Dear Riot and the Community,

-- TL DR; It seems that no perfect meta will ever exist. -- Hello wonderful people, I hope you are having a good day so far! :) If a rioter happens to pass through this, please hear me out! I have a few things I would like to say about the game state, the meta, and where I think League of Legends is, and why I think that the current game state is and where it seems to be headed... a little bit more than unsatisfactory.

-- The public opinion and my stand on it. -- First, I'd like to say that I have no game design experience and I probably won't be able to make a more successful or fun game as Riot has, so take my arguments and logic with a grain of salt, but I do think I have a couple of points that people ignore. People always complain about the meta being either catered to tanks, attack damage carries, assassins, ardent censor, I've been through them all and I think the concepts of meta's are inevitable around game balance as well as the huge champion pool.

Second, to establish credibility, I've played this game since late season 3 and early season 4, Aatrox being the latest champion released at the time. I've played ranked and spent at least 100 games in every elo, played over 5000 normal games across all my accounts, and I have peaked at Diamond 4, not the best of ranks, but nothing to scoff at either. I am an ADC main but I've spent more than a good deal of time on every role and I have played every champion and the game enough to play anything "well" in a casual normal game.

Back in Season 4, it felt like a good player, particularly in the "carry roles" (being adc, mid or top) could single-handedly smash open a game, and the every season that came after did an incredibly good job pushing the game into a direction where you required all 5 members of your team as well as your teamwork. I do not think that this approach is wrong by any means, and it does produce a more diverse game where you need to work with the entire map of summoner's rift and not just tunnel vision on your own lane. All pros so far of meta development.

Players also got better, so that might be a reason why everyone feels more frustrated that they can't smash open their lane and carry the game. But consider: Why have solid players of the past started quitting the game? Shouldn't a team-based game be more fun?

The thing people bring up most of the time is the inherently flawed matchmaking system and they complain about how their teams seemingly are always worse than the enemy's. I completely disagree with these people and I just find them to be toxic, horrible people in general. Matchmaking will always be flawed, you won't win every game, and so won't the enemy's that you think are getting good teams. Deal with it.

-- The old meta. -- In my opinion, I think the answer to that lies in how the game started, and how the game has developed. When I started playing the game, support items did not exist, and supports were supposed to be a sacrificial lamb to help the ad carries. Riot also made tanks the best picks for top lane because it was a convenient place to place a tank in a team of 5 and it was an island anyway. This results in a game state where:

• ADCs were responsible for doing as much damage as possible without dying and carry the game.
• Supports ease the ADC lane as much as possible so that the ADCs can shine later game.
• Mids provided kill threat in fights and were the "stars" of the show almost prior to later game.
• Jungles were responsible to provide ganks and kill threat in lane. They became meatballs and or kill threats come later game depending on the champion.
• Tops served as the tanks and front lines.

The entire community agreed on these roles based on the entire existence of league of legends up until that time. Nobody, and I mean nobody wanted to be support due to that reason. Riot wanted to change this, so they gave some love to the support players as well as making the role more playable without feeling like it's useless. This resulted in Supports receiving gold items and thus had a stronger voice, but tank supports were the most popular and tanks supports didn't provide that much damage, just a lot of crowd control and another front line "meatshield" if you would like to call it.

You can see this phase last into season 5, the VODs of LCK playoffs. Top lane Ekko and Trundle support were the power picks for their roles and you could see a lot of zoning and vision preparation as well as positioning before every team fight. This resulted in team fights where both parties got to use their champions ideally and resulted in even fights, despite 3-5 thousand gold leads. This resulted in really epic games that had really explosive and fun to watch team fights.

This meta died down when icebourne gauntlet, sunfire cape, and spirit visage weren't the "rush items" of top laners anymore, but tanks were ever prevalent. Now it's time to look at how the meta has developed recently.

-- The current meta. -- Vision checking became too safe with ward changes and riot needed to compensate for that: Their approach was to take away vision from abilities (anivia wall, trundle pillar, caitlyn traps (placement vision), gangplank barrels, lucian w, etc.) Less vision checking means teams can no longer put themselves in ideal conditions and positions before every team fight.

That in addition to the nerfs to tanks and buffs to bruisers and fighters results in tanks being not that tanky anymore. (Check the recent NA LCS games and play-offs for example). Champions that build full tank can still be bursted and can take damage now, which presents an interesting adaptation from professional teams, who pick up warmogs to compensate, making tanks less of a "meatshield", but more of a temporary one that rejoins fights with high frequency.

What is causing tanks to take so much damage? Is it no longer tank meta?

I think the problems of the current snowball meta are:

• The new runes provide too much burst. I think that they should revert some of that burst power into base stats, especially defensive. You can see this problem very clearly. I just had a game where a 0/2 Darius with 50 less cs than his opposing top laner (basically irrelevant) get just two kills in a team fight before dying leading him to be 2/3 (at just 20 minutes!) and he had damage presence for the rest of the game because of the conqueror keystone stacking off the damage items he built from the gold.
• Supports have too large of a gold income. I'm not trashing on supports, but the support items give a LOT of gold, and supports have a damage voice now, sometimes even more than an ADC that is behind. Instead of the old meta where you have at most 3 damage voices, the game now can have up to 5 damage voices given that tanks aren't good at meatshielding damage anymore.

And more ADC involved problems:

• Lack of life steal items that are GOOD right now. ADCs that are in 1v1s with bruisers can't survive anymore because one mistake is fatal without lifesteal to cover mistakes. Crit reliant ADCs are required to build double zeal as well as an IE to provide enough damage to be relevant, and they grab Fleet Footwork to supplement the current weak state of lifesteal. (They COULD grab the bloodline rune but with the lack of attack speed in the game now, it's almost impossible to auto-cancel properly without getting as much sources of attack speed as possible).

This is also another problem. Crit does too much damage, rageblade does too much damage, everything does too much damage. And given the recent patch notes, Riot is just keeping at it with the damage buffs, especially with the baron and elder drake changes.

Now here's the disclaimer: These issues cannot all be fixed, and that's what I believe is the sad state of League of Legends.

• If support items received gold income nerfs or support champions get damage nerfs, the role loses its voice that many people have taken for granted at this state and the role will go back to the sacrificial lamb that it once was.
• If tanks are tanky again, people will complain about tank meta.
• If people aren't allowed to have enough damage, ADC's will run rampant again and no one wants that.

Seeing that Riot has changed the role of ADC to be called Bottom, it seems to me that Riot no longer wants ADCs to be referred to as "carries" and have that role in the game, so based on that, it seems the game is only going to continue travelling down that path where 5 players will be given equal voice in a game. This feeds into the issue that 5 equal voiced players results in no one able to single-handedly carry a game but 1 player is able to ruin a game.

I think the problem with the meta is that Riot is trying to give too much of a voice in game to every player and to be honest, it doesn't sound wrong to do on paper, but the meta is unquestionably a snowball meta and we'll see Riot's approach in fixing it.

If you got up to here, thanks so much for reading through this speel. I don't think I'm always right and my opinion definitely has points you can argue against, but I tried my best to state what I believe. Good luck in your future ranked games and leave some feedback so I know where the community is on this!

[slayer-jinx-wink]