Everything about Twisted Treeline feels so neglected
So recently, I decided to play a game of 3v3 because I didn't have enough time to sit through 8 minutes of queue for a normal game.
I thought it might be fun to see how the other modes work out. Well, turns out 3v3 isn't really alive anymore.
I had to wait 7 minutes to find a game even though it was my very first game on Twisted Treeline, so I didn't have a rating. I could have been matched with any player, but it turns out there are very few of them.
So after a total of 10 minutes in queue, I found a game where nobody left the champ select and I was finally ready for my great adventure. I picked Ekko Jungle.
The game was over pretty quickly. My team scored 8 early kills and dominated afterwards. But while I was playing, I noticed how outdated basically everything on the map was. The jungle camps had no spawning animation, they just popped out of nowhere, the symbol for the golem buff was the one of the very old golems from the old SR, there was a harsh mistake in the description of the Hextech-sweeper trinket (going along the lines of "that reveals traps enemy champions") and the animation was the one of the old Q of
.
Not only that, but the gameplay was very stale. Basically all I did was clearing my 3 jungle camps and then fighting with the enemy jungler over who would get the health spot. Occasionally, I ganked and it worked out fine. The point is, I spent about 3 minutes of the game waiting inside a bush, and it didn't even matter. The objectives are very hard to contest, there is almost nothing that you can do when you fall behind, and when you're ahead, you have heavy problems closing the game, because neither sieging nor splitpushing works due to the lack of a Blue Buff that would allow a mage to poke the enemy away from their tower and due to the lack of a Baron-like buff that would make sieging easier.
TL;DR: Twisted Treeline needs some love and care from Riot. A basic gameplay update as well as a couple of minor updates to the overall look could really help bringing players to the map. I see great potential in it, it's just not being used.