7.22. My positive experience & some thoughts on the current boards.

Hi everyone. I'm Keytar Dragon, D5 supp/mid main.

"It takes 2 years to make a movie, 2 hours to watch it, and 2 minutes for people to criticise it"

I'm pretty disappointed in how big is the part of the community to provide a very poor, negative, non constructive feedback. People that completely disregard the tremendous work and insta-complain after they are challenged out of their comfort zone / have a few bad games in a row, and are so quick to judge Riot of "evil money making intentions".

It's because of these kind of people that games like World of Warcraft lost a big part their magic, and made Blizzard find out how to make money while making their game convenient and have everything easy and for free.

Anyway, here are some honest thoughts on the update and pre-season, based on my personal experience in Diamond solo queue (and some normals) since the update.

-About the new runes:

• Before this update I had written a post expressing concern over limiting champions to less playstyles, or not letting people do off meta creative builds as they please. This concern is supported by previous patch changes where Riot has removed niche items, summoner spells, and -my least favorite- "hidden" AP ratios in champions, which I thought gave a lot of magic and color to the game allowing for fun possibilities.

• However, I was really happy to see that the new runes not only give a lot more possibilities to the champions in general, but those possibilities are actually viable and not a fun/troll choice. Before, when playing Soraka in ranked, there was almost no reason not to pick Windspeaker's Blessing. Now, Aery seems like an obvious good choice, but I've found myself often making more use of Comet, inspiration tree keystones, or even the resolve ones, depending on the matchup. Similarly with Zyra, it was either DFT or TL before. Now I've succesfully played her with Aery, Electrocute, Comet and even Dark Harvest -in matches where I feel I won't be the first to die because they have a Talon and Shaco-. The previous rune/mastery system was in fact deceiving. I have already experience more gameplay/champion variety in solo Q these 2 weeks than my last months of Season 7, and I find that to be one of the most important aspects of the game. I'm 100% sure we will be seeing many new interesting builds and a much wider and rich "meta" grow out of this, which I'm very excited for.

• A lot of the Kleptomancy complains are people feeling frustrated of getting poked knowing the opponent might have just gotten 100g of it. It's not that hard to change the playstyle to minimize the effectiveness they get out of that. They are giving a very powerful potential keystone up (or main tree) in exchange of that. And it loses a lot of value after laning phase.

• I would really like to see when Scorch or Manaflow Band will available again, similarly as Electrocute or the old Thunderlords timer. I think the proc is significant enough to consider it.

-About the new essence system and levelling:

• The post that got a few hundred upvotes in the boards saying "You need level 300+ to get all champions..." and gathering all the outrage reflects a big part of the problem with the community. I have played for 3 years and around 2000 games after I reached level 30 on this account, and after buying the runes and rune pages, I barely own 20% of the champions. Current accounts that own all the champions and mostly used IP for them, would easily be 300+ level by now. The fact that Riot made the effort to show the math and graphics and people still downvote and trash talk is just sad and unfair. This predisposition to instantly believe that what they say is a lie and they're manipulating is ridiculous and is not helping improve the communication between them and us at all.

• I'll finish saying an obvious thing that people don't seem to consider. League, and this whole thing is possible because there's a lot of real people working full time on it. Riot needs to look after their employees and be very cautious about stuff like giving free content. The hextech crafting, the epic shows at worlds, the comics, the lore, the amazing login music themes that give champions a unique emotional dimension. All this and much more that we take for granted could easily be gone if people suddenly see no reason to buy RP for a skin or XP boost because everything is so easy and free.