I think it's time for Riot to heavily consider separating competitive and non-competitive balance

I think it's been as long as since season 4 or 5 that people in the community have been begging Riot to have a separate pool of tweaks to competitive play vs casual play. I didn't agree with them at the time, and Riot gave an answer along the lines of "We want players to know that when they say a huge play in pro games they can go do that very same thing" and I think they gave the example of a massive Gnar ult or something. It makes sense and I really sympathize with the position, but over the last few years pro players have become exponentially better than even solo queue master and challenger players, and I think it's time this policy needs to change. It's the start of a new season, let's try a new way of balancing the game for pro vs normal players, if it doesn't work for like 5 to 6 months of changes you can switch back before the next Worlds.

A number of factors have led me to this position, and I'll go through them in a little more detail.

1- Like I said, pro players have just gotten so much better than even the best of the solo queue and non 5 mans have to offer. They abuse miniscule differences to level a massive advantages, yet as Riot knocks these miniscule things out they slowly chip away at strategy and harder champions for the average player.

2- Whenever Riot changes finds competitive games too boring, they increase snowball for the rest of players. This is happening right now on the PBE. Riot has basically said pro games aren't bloody enough (aka not even kills happening) and they are worried viewers will be bored, so they think the solution is to make systematic changes to the game to make pro games more bloody. Please for the love of god, don't do this. The game is already way too snowbally and if anything needs to be less so. I'm not asking for a return to earlier seasons where towers are immortal and a team with a 20k gold deficit could come back through pure bullshit sometimes, but the game has gone way too far in the opposite direction. This has effectively slaughtered real late game strategies like split pushing and turned the game into a 5v5 deathball every single game. Old things considered "late game" like Kog'Maw and Vayne are now literal gods at like the 10 minute mark. Laning phase needs to slow down, snowbally bullshit needs to be taken out more. Epic monsters as they are on PBE will basically spell the end of a game outside of pro play, and that's stupid.

3- Champions that prove to be super viable in competitive get absolutely shit on if you haven't graduated with 4 PhDs. I'm a flex player so this one hits me particularly hard but people who main one to two champions and those champions get nerfed for competitive are basically just screwed. Cassiopeia, Ryze, Azir, Rek'Sai, Kalista, Ekko, and many other champions with more on the way (Gnar) are being absolutely slaughtered. Champions I used to love playing I feel like I can't in ranked because I'm worried I'll just get rekt, and even in normals I feel like I'm throwing for the simple act of playing a champion Faker used to abuse. It blows.

4- Compare the way you play a pick up basketball game with friends after school or a card game at a party with people you know. There's usually house rules, and even if there's not you don't open the 500 page basketball handbook or the card game rule book 99.999% of the time. This may seem like a bit of a weird analogy to a video game but I see it as someone like Ryze. That champion is OP in competitive, trash in solo queue for most players. Maybe Ryze players want the rules loosened up a bit because even though pros do something it doesn't mean their own way of playing shouldn't be viable.

We need some answers from Riot as to what they think about these changes. Like I said, I know they've made comments about separate balancing in the past, but circumstances change and honestly the game is going in a direction most of us don't like just so pro games can be more fun to watch. This isn't a game like Counter-Strike where literal gods of aiming can have the same rules as someone who just started playing FPS games, and even in CS:GO there are different rules in tournaments such as how overtime works that are not the same as in the base game. Please Riot, at least reconsider, I don't want there to be another 2 months with basically no balance updates like the Ardent Censor meta last year that was perpetually kept around because you didn't want to change things up before Worlds. You're literally making the game less enjoyable to play slowly but surely for the sake of making the pro scene more viable, even though there's like 100 players who that even matters to and millions of the rest of us.