Fights vs. Grey-screens, or Balancing Playtime vs. Downtime

(TL;DR at the end by the way)

Grey-screens are boring.

.......... Oh, sorry, I guess I gotta add more than that.

Holy fuck grey-screens are fucking boring.

So back in season 5 (my own opinion on where the "golden age" of League was, right in the middle of the season after Cinderhulk got leveled out a bit and before the GP and Fiora reworks), we had a new concept to League that hadn't really been seen in a while except in small flashes of cluttered confusion that would end in mere seconds - your teamfights.

Oh my, but we have those, don't we? Well, sure, "fragments" I would call them. They're pretty fuckin' short and end in people just blowing up left and right, and this was also pretty much the case prior to season 5 - teamfights were less that and more of which assassin or burst mage could nuke the shit out of the ADC faster. This was at the height of Lee Sin dashing/flashing his way into the enemy team to dragon kick the enemy ADC directly into death, and Kha'Zix was a top pick because that mother fucker lept in and deleted somebody and lept back out.

Teamfights were also forecasted as "spotty with a slight chance of storms" - in that you'd maybe see them once or twice but most things boiled down to picks being made and then there wasn't really much of a teamfight afterward, more of a skirmish. If you watch a lot of the worlds highlights from back in season 4, fights were pretty much decided within the first 2-3 seconds after they were initiated, ending up with one team running/flashing away and the next maybe up to 20 seconds just being chasing. If the fights were played out to their fullest in a complete death brawl, then they lasted 10 seconds tops.

Oh my god, 10 seconds, can you even imagine that amount of time anymore?

Now, fights were still actually longer in S4 - the assassin meta it was known as - than now, to give you any idea, but something was actually shorter in S4 than now:

#Death timers were shorter in S4.

Yeah, believe it or not, you saw a lot less grey-screen back in the day and were pretty much hopping back into the action in a reasonable amount of time, meaning there wasn't the same amount of time to snowball objective taking as nowadays and shit was actually more durable back then, can you believe that? Just hard to imagine a tower not falling in less than 3 seconds every time.

But this had basically been how the game worked for 4 seasons thus far - skirmishes decided games, picks and throwing your weight around. So in Season 5 we brought a change.

Hello, the teamfight meta, aka the tank meta.

See, tanks weren't originally these things that were just bulkier, slower fighters - no, they were basically walls of unbridled CC that could keep teams in check for the better part of the millennia and could whittle an enemy down one-on-one before the enemy could whittle them down. A battle with a tank was like fighting a lumbering goliath - it took time and it took effort. So when the new notion came in that people should actually focus that giant wall standing between the two ADC's on either side, people were fucking confused.

"Sorry, I should shoot at the thing standing in-between me and the target I really wanna kill?"

No, I'm more saying that that thing standing between you and your target should also be your fucking target. Welcome to a time when everyone was a threat and had an important role on the team. Mages did their AoE damage, assassins blew up the squishies as best they could, tanks were a threat to the assassins for once, and ADC's killed everyone as they usually did but with their gift of sustained range damage came the notion that no, they could not do everything by themselves and did actually need protection.

Who do you focus in that? Who do you shoot!?

Try everyone. Just try hitting whatever's in front of you and use your brain to come up with a tactical way to distribute your teammates' damage to be most effective and actually position yourself.

#Try coordination! It really works!

I'm rambling a bit, aren't I? Gosh I just miss that meta so much.

So okay, whether you liked that or not (if you didn't like it you're wrong, har de har I'm being sarcastic you can have your opinion), what is the real point?

Well, first of all, teamfights lasted a good 30 seconds. And I don't mean "oh we picked the enemy's carry, time to start picking off the rest of the lemmings", no. I mean that an all out Super Smash Bros. fight ensued with everyone throwing their weight around. Fights weren't decided just because somebody got picked - you could actually turn shit around. What a fucking notion! You could essentially 4v5 a fight just through legitimately outplaying the enemy with your own tactics!

But this also meant that for the long drawn out fights, death timers were still short. So shit didn't get fucking taken in such a short amount of time because, again, it took time to accomplish anything and the enemy could easily have one of their teammates revive and ready to defend under towers (which unlike nowadays, were an actual threat that could serve as two champions practically given enough stalling time). So can you guess what happened?

#Death timers got fucking extended.

Oooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooohhhhhhhhhh.

Granted, it's only 2.5 seconds to the base minimum and maximum, but I mean hey, that's still enough to take a tower nowadays, right?

But that is a collective much more grey-screen that we end up seeing nowadays, so when you're getting blown up left and right, it's pretty fucking irritating to have to wait that frustrating amount of time to get back to actually do something again.

And teamfights are especially sparse and when they do happen, are resolved in the blink of an eye in most cases.

#This generally means that the fun, meaty part of League that people really like to see is vastly overshadowed by the part that is fucking boring.

So since we've pretty much reverted back to season 4's style of play on steroids, step number 1 that should be taken is to make towers do something again!

Wait, wait, this thread isn't the one for that argument.

#I meant shorten fucking death timers! There's so much time allotted to enemies to take whatever they want after a team-wipe and everything falls so fucking quickly that trying to go contest things is next to impossible. No wonder people tip-toe around shit and hesitate at the first risk - it's because the consequences aren't just snowbally, but they're fucking boring as well.