gap between them and the Korean mother land, but all it has done is damage the quality of pro play in Korea (and most of these exported players end up being very sub-par in other regions anyway due to communication issues e.g. Piglet, CoreJJ, Flame etc etc. There are very few exceptions here, like Ssumday, and that's only because he is an absolute god at the game. He's actually so good that caster Zirene and his team didn't even know what he was doing the other week when he was actually winning the game for them, but I digress...).

Again, NA seems to be the strongest in this category with NA fans eating this shit up, especially for wonderkid Bjergsen (who is ironically from EU anyway). Not really a surprise given the culture of North America in the way that Americans really fetishize fame and famous people.

So, Riot, what are you going to do to re-engage your player base and reinvigorate viewership? I would love to watch these games, I really would, but I can't. You know why?

Most of them are bad.

Most of them are boring beyond compare.

I often use LCK now to help me drift off into a comfortable sleep (no, I'm not exaggerating).

So what are you going to do?

My opinion is thus:

a) The map needs more objectives and everything macro related. Rotations aren't interesting. Fighting over objectives is. Make objectives, including blue and red buff more powerful, spawn faster but last for a shorter amount of time. Make them more accessible to both teams positionally and make them worth fighting over. Make scuttle worth fighting over.

A hypothetical: what if both scuttles were actually buffs? Hear me out. Top scuttle gives red buff, bottom scuttle gives blue buff. Worth fighting over? Absolutely. Better to watch? Yup. Then replace blue and red with something else worth invading over. Something more high risk, high reward.

b) The game MUST BE MADE MORE RISK-FRIENDLY AKA LESS PUNISHING FOR MAKING MISTAKES AND DYING. This is an absolute must in my opinion, to make players take more risks, brawl over objectives, rack up kills AND deaths. By encouraging risk you greatly decrease THE BORING FUCKING MONOTONY IN MOST OF THESE PRO GAMES.

c) Make CS less valuable, make kills more valuable. The goal here isn't to totally remove the value of CS, but change the balance of power relative to getting kills.

d) Reduce death timers across the board, at all stages of the game. Again, the goal here is to reduce the punishment for taking a risk and engaging in a team fight.

e) Following on from point d), reduce the cost of items across the board. Increasing death timers to try to artificially reduce the length of games was absolutely fucking stupid and should never have happened last year. A MUCH better solution to reducing the time of games is to flat out reduce the cost of items across the board. Besides making the game more fun, this would help to reduce game times by having heroes hit power spikes and break points much more quickly, and those games that do go longer be even more entertaining to watch with reduced death timers and more fights with more items (and reducing the time spent sitting in lane farming trying to hit those item spikes, especially with the reduced worth of cs).

There is a very strong relationship between items, power spikes, team fights and risk taking that does not get enough attention and yet DESPERATELY needs attention.

f) Give us back our vision. The more vision teams have, the less risk is involved with starting team fights and as a result we see better engages and much better team fights.

All right, that's enough for now.